Privacy Policy

The Asian Photovoltaic Industry Association (APVIA) is an industry association for the solar sector across the Asia Pacific. This policy covers the website you are reading and the forms on it. APVIA is the personal information controller for that data under the Philippine Data Privacy Act of 2012 (Republic Act No. 10173).

You can reach the APVIA Secretariat about anything in this policy at APVIAPhilippines@apviaph.org.

This policy does not cover other organisations' websites. Some events listed on our calendar are run by partners and link to their own registration pages; once you follow such a link, that organisation's privacy policy applies, not ours.

We only receive personal information from this website when you type it into a form and submit it. There are four such forms, and each collects only what it needs:

• Newsletter — your email address, and nothing else. We do not ask for your name, so our newsletters are not personalised.
• Contact form — your name, email address, subject and message, plus your organisation if you choose to give it.
• Solar pledge — your first and last name, email address, contact number, organisation, country, type of organisation, the capacity you are pledging, the building type and your target date.
• Event registration — your full name, the name you want printed on your certificate, email address, organisation, position, country and contact number, along with your answers to any extra questions the organiser added for that event, and whether you agreed to receive updates.

Event registration also records which event you registered for, and whether the Secretariat has confirmed your attendance and issued your certificate.

We measure how the site is used, but we do it with counters rather than profiles. Each visit adds one to a set of daily totals: page views, unique visitors, clicks, which page, which button, whether the browser was a phone or a desktop, and which website you arrived from. Those totals are all we keep.

There is no record of an individual visitor anywhere in that data — no identifier, no session, no browsing history, nothing that could be traced back to you or joined up with anything else. We cannot tell which pages one person looked at, because we never write that down.

• This site sets no cookies. Nothing about you is stored in a cookie, and there is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.
• We store two small values in your browser, not on our servers: a flag recording that your browser has already been counted today, so you are not counted twice, and a note of which announcements you have dismissed, so they do not reappear. Clearing your browser data removes both.
• We do not use Google Analytics, advertising pixels, social media trackers, or any other third-party analytics on this website.
• Your IP address is never stored. Our servers see it, as every web server does, and use it in memory for a few minutes to stop the same source flooding our forms. It is not written to any database or log we keep.

• To reply to you. If you write to us through the contact form, we use your details to answer. Basis: your consent, and our legitimate interest in responding to enquiries.
• To send the newsletter. Only to addresses that asked for it. Basis: your consent, which you can withdraw at any time.
• To run events. To register you, confirm your attendance, produce and email your certificate, and tell you what you need to know about the event you signed up for. Basis: performing what you asked us to do when you registered.
• To record pledges. To keep an accurate record of commitments made to the pledge campaign and to report on them. Basis: your consent.
• To understand and improve the site. Using the aggregate counters described above. Basis: our legitimate interest in knowing which pages are useful.

We do not use your information to make automated decisions about you, and we do not profile you.

The pledge totals on our website are built from a separate copy of each pledge that contains only two things: the country and the pledged capacity. Your name, organisation and contact details are never part of it, and are never published.

We do not publish attendee lists, and we do not publish anything you send through the contact form.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing. It reaches only the service providers we need to operate the site, each of which is bound to use it solely on our instructions:

• Google (Firebase / Google Cloud) — stores the database behind the forms above, and authenticates APVIA staff signing in to the admin area.
• Vercel — hosts and serves this website.
• MailerLite — delivers the newsletter and holds the mailing list.
• Mailtrap — delivers individual emails such as contact confirmations, pledge receipts, event invitations and certificates.
• Cloudinary — stores and serves the images on this site, including event posters. It receives no personal information from the forms.

Beyond that, we disclose personal information only where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim.

The providers above operate internationally, so your information may be stored on or accessed from servers outside the Philippines. Where that happens we rely on those providers' contractual commitments to protect it to a standard consistent with the Data Privacy Act. APVIA staff access the data from the Philippines.

• Newsletter — until you unsubscribe. We then keep a record that the address unsubscribed, so we do not add it back by mistake.
• Contact messages — while the matter is open and for a reasonable period afterwards for our own records.
• Event registrations — for the event, and afterwards so that a certificate can be reissued if you lose it or ask for a correction.
• Pledges — for as long as the pledge campaign runs and we report on it.
• Site counters — indefinitely, because they are totals and contain nothing personal.

If you ask us to delete something sooner, we will, unless we are required to keep it.

Under the Data Privacy Act you have the right to be informed about how your information is processed, to access it, to have it corrected, to object to processing, to have it erased or blocked, to be indemnified for damage caused by inaccurate or unlawfully obtained data, and to obtain a copy of it in a portable format.

To exercise any of these, email the Secretariat at APVIAPhilippines@apviaph.org. We will respond as promptly as we can, and we may ask you to confirm your identity first so that we do not disclose your information to someone else.

To stop receiving the newsletter, you do not need to write to anyone: every newsletter has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and it takes effect immediately.

If you believe we have mishandled your personal information, we would rather hear from you first and put it right. You also have the right to complain to the National Privacy Commission at privacy.gov.ph.

This site is intended for professionals and members of the public with an interest in the solar industry. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has given us personal information, tell us and we will remove it.

The site is served entirely over HTTPS. The database enforces rules that keep submitted information private: the contact messages, pledges, subscriber list and attendee records can only be read by signed-in APVIA administrators, not by visitors. Administrator access requires a verified account. Event registration links carry a code so that a form is reachable by the people it was meant for.

No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise. If a breach ever affects your personal information, we will act on it and notify you and the National Privacy Commission where the law requires.

If we change what we collect or what we do with it, we will update this page and change the date below. Where a change is significant and we hold your email address, we will tell you directly rather than rely on you noticing.