Privacy Policy

Who we are

Bidston Lighthouse C.I.C. is a Community Interest Company whose goals are to preserve Bidston Lighthouse and its environment, to educate the public about the history of Bidston Lighthouse,  and to operate Bidston Lighthouse as a visitor centre.

Our website address is http://www.bidstonlighthouse.org.uk.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

We try to collect as little personal data as possible. We don’t have members, we don’t let users log-in to our website, and we no longer maintain a mailing list.

We do, however, want to allow you to interact with our website (by leaving comments on articles) and with ourselves (by contacting us through our contact form). We can’t do this without having some way of contacting you back, typically through a valid email address, which means we will probably end up holding some personal information about you.

We do not do any automated decision making or profiling with personal data. We do not share personal data with anyone else.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

Our policy is that comments are moderated. This means that they might not appear on the website immediately. We will not approve comments that in our opinion are defamatory, inflammatory, profane or unrelated to the topic of the article. We will not usually reply to a visitor’s comment.

Please do not leave a comment on our website if you do not want it to be made public.

Please do not include anything in your comment that you are not willing to share with the world.

If you want to use a pseudonym when leaving a comment, that’s fine by us. Just don’t be offended if we later address you or refer to you by that pseudonym.

The email address that you provide when leaving a comment will not be published. We don’t validate your email address. But if you provide an email address that doesn’t reach you, we might not be able to process any subsequent subject access request or take-down request that you make for information linked to that email address.

Leaving a comment is no substitute for contacting us through our contact form.

Contact form

We allow you to contact us through our contact form. This is for your convenience (it means you can send us a message while browsing our website even when you don’t have access to email) and ours (we get less spam by not having to publish our email address in machine readable form). The contact form does not store any personal information on our website. But it does generate an email to us, which we will treat just as if you had emailed us directly. If we need to follow up by contacting you, we will do so using the email address that you provided (if valid), unless you ask us to contact you by some other means (such as a telephone number).

Cookies

We also try to minimise our use of cookies.

We use cookies to count visits to our website, so that we can properly distinguish between first-time, unique and return visits. (We use the third-party analytics service Statcounter.com for this.)

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

Some plugins (such as the widget that provides our Twitter feed) might store cookies in your browser.

We think that the cookies used by our website are innocuous and do something to improve the user experience. If you have reason to believe otherwise, we’d like to hear from you.

You can, of course, disable cookies in your browser when you visit our website.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor had visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Who we share your data with

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. We use Akismet.

We do not share your data with anyone else.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

What rights you have over your data

If you have left comments on this site, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. This is sometimes called a subject access request.

You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This is sometimes called a take-down request, and reflects your right to be forgotten. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Usually, the personal information we hold about you will be information that you provided to us, and will be linked to the email address you provided when leaving a comment or using our contact form. So we will need to know the email address you used at the time.

It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s possible that someone else might have disclosed personal information about you in a comment left by them. If you want us to take it down, you’ll need to help us by supplying enough information for us to identify the comment and the page or article (post) on which it appears.

Contacting us

Please see our contact page for ways to contact us.