About
Privacy
What this site collects, why, and what you can ask us to do with it. In short: no cookies, no advertising, no tracking across sites, and the only personal details we hold are ones you choose to give us in the corrections form.
Last checked · Report a correction
Who is responsible
This site is run by its editor, Andy Redfern, a resident of Ochre Yards, who is the data controller for anything collected here. To ask about your data, or to have it deleted, email corrections@gateshead.info or use the corrections form.
The corrections form
The form asks for the change you are suggesting and, if you want to give them, how you know, your name and an email address. Name and email are optional; leave them out and your correction arrives anonymously.
- Where it goes: each form submission is stored as an issue in the site’s private repository on GitHub, which only the editor can see. Emails to corrections@gateshead.info go to the editor’s own inbox. GitHub is a US company; data sent to it is covered by the safeguards approved for transfers of UK personal data to the US.
- What it is used for: checking and making the correction, and, if you gave an email address, replying to you about it. It is never published, shared or used for anything else. We do not put your name on the site unless you ask us to credit you.
- Legal basis: our legitimate interest in keeping a community reference site accurate, and in replying when you have asked us to.
- How long we keep it: once the correction is dealt with, and at the latest after 12 months, your name and email are removed from the issue and from its edit history (or the issue is deleted). GitHub also emails the editor a copy of each new issue; those emails are deleted on the same timetable. The correction itself may be kept as a record of why the site changed.
Visiting the site
- No cookies. The site does not set any cookies.
- Search runs in your browser, against an index that is part of the site. What you type is not sent to us or to anyone else.
- Analytics: we use Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page views. It does not use cookies, does not identify you and does not follow you to other sites.
- Hosting: the site is served by Cloudflare, which processes your IP address to deliver pages and protect the site from attack, and keeps short-lived security logs. When you send the form, your IP address is also used, for about a minute and without being stored, to limit how many notes one address can send.
- Things your browser fetches from other services: to show the site, your browser also asks a few other services for content, and they will see your IP address as any website does: Google Fonts (typefaces), OpenFreeMap (map tiles), and, for the live weather and river panels, Open-Meteo and the Environment Agency. A few pages have a video: nothing loads from YouTube until you press play; then the video plays from YouTube (Google) in its privacy-enhanced mode, and YouTube may store information on your device under Google’s own privacy policy. Links out to other sites, such as ticket sellers, are covered by those sites’ own policies.
If we ever add analytics that use cookies, this page will say so first, and you will be able to switch them off.
Your rights
You can ask to see what we hold about you, to have it corrected, or to have it deleted, and you can object to our using it. Email corrections@gateshead.info or use the corrections form, and we will reply within a month. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.