How we look after your information

• Signing in — you sign in with your Google account. We receive your name and email address, and we keep a record of your sign-in so you stay signed in.
• Membership — your name, email, mobile number, gender, dietary preference and date of birth, the plan you chose, and whether it is paid. If you register a family, we also keep the same details for each person you add, including children. A parent or guardian must give a child's details.
• Messages and requests — what you send through the contact form, sponsorship requests, and our replies.
• What you post — stories and articles you submit, pictures you upload, comments, reactions and favourites.
• Notifications — the alerts shown to you on the site, and whether you have read them.
• Roughly where you are, if you accept cookies in the cookie notice: your browser asks whether it may share your location, and if you allow it we keep only the area (for example the borough), never your exact position. If you don't allow it, we use a rough guess from your internet address instead (country, region and city, which can be wrong). It is used to understand who our community is.

• To run your membership and keep our member list.
• To answer your messages and requests, and to tell you when we reply or when your membership changes.
• To publish what you choose to submit, after our editors have read it.
• To send a birthday greeting. We always show your household a birthday message and email it to you. When you register you choose whether other members also see a birthday page, with the person's first name and the age they are turning, where they can leave wishes: for everyone in your household, for adults only, or for no one. Children's birthdays are shared with other members only if you choose to share everyone's. You can change your choice whenever you update your registration.

The law asks us to have a reason for each use of your information. Ours are:

• Running your membership, answering your messages and keeping our member list: this is needed to provide the membership you asked for (contract).
• Publishing what you submit, and sharing birthdays with other members: you agree to it (consent). For birthdays, you choose when you register, and you can withdraw that at any time by changing your registration or writing to us.
• Keeping the site secure and working: this is in our legitimate interest in running the community safely.

We use a few services to run the site. They process information for us and only for that purpose:

• Google — Sheets and Drive, where our records and pictures are kept; sign-in; and the email we send.
• Vercel — where the website is hosted.
• Upstash — a database for temporary data, such as notifications and login sessions.