Privacy and Cookies Policy

Published 23 October 2013. Last updated 21 June 2022

We believe you as a reader are entitled to know what we get up to on this website with your personal data. This is why we’ve created this page to tell you all about it.

What is listed below applies to all content hosted on ramblingman.org.uk. It was last updated on 21 July 2022.

Email addresses

We collect email addresses in the following situations:

  • Comments – when you comment on any blog post you are asked for an email address. As part of our attempts to battle comment spam, we do not allow any comments without an email address. Your email address is stored in our content management system (called WordPress).  We may also use your email address to reply directly to your comment should this be necessary, although generally we reply on the blog comments themselves.
  • Contact forms – each page of the site has a link allowing you to get in touch directly. If you do so, an email address is required so we can reply. These messages are stored in a Gmail inbox, provided by Google.

We take data protection very seriously and only ever use your email address for the purposes listed above. We never send out unsolicited marketing emails.

If, for any reason, you do not want us to hold your email address in the systems noted above, or any other system we may decide to use in the future, then the best suggestion is not to get in touch in the first place. However if you already have, please get in touch and we can sort something out.

Comments

When you leave a comment on this site, we collect the data shown in the comments form. We’ll also collect your IP address and browser user agent string. We use this to help us detect spam messages. We store comments indefinitely.

If for any reason, you don’t wish us to to that, then please don’t leave a comment.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files stored on your computer which allow a website to identify you at a later date. Many websites use them, for example to stop you having to logon every time you visit.

We set a small number of cookies on ramblingman.org.uk, mostly related to supporting our commenting functionality. If you ask us to store your details when you submit a comment, we will do this in a cookie. They do not track you as a user, but are used to establish that you are a user and not some evil spambot. They will last one year.

We also use third party services which may or may not set cookies. These include:

  • YouTube – when including video from YouTube we use a privacy enhanced version of YouTube which does not set a cookie on your computer unless you play the video. If you do not wish to have a YouTube cookie, simply do not play any embedded video. For more information see the YouTube Privacy Policy.
  • Flickr – we occasionally include Flickr slideshows on the site. Cookies from Flickr will appear on your computer. Flickr is owned by a company called SmugMug.  For more information on the Flickr Privacy policy visit SmugMug’s website.
  • Matomo Analytics – This is an analytics package that we use to measure usage of the website. This requires a cookie to be set on every one of our pages which tracks what you do. This data is made anonymous. All data sits in our server, and is not shared to anyone else.
  • Ordnance Survey OpenSpace – maps displayed on this site are published using Ordnance Survey OpenSpace.
  • Amazon.co.uk – some pages include links to buy products directly from Amazon.co.uk. These come in the form of simple text links, or in “widgets” hosted by the Amazon website and embedded in our webpages. These widgets may track you as a user. Their use is restricted to the Planning a Walk section.

When you first visit Rambling Man you will be asked if you wish to allow cookies.  You can accept or reject our cookies, but this doesn’t currently work for third party cookies. If you reject cookies, you will see the request to allow or deny cookies with every page view as we cannot store your preferences without cookies.

If you have concerns over cookies, most web browsers allow you to disable or remove them – either by disabling them all, or by disabling just third party cookies. This website does not require or mandate cookies in order to view any page.

Information from your browser and IP addresses

Your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) report various information to all web sites you visit. This is information about your computer, such as browser type and operating system. We use most of this data to ensure that we’re not making unusable web pages for people. Your browser will also tell us which the page you viewed before visiting one of our pages.

All this data is served in log files on our server. We also use some files hosted by third parties, such as Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Flickr and YouTube. When you visit one of our pages your web browser will send the same information to those companies. This is true of all websites you visit, and whilst possible, it is not easy to disable if you wish to. However the data cannot be tracked to an individual person.

We also receive your IP address. This is a corner stone of how the internet works as it allows servers to always talk to each other. Your IP address is a number that refers to one, or more, PC.

It is not possible for a website to trace an IP address down to an individual (only your Internet Service Provider can do that) however we can use it to determine which country you live in. This allows us to tailor content accordingly; for example, to point you to your local Amazon website.

If you send us an email or submit a blog comment then your IP address will be stored within our mail system (Google) or content management system (WordPress) along with your email address. In that situation it would be possible to then go through the server logs and find every page you’ve ever visited, and what browser and computer operating system you’re using. However we’ve got better things to do with our time, and (at time of last update), have never, ever done this. If you don’t trust us not to get this urge, then we recommend you never email us or submit a blog comment.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

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

Further Information

If you would like any further information, please email us using our contact form.