MarketDeeping.co.uk is a community and local business guide for Market Deeping, Deeping St James, West Deeping and the surrounding Deepings. This page explains what information we collect from visitors, voters, advertisers, email list subscribers and anyone who contacts us, why, and how it’s handled.
Information collected from all visitors
- Standard website analytics (page views, general location, device type) via Google Analytics 4, which does not identify you personally. Google Analytics only runs if you choose “Yes, that’s fine” on our cookie banner. Until you choose, and if you choose “No thanks”, Google’s analytics tag is not loaded and nothing is sent to Google Analytics. If you accept and later change your mind, the “Cookie settings” link in the footer stops it and deletes its cookies.
- Click tracking on outbound news, accommodation and advertising links, used only to show which links are useful and never linked to your name or contact details.
- Standard server logs kept for security and troubleshooting.
- Searches made with our own site search are saved as anonymous search words, with a random code for that visit and never your name or address, for 30 days. After that only daily totals are kept, for 12 months, to help us improve the results.
- Pictures shown next to news headlines load directly from the publisher’s own website, so that publisher’s servers can see your IP address and browser details, as they would if you visited their site. Headlines open at the publisher’s site, and we do not copy their articles.
Contact forms and submissions
If you use our Contact form, or submit an event or a club/activity for us to list, we collect the information you provide, such as your name, email address, and the details of your message or submission. We use this only to reply to you and, for a submitted event or club, to review it before anything is published. Submissions are never published automatically, and your contact details are never shown publicly. We keep a private record of submissions for a limited period, to allow us to respond and to help prevent spam or abuse, then delete it.
Information collected from Best of the Deepings voters
Best of the Deepings is our community poll for local favourites. When you vote, we ask for your email address purely to verify your vote and help prevent duplicate or fraudulent voting, not to enter you into anything. We do not keep your email address itself alongside your vote: instead we store a one-way scrambled (“fingerprinted”) version, which lets us check whether that address has already voted in a category without letting us read the address back out. A confirmation link sent to that address expires after 24 hours and can only be used once.
- We use Cloudflare Turnstile, a free, privacy-focused service, to help confirm votes come from real people rather than automated bots. This involves limited technical data being checked with Cloudflare as part of that process.
- A short-lived technical signal tied to your browser session may be used to help detect unusual voting activity. It is not used to identify you personally, and is not kept for long.
- Verified votes themselves (identified only by the scrambled fingerprint, never a readable email address) are kept as the permanent record behind each year’s published results.
- Voting is entirely optional, and each category poll has its own published rules at Voting rules and privacy.
When voting, you can separately and optionally choose to receive occasional MarketDeeping.co.uk emails. This is unticked by default and has no bearing on your vote. If you tick it, we keep your email address and a record of the exact wording you agreed to, until you unsubscribe, which you can do at any time using the link in any such email. A free prize draw may also be offered alongside voting from time to time; when it is genuinely open, an email address given for that purpose is held separately from your vote, only to run the draw and contact a winner, and full terms are published on the Voting rules and privacy page.
Information collected from advertisers
If you book advertising on MarketDeeping.co.uk, we collect additional information in order to process your booking:
- Contact and business information: your name, email address, telephone number (if given) and the business or organisation you represent.
- Uploaded advert material: your advert text, logo or image, and destination website link.
- Booking records: the dates, package, price and status of your booking, and a record of communications about it. Any change an administrator makes to your booking (advert content, dates, approval, rejection, cancellation or refund) is logged with a timestamp for audit purposes.
- Payment references: Stripe, our payment provider, processes your card payment and shares a payment reference and status with us. We do not receive or store your full card details.
- Booking status link: we generate a long, random, unguessable link (not based on your booking number) so you can check your booking’s status without creating an account. It’s included in your booking emails. An administrator can disable or regenerate this link at any time, for example if you’re concerned it’s been shared with someone else.
Information collected if you support the site
If you choose to make a one-off payment via our Support page, Stripe processes your card payment in the same secure way as for advertising bookings, and we do not receive or store your full card details. If you provide an email address, we use it only to send a thank-you confirmation, and it is kept separately from any advertising or voting records.
Information collected if you join our email list
If you join our email list using the form in the footer of this website, we ask for your email address and nothing else. You tick an unticked box to say you agree to receive future email updates, then we send you one email to confirm your address. You are only added to the list after you click the link in that email. If you do not confirm, you are not added.
- What we use it for: to send you future updates from MarketDeeping.co.uk, including local events, news and occasional clearly labelled sponsored content. We have not started sending a newsletter yet and have not set a schedule or a date, so you will not receive these updates until we do. Our lawful basis is your consent, which you can withdraw at any time without giving a reason.
- Who holds it: when you press Join, the form sends your email address straight from your browser to MailerLite, the email service we use. Nothing is sent to MailerLite before that, and this website does not keep a copy of your address. MailerLite stores it, together with a record of when and how you joined and confirmed, as evidence of your consent. MailerLite acts as our processor, which means it handles your information only on our instructions. Its documents say its data is stored in the European Union and that any transfer outside Europe is covered by standard contractual clauses approved for the UK and EU. The link in the confirmation email opens a page hosted by MailerLite, which may set its own cookies; see MailerLite’s privacy policy.
