Update on member portal and data

We are sharing an important update regarding the recent change to the server infrastructure at Calyx Institute to ensure transparency and respond to emerging questions and concerns on personal data stored at Calyx. Please continue reading for details about the change and how it affects your data.

Update in Calyx data infrastructure

In July, Calyx experienced an outage of our storage infrastructure, which caused our member portal to be down for approximately 12 hours and greatly affected several key projects. This is not the first time this has happened, and our internal data infrastructure has been undergoing reconstructions for more than a year. This outage made it a matter of urgency to keep our work running while conducting a full data infrastructure audit and redesign.

To conduct an urgent fix, the affected projects were migrated to the Vultr cloud to ensure project stability and resilience. This includes our member portal and database. Here you can find information about Vultr's note on data encryption, their privacy policy, and their approach to data protection in Trust and privacy section of Vultr Trust Center.

For the same reason, we have switched to Proton as our primary email provider, and are in the process of transitioning our email server for the member helpdesk to Proton. This means future emails from us to our members, including this one, will be sent from a Proton SMTP server. Here is Proton's privacy policy and their explanation of how email encryption works within and outside Proton.

How does this affect our members?

This operational update will not change any member status and services. Member login credentials stay the same. The integrity of our members' personal data is our main priority and we will continue improve our infrastructure to secure data privacy. Calyx does not, and will not have access to any payment information if you have been using credit card or cryptocurrency for your contribution, as all of the transactions are and will remain being handled by PayPal and NOWpayment. As a reminder, you can login to your member portal any time to delete your shipping information if you are not waiting for shipment from us.

Looking ahead

We always strive to do our best to keep our members apprised of changes, and to take efforts to enhance organizational transparency.

As part of this effort, we are reviewing our privacy policy and are currently in the process of a thorough update. Please stay tuned for our updates.