Our privacy notice

The data we collect on this site

The Non-GamStop Beat is an information site with no user accounts, no comments, no forums and no sign-up forms. There is nothing to buy, nothing to subscribe to, and no reason to hand over personal data in order to read the reporting. What that means for a visiting reader is that the site collects only the technical information a web server necessarily processes in order to deliver a page.

That includes the IP address of the requesting device, the browser type, the operating system, the referring page and the URLs of the pages visited. The technical logs are kept for as long as they are useful for security and diagnostic purposes and are deleted or aggregated beyond identifiability after that.

If you write to the editor at [email protected], we will process the email you send us in order to respond to it. That processing is on the lawful basis of legitimate interest, specifically the site's interest in operating an editorial correspondence pathway and your interest in receiving a reply.

If you do not write to us we hold no correspondence data about you at all. The site does not run a newsletter, does not sell contact lists and does not enrich technical logs with any other source of personal information.

Cookies and analytics, on the record

The site uses only technical cookies that are strictly necessary to deliver the pages you request. There are no marketing cookies, no advertising trackers, no third-party pixels and no cross-site fingerprinting scripts on this site. Where the site uses aggregate analytics to understand which articles are being read, the analytics run in a privacy-preserving configuration, without third-party cookies, without individualised user profiles and without any behavioural retargeting downstream.

The purpose of that analytics is editorial planning, not audience monetisation, and the data is not shared with any third party for commercial reasons.

If you would rather block analytics of any kind, every mainstream browser provides a Do Not Track signal, a private browsing mode, and a range of extensions that block scripts at the network layer. Any of these mechanisms is respected by this site to the extent that the analytics provider offers a matching honour setting, and none of them will affect the reader's ability to access the reporting. There are no paywalls on this site, no compulsory registrations and no articles gated behind a cookie acceptance banner.

How long we hold your data

Technical server logs are retained for up to twelve months for security and diagnostic purposes, after which they are either deleted or aggregated to a level at which no individual reader can be identified. Editorial correspondence is retained for the working life of the article that the correspondence concerns, and for a further three years after that, in order to support any subsequent correction request or public interest defence should the piece be challenged later.

Where the correspondence concerns a source, retention follows the confidentiality commitment made to the source at the point of contact rather than a fixed timetable.

Nothing on the site is retained indefinitely without a specific editorial reason. Where a reader asks for their correspondence to be deleted, and where no legal or public interest reason exists to retain it, the deletion is performed within thirty days of the request. Requests can be made through the editor's address, and the response confirming deletion is issued by the same route.

Your data rights under UK GDPR and the DPA 2018

The UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018 give you a set of rights in respect of the personal data a site controller holds about you. These include the right to be informed, the right of access, the right to rectification, the right to erasure, the right to restrict processing, the right to data portability, the right to object and rights in relation to automated decision-making and profiling.

This site does not carry out any automated decision-making and does not profile readers, so those last two rights are not engaged in practice, but the other rights are exercised in the ordinary way.

To exercise any of those rights, please write to the editor at [email protected]. Requests are responded to within thirty days as the statute requires. Where a request cannot be granted in full, the response explains why and cites the specific exemption that applies. Where a request is granted, it is granted without a fee, in line with the default statutory position.

Getting in touch, and taking a concern to the ICO

The editor's inbox at [email protected] is the contact point for privacy queries as well as for editorial correspondence. Any request under the rights described above should be sent to that address and will be handled by the editor. Where a reader considers that a data protection right has not been respected, and where the response from the site has not resolved the concern, the reader has the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, which is the UK's independent supervisory authority for data protection.

The Information Commissioner's Office can be reached through its website at ico.org.uk or through its helpline. The site strongly prefers to resolve any concerns directly through the editorial correspondence route in the first instance, both because the response can usually be quicker and because a direct conversation is often more productive than a formal complaint, but the ICO route is always available and no reader is required to exhaust the direct route before using it.

This privacy notice will be updated where the underlying practice changes, and the last-updated date is stated in the footer of the page.