- How long we keep it: until you ask us to remove you. If we have not sent you a newsletter within 12 months of you joining, we will either ask you to confirm that you still want to hear from us, or delete your address. Once newsletters start, every email will include a link to unsubscribe.
- Leaving the list or deleting your details: tell us through our Contact page at any time and we will remove you and, if you ask, erase your details from MailerLite, which says it deletes such data within 30 days.
Why we use this information
We use advertiser information to process and review your booking, publish your approved advert, communicate with you about it, and to meet our own accounting and legal obligations. Our lawful basis is performance of the contract formed when you book advertising, and our legitimate interest in reviewing advert content before publication and reporting basic advert performance back to you. Where you contact us, submit an event or club, vote, opt in to our mailing list, or support the site, our lawful basis is your consent (given by using the relevant form) and our legitimate interest in responding to you, reviewing submissions, and running a fair and genuine community poll.
Measuring how your advert performs
While your advert is live, we count viewable impressions (the advert was genuinely visible on someone’s screen, not merely present in the page code) and clicks through to your website, so we can show you a click-through rate once your campaign finishes. This measurement:
- Is recorded against your campaign, not against any individual visitor. We don’t build a profile of who saw or clicked your advert.
- Never stores a visitor’s full IP address. A short-lived, one-way scrambled value is used only to stop the same visitor’s browser being counted twice in a short space of time, and is not kept.
- Does not collect visitor names, contact details or any other personal information.
If Google Analytics 4 is active and a visitor has accepted analytics cookies, we also send anonymous events when an advert, a sponsored announcement or a promoted event is seen or clicked, and when a booking or support payment is completed. These carry only details of the advert itself: your booking or announcement reference number, the business name and button wording exactly as they appear publicly, the type of campaign, where on the site it appeared and the package length. For a completed payment they carry the payment reference, the amount and the package. They never carry a visitor’s name, email address or telephone number, and we never send your own email address, telephone number or card details to Google Analytics. Sponsored announcements and promoted events are counted in the same anonymous way as adverts.
Who we share it with
- Stripe, to process advertising and support payments securely.
- Our website hosting provider, who stores the site’s database.
- Google, for basic anonymised analytics (Google Analytics 4).
- SMTP2GO, our transactional email provider, to deliver emails from this site, such as booking confirmations, vote confirmations and replies to your messages.
- MailerLite, our email list service, which receives and stores the email addresses of people who join the list through the form in the footer of this site.
- Cloudflare, solely for the Turnstile check used to help verify genuine votes when Best of the Deepings voting is open.
We do not sell your information, and we do not add anyone to a mailing list automatically. Marketing emails are only ever sent if you actively opt in using an unticked consent box, either when voting or through the email list form in the footer.
How long we keep it
Booking records are kept for as long as reasonably needed for accounting, tax and dispute-resolution purposes, and then deleted or anonymised. Contact, event and club submissions are kept for a limited period to allow us to respond and review them, then deleted. Verified vote records (identified only by a scrambled fingerprint, never a readable email address) are kept as the permanent record behind each year’s published Best of the Deepings results. Where you’ve optionally opted into our mailing list or a prize draw, we keep your email address only for as long as that specific purpose requires, or until you unsubscribe; the Voting rules and privacy page sets out the specific retention period for a prize draw whenever one is genuinely running. Email list addresses are kept until you ask us to remove them, subject to the 12 month check described in the email list section above.
Administrator access
Booking and payment-status information is only accessible to the site administrator; payment capture, refund, cancellation and advert-editing actions all require an administrator account with the appropriate permission level, and each one is recorded in an audit log together with who made it and when.
Security
We use industry-standard practices to protect the information we hold, including secure hosting, restricted administrator access, and processing card payments through Stripe rather than handling card details ourselves.
Your rights
You can ask us what information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it where we’re not required to keep it for legal or accounting reasons. Contact us using the details below. If you join our email list, you can also ask us at any time to remove you or to erase your details.
Cookies
This site uses essential cookies to function, and optional analytics cookies to understand how the site is used. When you first visit, a short banner lets you choose whether to allow analytics cookies; rejecting is exactly as easy as accepting, and the site works fully either way. Analytics cookies are only set once you accept, and Google’s analytics tag itself is only loaded after you accept. You can change your choice at any time using the “Cookie settings” link in the footer: choosing “No thanks” stops analytics straight away and removes its cookies. Where the checkout/payment flow is used, Stripe may set its own cookies as part of processing payment securely, and Cloudflare may set a short-lived cookie as part of the Turnstile check used for vote verification. The email list form in the footer sets no cookies of its own; the confirmation link in its email opens a page hosted by MailerLite, which may set its own (see the email list section above).
Contact us
For any privacy question, or to exercise your rights over information we hold, see our Contact page.