theMB Photography · Myrtle Beach, SC
Privacy & your photographs
Most privacy policies talk about email addresses. A photographer holds something far more personal than that: pictures of your face, your family, and the day you will want to remember. This page is mostly about those.
Your photographs
This is the part that matters most, so it goes first rather than last.
What exists after a session
Photographing you creates image files of you, and often of the people with you. Those files sit in three places: the camera cards until they are cleared, an editing archive, and the gallery delivered to you. They are the whole point of the work, and they are also personal information about identifiable people.
Who they belong to and what happens to them
Your images are not stock, and they are never sold. They are not licensed to anyone, not supplied to image libraries, not handed to advertisers, and not used to train any artificial intelligence system.
Images from your session are delivered to you under the terms agreed when you booked. Where those terms and this page ever appear to differ, the booking agreement governs the session and this page governs the website.
Showing work publicly
Photographers build a portfolio from the work they do, and this one is no different. Selected images may appear in the portfolio on this site, in social posts, or in printed samples, on the basis agreed with you at booking.
Say so and that is the end of it. You do not need a reason, it will not cost you anything, and it does not have to be decided at the time of booking. Write to privacy@thembphotography.com at any point, including years later, and your images come down from anywhere public.
Where an image has already been printed or shared onward, that cannot be recalled, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Everything within reach comes down.
Children
Family sessions, weddings and graduations involve children, and children cannot consent for themselves. Photographs of a child are made and used only on the agreement of a parent or guardian, and a parent or guardian can withdraw that agreement later in exactly the way described above.
Guests at an event
At a wedding or a party, most of the people photographed never signed anything with me. If you appear in a photograph on this site and would prefer not to, write and it comes down. You do not have to have been the client to ask.
What else this website collects
What you send
The enquiry form takes your name, email address, the kind of session you are asking about, your date if you have one, and whatever you write in the message. That is all it asks for, and it is used to reply to you and to plan the session.
What the site records by itself
- your IP address and the rough region it suggests
- browser and device type
- which pages you looked at, and when
- the site or search that sent you here
These are ordinary web server records. There is no analytics platform on this site, no advertising pixel, and no cross-site tracking. Nobody is being profiled for looking at a portfolio.
Payments
No payment is taken on this website. No card details are entered here and none are stored here. Booking, deposits and balances are arranged with you directly. Nothing on this site recurs or renews.
Who else can see anything
Short list, and here it is in full rather than as the phrase “service providers”.
- Namecheap
- Hosts the website and carries its mail. Can see everything stored here, including uploaded images.
- Google Fonts
- Serves the two typefaces the site is set in, Fraunces and Manrope. Loading a page reveals your IP address to Google.
- Fluent Forms
- Runs the enquiry form. What you type is stored on this site’s own server, not in a vendor cloud.
- Ameen Systems
- Built and maintains the site over a cryptographically signed connection, reaching what an administrator reaches.
No analytics provider, no advertising network, no image library, no data broker. Your galleries are not published to any third party service. If anything is added that can see personal information, it appears in that list before it goes live.
Beyond those, information is shared only where the law requires it, or where it is genuinely necessary to protect someone’s safety.
Artificial intelligence
- Your photographs are never used as AI training material. Not by me, and not handed to anyone else for that purpose.
- Your enquiry is not sent to an AI service. Nothing you type into the form here is passed to a model.
- This website was built with AI assisted tools, and some of the writing on it, including parts of this page, was drafted with AI help and then read and approved by a person.
- Editing is done by a person. Ordinary photo editing software is used on your images. No decision about you is made by a machine.
If any of that changes, this section changes before it does.
How long things are kept
- Your delivered gallery
- Available to you for the period agreed at booking. Download and back up your own copy; do not rely on the gallery being the only one.
- Editing archive of your session
- Kept for a limited period after delivery so a reprint or a re-edit is possible, then removed.
- Enquiries that did not become a booking
- 24 months, then deleted.
- Booking and invoice records
- As long as tax and accounting rules require.
- Server logs
- A short rolling window at the host, then discarded.
- Backups
- Rotated, so a deletion can take one backup cycle to become final.
If you want your images deleted from the archive sooner, ask. The only caveat worth stating plainly is that deletion is deletion: if you later want a reprint, there will be nothing to print from.
Cookies
A small number, for the site to function and to keep it secure. There is no advertising cookie, no analytics cookie and no tracker following you elsewhere, which is why the site does not stop you at the door to ask permission. Clear or block them whenever you like and nothing here is withheld from you.
What you can ask for
- See it. A copy of what is held about you.
- Correct it. Tell me what is wrong and it gets fixed.
- Take it down. Any public image of you or your family, no reason required.
- Delete it. Including your session archive, subject to the caveat above and to any record a tax rule requires me to keep.
- Stop the email. Every message carries an unsubscribe link that works first time.
Write to privacy@thembphotography.com. It is a small business, so it is a person reading it, and you will hear back well within thirty days. There is no charge.
Changes, and how to reach me
When practice changes, this page changes and the date at the top changes with it. Anything that materially affects how photographs are used will be told to clients directly rather than left on a quietly edited page.
- Business
- theMB Photography, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
- Privacy and takedowns
- privacy@thembphotography.com
- Everything else
- The contact page