Privacy & Cookies Policy

Who we are

LoveLincoln is a hyperlocal news and community platform for the city of Lincoln and the surrounding region. Operated by LoveLincoln, we are the “data controller” for the personal information described in this policy. You can reach us about anything here at privacy@lovelincoln.co.uk. We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (registration no. [to be added on registration]).

What we collect

• Account: your name and email, and — if you use LinkedIn sign-in — the basic profile LinkedIn shares; plus anything you choose to add, such as your industry and profile details.
• Activity: the stories you heart or star, shout-outs you post, and photos you submit.
• Newsletter: your email address.
• News tips and submissions: your name and email, and any organisation, phone number or content you choose to send us.
• Advertising, jobs, events and sponsorship: your business and contact details and billing information. Card payments are handled entirely by Stripe — we never see or store your card number.
• Automatically, for any visitor: basic analytics (pages viewed, the page you arrived from, and a device type), measured two ways — our own counting, linked to a one-way fingerprint derived from your IP address and browser, and Google Analytics (see the cookies section below). We do not store your raw IP address and never use analytics to identify you personally.

Why we use it, and our legal basis

• To run your account and provide what you have asked for — performance of a contract.
• To send our newsletter — your consent (you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in every email).
• To keep the site secure, understand what is read, and improve it — our legitimate interests.
• To take payment and meet our legal and accounting duties — contract and legal obligation.

Who we share it with

We do not sell your data. We rely on a small number of trusted suppliers to run the site:

• Clerk — sign-in and accounts (based in the US, under standard data-protection contract terms).
• Stripe — payments. Resend — our emails. Railway — hosting and database (in the EU). Cloudflare — content delivery and file storage.
• Elfsight — the Instagram feed on our home page, which only loads if you agree to it.
• Google — Google Analytics, processing visit statistics on our behalf. We have its advertising and data-sharing features switched off.
• We use AI tools (Anthropic) to help our editors triage incoming news. We do not use your personal data to train AI models.

How long we keep it

Account information for as long as your account is open, and a short period afterwards if you close it. Analytics for up to 26 months, then deleted. Newsletter details until you unsubscribe. We keep limited records longer where the law requires, such as payment records.

Cookies and similar storage

We keep these to a minimum:

• Essential — sign-in and security (Clerk). Needed for the site to work.
• Functional — your light/dark theme choice and a couple of “dismissed this” flags, set only when you act.
• Analytics — Google Analytics cookies (named _ga and _ga_*) that give your browser a random ID so we can count visits and see which pages are read. We use this purely as statistics to improve the site — never for advertising, and Google’s advertising features are switched off. UK law allows these without a consent pop-up because they are statistics-only; you can switch them off below at any time.
• Instagram feed — our home-page feed (Elfsight) sets a cookie and contacts Instagram, and only loads if you choose to show it.

Your rights

You can ask us to show you, correct or delete your data, to restrict or object to how we use it, or to provide it in a portable form, and you can withdraw consent at any time. Deleting your account removes your profile, your sign-in identity and the content tied to it (we keep limited moderation and legal records where we must). Email privacy@lovelincoln.co.uk. You can also complain to the ICO at ico.org.uk, though we would appreciate the chance to put things right first.