Privacy & cookies.

I · Who we are

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.

II · What information we collect

Very little, and none of it identifies you personally. When you visit any page on this website, our anonymous analytics service records:

• The URL of the page you visited (e.g. /farnham-history.html)
• The website you arrived from, if any (the “referrer” — e.g. a Google result or a link from another site)
• The country your visit came from, derived briefly from your IP address and then immediately discarded
• The general family of browser and operating system you used (e.g. “Chrome on Android”, “Safari on iPad”)
• Your screen-size category (phone, tablet, or desktop)

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.

III · How we use it

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.

IV · Cookies

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.

V · Third parties

We rely on three third-party services to make the website work. None of them identifies you personally or builds an advertising profile.

• GoatCounter (operated by Martin Tournoij, in the Netherlands) — provides the anonymous analytics described above. Its privacy policy is at goatcounter.com/help/gdpr.
• Cloudflare (registered in the United States) — operates a small intermediary service that fetches visitor counts from GoatCounter on the home page’s behalf. Cloudflare receives your IP address momentarily as a routine part of routing the request, but does not retain it as part of this service.
• Netlify (registered in the United States) — hosts the website’s files and serves the pages to your browser. Netlify keeps standard short-term access logs (containing IP and timestamp) for security purposes; these are deleted automatically after thirty days.
• Open-Meteo (operated by Patrick Zöller, in Switzerland) — provides the current-weather and sunrise/sunset data shown on the home page. The home page sends a single request to their public API containing only Farnham’s coordinates; your browser’s IP is visible to them momentarily as a routine part of the request, but Open-Meteo states that they do not log requests. Their privacy notice is at open-meteo.com/en/terms.

We chose these providers because they have strong privacy commitments and minimal data collection compared with their competitors.

VI · The contact form

The contact form on the home page is currently a placeholder — it does not yet submit messages to anyone. Anything you type into it is discarded the moment you leave the page. If the Parish Meeting later activates the form, this policy will be updated to describe what happens to your message.

To contact the Parish Meeting in the meantime, please use one of the methods listed in section VIII below.

VII · Your rights under UK GDPR

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.

Because we do not collect personally identifying information, in practice most of these rights have nothing to act on for this website. If you believe we hold data about you and would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the details below.

VIII · How long we keep information

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. Netlify’s short-term access logs are kept for thirty days then deleted automatically.

IX · How to contact us

For any question about this policy or any data matter, please contact Farnham Parish Meeting via:

• The contact section on the home page
• By post to Farnham Parish Meeting, c/o Farnham Hall, Farnham, Knaresborough, HG5 9JE

X · Changes to this policy

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.