Privacy | Wagfinder

Who we are

Wagfinder is a UK directory of dog-friendly places, run by Matthew Wilkin. We are the data controller for the information described here.

How we count visits

We count page views ourselves, on our own server. For each day we keep a single number per page — how many times it was opened. That is the whole record.

We do not store your IP address, your browser, your device, or anything that could identify you. There is no cookie, no pixel, no fingerprint, and no Google Analytics. Nothing about your visit is sent to any other company.

This is why there is no cookie banner. UK cookie rules require your consent before a site stores or reads information on your device. We do neither, so there is nothing to consent to. We would rather have honest numbers and no pop-up than the other way round.

Cookies

One, and it is not about you: a session cookie set when the site owner logs in to the admin panel. It exists so the login works and it is exempt from consent requirements as strictly necessary.

If you pay for something, the payment happens on Stripe’s own website, not ours. Stripe sets its own cookies there under its own privacy policy.

What we collect, and only when you give it

Nothing on this list is collected by browsing. Each one is a form you chose to fill in.

Creating an account — a username, your email address, and a password. Only your username is ever shown publicly; your email is kept private, used solely to sign you in and for alerts you ask for. Your password is stored as a one-way scrypt hash with a per-account salt — we never store or can see the password itself, and a database copy would not reveal it. You can also sign in without a password by asking for a one-time email link.
Wagfinder Members — if you subscribe, we hold that you are a member and, from our payment provider, a reference to your subscription so you can manage or cancel it. Card details are handled by Stripe and never reach us.
Email updates and the members waitlist — your email address. Separate lists; joining one does not join you to another.
Claiming a business listing — your name, role, business name, phone, email, website, and whatever you write about your venue.
Writing a review or entering a competition — shown against your username, never your email or real name. Your email is never published and is not shown to the venue. We keep it so we can contact you, and because the law expects a site publishing reviews of named businesses to know who wrote them.
Sending us a walk — the route, and your email if you give one. Your file never leaves your device: the route is read in your browser and only the coordinates are sent.
Telling us about a missing place — what you tell us, and your email if you give one.

On walk routes specifically: roughly the first and last 200 metres of any track are removed in your browser before anything is sent to us. A recorded walk usually starts at somebody’s front door, and we would rather not receive that at all than promise to look after it.

Why we are allowed to hold it

Email lists — your consent. You can withdraw it at any time and every email has a one-click unsubscribe.
Claims and subscriptions — to perform the contract you have entered into with us.
Reviews, walks and reported places — our legitimate interest in running a directory that is accurate and accountable, balanced against your privacy. That is why we minimise what we take, trim route ends, and never publish an email address.

Who else sees it

As few as we can manage. We do not sell data, ever, and we do not share it for anyone else’s marketing.

Render — hosts the site and the server it runs on.
Neon — hosts the database.
Stripe — takes payments. They handle your card details; we never see them.
Our email provider — sends the emails you have asked for.

Some of these are US companies, so some data is transferred outside the UK. Those transfers rely on the safeguards in each provider’s data processing terms, which is the standard mechanism for this.

How we keep it safe

Passwords are stored only as a salted one-way scrypt hash. We cannot read them, and neither could anyone who obtained a copy of the database.
Sign-in sessions use a signed, HTTP-only cookie that a script on another site cannot read; signing out, or changing your password, invalidates every existing session on every device.
Sign-in attempts are rate-limited and one-time email links expire quickly, to make guessing and brute-forcing impractical.
Your email is never shown publicly — reviews, competition entries and votes appear against your chosen username only.
Payments go through Stripe; card numbers never touch our servers.

No system is perfect, and we do not pretend otherwise — but we hold as little as we can, protect what we hold, and if anything ever did go wrong we would tell the people affected and the ICO as the law requires.

How long we keep it

Email lists — until you unsubscribe, then we remove you.
Claims and subscriptions — for as long as the subscription runs, then six years, because tax records have to be kept.
Reviews — while published. If you ask us to take yours down we will.
Walk and place submissions — until we have checked them and either used or discarded them.
Visit counts — indefinitely, because they contain nothing about anybody.

Your rights

You can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, delete it, restrict what we do with it, object to it, or send it to you in a portable form. Where we rely on your consent you can withdraw it at any time, and that does not affect anything done before you did.

Email paws@wagfinder.co.uk and we will get on with it. There is no charge and no form to fill in.

If you are unhappy with us

Complain to us first — we would rather fix it than have it escalated, and we are required to make that easy. Use the data protection complaint form or just email us. We will acknowledge it within 30 days and answer as quickly as we can.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint at any time, whether or not you have come to us first.