About this site
Privacy & cookies.
A short, plain-English explanation of what this website does and does not do with information about its visitors.
Last updated: 18 August 2026
A short, plain-English explanation of what this website does and does not do with information about its visitors.
Last updated: 18 August 2026
In short:
We are a small village website run by Farnham Parish Meeting. We don’t sell anything, don’t run advertising, don’t use cookies, and don’t have user accounts. We do use a privacy-friendly analytics service (GoatCounter) to count visitors each day — but it doesn’t identify anyone and doesn’t track you across other websites. That’s all.
This website (farnhamvillage.co.uk) is published by Farnham Parish Meeting, the volunteer-led community forum representing the parish of Farnham in North Yorkshire. It is maintained on the Meeting’s behalf by an appointed website maintainer.
Very little, and none of it identifies you personally. When you visit any page on this website, our anonymous analytics service records:
/farnham-history.html)The analytics service combines these properties into a one-way hash to identify a returning visitor within the same eight-hour window, so the same person reloading the page is not counted as multiple visitors. After eight hours the hash expires and a returning visitor is counted afresh. We do not see, store, or have access to your IP address, your name, your email address, or any other detail that could identify you.
We do not use cookies of any kind — no tracking cookies, no functional cookies, no preferences cookies. We do not embed Facebook pixels, Google Analytics, or any third-party advertising or tracking scripts.
There are two occasions when you may give us personal information directly: if you send us a message through the contact form, or if you ask to join our village email list. In both cases you provide your name and email address yourself. These are explained in sections VI and VII below.
We use the aggregate visitor counts to understand which pages of the village website people find most useful, to plan future content updates, and to report value back to the Parish Meeting. We do not share these numbers with advertisers or commercial third parties. Simple aggregate counts (such as “12 visitors today”) are displayed openly on the home page.
Where you have given us your details directly, we use them only for the purpose you provided them: to read and reply to a message you send through the contact form, or to send you village news and notices if you have joined the email list. We do not use them for anything else.
This website does not set or read any cookies at all. You will not see a cookie consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.
If you have added this website to your phone’s or tablet’s home screen as an app, a small set of files (HTML pages, images, the site’s icons) is cached locally in your browser’s storage so the site loads quickly and works offline. This cache contains no personal data and never leaves your device. You can clear it at any time through your browser settings.
We rely on the following third-party services to make the website and our email work. None of them identifies you personally or builds an advertising profile.
We chose these providers because they have strong privacy commitments and minimal data collection compared with their competitors.
The contact form on the home page lets you send a message to the Parish Meeting. When you submit it, the name, email address and message you provide are sent securely to our forms provider (Netlify) and forwarded by email to the Parish Meeting’s webmaster, who passes your message to the right person. We use this information only to read and respond to your message.
We do not add you to any mailing list as a result of contacting us, and we do not share your message with anyone outside the Parish Meeting. Messages are kept only as long as needed to deal with your enquiry and are then deleted. Our lawful basis for handling your message is our legitimate interest in responding to enquiries from residents and visitors.
Farnham Parish Meeting keeps a voluntary email list so we can send occasional village news and notices. You are only ever added to it if you ask to be — we never add anyone automatically. If you join, we hold your name and email address for this purpose alone.
We never share the list with anyone else, and every email we send from it includes a simple way to unsubscribe. You can join, or leave at any time, by emailing webmaster@farnhamvillage.co.uk, and we will action your request promptly. Emails are sent so that recipients cannot see one another’s addresses.
Our lawful basis for holding your details for the email list is your consent, which you gave by asking to join and which you can withdraw at any time by unsubscribing.
Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation you have the right to access any personal information we hold about you, to have inaccurate information corrected, to ask for it to be erased, to restrict or object to its processing, to receive it in a portable format, and to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office.
For most visitors we hold no personally identifying information, so in practice these rights have little to act on. If you have contacted us through the form, or joined the village email list, and would like to see, correct or delete the details we hold, please contact us using the details below.
For general website visitors we do not retain any personally identifying information. Aggregate, anonymous visitor counts are kept by GoatCounter indefinitely so the Parish Meeting can compare years over time, and Netlify’s short-term access logs are kept for thirty days then deleted automatically.
Where you have given us your details directly: messages sent through the contact form are kept only as long as needed to deal with your enquiry and are then deleted; and email addresses on the village email list are held until you ask to be removed — for example if you leave the list or move away.
For any question about this policy or any data matter, please contact Farnham Parish Meeting via:
We may revise this policy from time to time — for example, if we change analytics provider, add a new feature, or activate the contact form. The most recent version is always available on this page, with the revision date shown at the top.
This policy is written for clarity rather than legal completeness. It is intended to give residents and visitors a fair and honest picture of how this small village website handles information, in language that a non-lawyer can understand. If anything here is unclear or appears to omit something important, please do let us know.