UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018
Data Protection: How This Website Handles Your Personal Data
What this website collects, why, how long it is kept and what rights you have over it.
This notice explains how personal data is handled by this website. It is written to meet the requirements of the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018. It is deliberately short, because a static reference site collects very little in the first place. Nothing here is written to be technically true and practically misleading.
Who is responsible
The data controller for this website is Declan Fowler, 49 Simone Weil Avenue, Weare Giffard, EX39 2SJ, United Kingdom. Contact details are given in the legal notice. Any request about personal data should be sent to that address, and will be answered from it. Repeating an address in two places is how one of them quietly goes out of date.
What this site collects
This is a static reference site. It does not operate user accounts, a shop, a newsletter or a comment system, and it does not ask visitors to register or to submit personal information in order to read anything. Visitors are never asked to identify themselves in order to read anything published here.
Server logs. Like effectively every website, the server that delivers these pages records technical information about requests: the IP address making the request, the time, the page requested, the referring page where one is sent, and the browser’s user-agent string. These logs exist to keep the site running securely and to diagnose faults.
Cookies. This site sets no advertising, analytics, profiling or tracking cookies, and it does not embed third-party tracking scripts. Where a browser stores anything at all, it is for the ordinary technical operation of a web page rather than to identify or follow a visitor. No consent banner is shown because there is nothing to consent to.
Correspondence. If you make contact, the message and the address you send it from are processed in order to reply. Nothing sent that way is used for marketing or passed to anyone else, and the message is deleted once the matter it concerns has been dealt with, instead of retained on the chance that it might one day prove useful.
Legal basis for processing
Server logs are processed on the basis of legitimate interests under Article 6(1)(f): the interest in operating a secure, functioning website and protecting it from abuse. That interest has been weighed against the rights of visitors, and the processing is limited to what security and fault diagnosis require, and nothing in them builds a profile of an individual visitor.
Correspondence is processed on the same basis, namely the legitimate interest in responding to someone who has chosen to make contact. A message sent here is read, answered and then kept only for as long as the matter it concerns remains open. Nothing sent that way is added to a mailing list or used for any unrelated purpose.
How long data is kept
Server logs are retained only for as long as they are useful for security and diagnostics, and are deleted on a routine cycle thereafter. Correspondence is kept for as long as needed to deal with the matter it concerns, and then deleted. No archive of historic traffic is maintained beyond that cycle.
Sharing and transfers
Personal data from this site is not sold, rented or shared for marketing. Technical data may be processed by the hosting and content-delivery providers that deliver the site, acting as processors under contract and only on instructions. Those providers act only on instructions and for no purpose of their own.
Links to other sites
This site links to external websites, including the venue operator’s own pages. Those organisations are separate data controllers with their own notices, and this notice does not cover what happens once you follow a link. Following a link takes you into somebody else’s policy, which is worth reading on its own terms.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you have the right to be informed about how your data is used, to request access to it, to have inaccurate data corrected, to request erasure, to restrict or object to processing, and to data portability where it applies. Requests can be made using the contact details in the legal notice.
You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK supervisory authority, at ico.org.uk. Raising a concern here first is welcome but is not a precondition of complaining to the regulator. The Information Commissioner’s Office can be approached directly at any point, and doing so does not depend on having raised the matter here first.
Changes to this notice
This notice is reviewed periodically and may be updated to reflect changes to the site or to the law. The date at the head of the page shows when it was last revised, and a material change to what is collected would be reflected there before it took effect rather than afterwards.