Privacy Policy

Draft scaffold for review by counsel before launch. Not legal advice.

What we collect

Account details (name, email, password hash, or the Google account you sign in with), bidding and watchlist activity, comments, consignment submissions and photos, valuation requests, advertising enquiries, and — if you register to bid — a payment method stored by our payment processor (Stripe). We do not store full card numbers.

How we use it

To operate auctions, verify bidders, invoice buyers, pay sellers, review submissions, reply to valuation and advertising requests, prevent fraud, and communicate with you about your account and listings.

Our email list and your consent

ArtSell is free to use; email is how we stay in touch. Every address you give us is kept on one contact list, with a record of where you gave it:

Account sign-up, including the “Sign up free to see all prices” prompt shown after the free price views;
Artist alerts (“Follow [artist]”: new results and upcoming sales, daily or weekly) — you can use these without an account;
The monthly market report sign-up boxes;
The “What’s it worth?” form, consignments and advertising enquiries — we use these addresses to reply to you.

Marketing email needs your explicit opt-in. The monthly report is sent only if you tick the box that says so; that box is never ticked in advance, for any visitor. We store the wording you agreed to and when. We also use double opt-in: newsletter and artist-alert sign-ups receive a confirmation email, and nothing else is sent until you click the link in it (signing in with an email link or Google also confirms your address).

Unsubscribing. Every email we send has an unsubscribe link (and supports one-click unsubscribe in mail apps). Unsubscribing stops the market report, artist alerts and saved-search digests; you’ll still get messages you trigger yourself, such as sign-in links and replies to a request you sent. You can also use the unsubscribe page via the link in any email, or ask us to delete your contact record.

We don’t sell or rent the list, and we don’t share it with advertisers.

What is public

Your bids and comments are shown publicly under a pseudonymous handle (first name plus a short code). Your email, address and full name are never displayed publicly. Completed sale prices are published in the price database without identifying the buyer or seller.

Advertising

Ads on ArtSell are sold directly to auction houses and galleries and are labelled “Advertisement”. We count how many times each ad is shown and clicked (a simple counter per ad — no personal data, no third-party ad networks or tracking pixels).

Sharing

We share data with service providers (hosting, payments, email, storage) under contract, with the other party to a completed sale as needed to complete the transaction, and where required by law.

Your rights

You may request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data, and withdraw consent to marketing email at any time. [Counsel to add CCPA/GDPR specifics, lawful bases, retention periods and contact details.]

Cookies and local storage

Session (artsell_session) keeps you signed in, and artsell_auth tells the page you’re signed in so prices aren’t hidden.
Free price views (artsell_meter, signed, and artsell_pm): records which lot pages you’ve viewed in the last 30 days so we can show realized prices on a limited number of lots before asking you to sign up. They contain lot IDs only and expire after 30 days.
Local storage in your browser remembers a page-view count and whether you dismissed the sign-up bar or already subscribed, and keeps an unsaved consignment draft on your device.

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how the site is used (pages viewed, searches, clicks to auction-house websites, form starts and submissions). Google Analytics sets first-party cookies (_ga, _ga_*) and IP addresses are not stored by us. You can decline analytics cookies in the notice at the bottom of the page, and your choice is remembered in your browser. We also keep a simple first-party log of page views and outbound clicks (page address, referring page, browser type, time) for our own statistics. We don’t use advertising cookies.