This year, we decided to outsource the actual registration process, so that people could pay for their attendance online, to avoid all those long, obnoxious queues you see in front of FOSS.IN’s gates every year.

The added advantage would have been that we would have had a more accurate idea of how many people were coming, and could plan resources accordingly.

Since we are a non-commercial event, we couldn’t just set up merchant accounts to accept credit cards. And PayPal wasnt an option since it would be international payments, and debit cards and netbanking wouldn’t be accepted.

Unfortunately, the vendor we worked with did not initially understand our primary requirement – that delegate data had to be protected at all costs, and that at no time would we allow this data to be stored anywhere but with us. However, in the last moment, we discovered that their system was actually creating user accounts, storing detailed contact information about people – something that was populating their system, and could be leveraged later for other events and publicity.

While we are not saying that this is essentially bad (there are good reasons for this as well, such as the ability to be able to retrieve your registration info) or malicious (we knew that the original system design did this, and that many similar systems do it as well), we are very clear about this:

We do NOT distribute delegate information, other than in statistics form. Ever. Period. Not even to sponsors. It may be OK on the Facebooks of the world, but we take privacy VERY seriously, and do NOT want to play around with our reputation, or your data.

To his credit, the service vendor did bend over backwards trying to fix the issues, but they just kept multiplying, and we really didn’t want to show him (or us) up in a bad light.

We have therefore decided, in the very last moment, to scrap the use of the outsourced system, and are reverting to an old system that we have used in the past.

We apologise deeply for this messup, but we are glad that we caught this BEFORE we violated our own privacy policy.

The old system will be up shortly, possibly in the next couple of days. Please stay tuned on Twitter and on the mailing lists and of course the website.

We also have a few weeks to try and arrange for online payment, so if we manage to do this, we might actually still get things in place, in which case we will send you a payment link later where you can just put in your delegate code and make your online payment.

If not… well, let’s hope it doesn’t rain!

Atul Chitnis
Project Lead
FOSS.IN