Privacy
What we hold, why we hold it, and how to get rid of it.
The short version
Reading this site is anonymous unless you choose otherwise. Nothing is loaded from anyone else and nothing is stored on your device until you have agreed to it, and if you decline there is no record that you visited. If you subscribe to the calendar we hold your email address and the traditions and regions you asked for, because we cannot send you a calendar without them. That is all of it.
Reading the site
We ask once whether we may count your visit with Google Analytics. Until you answer, and for as long as your answer is no, nothing is loaded from anyone else and no cookie is set. There is no tag manager, no advertising pixel and no embedded video or social widget either way, and the typefaces are served from this domain rather than from a font service. We do not keep web server access logs, so we hold no record of your IP address from browsing.
If you agree, Google receives the address of each page you open here with your approximate location, browser and device, and sets two cookies to tell one browser from another. Google is a processor for this and the lawful basis is your consent, which you can withdraw at any time on the cookies page; withdrawing removes those cookies from your browser. We have turned off the settings that would let Google use any of it for advertising or link it to your activity on other sites, and we do not ask it for demographics. Data is processed on Google’s servers, which are outside the UK, under the transfer terms in its data processing agreement.
Asking rather than assuming is the deliberate part. What a person reads about religion is sensitive, and a visitor who would rather not be counted should be able to read the whole site without being counted — so declining withholds nothing and changes nothing about how the site behaves.
If you subscribe
We store one record per address, containing:
- your email address;
- the traditions and regions you chose;
- a random token, which is how the confirmation and unsubscribe links work;
- whether you have confirmed, and when;
- whether mail to you has bounced or been reported as spam, so we stop sending;
- a second random token that forms your calendar link, and a count of how many times that link has been fetched with the time of the last one.
The fetch count exists so we can see a personal link being used by an office rather than a person. It is a number and a timestamp against your subscription. We do not record the address you connected from, so it cannot tell us where you were.
We use double opt-in. Subscribing stores an unconfirmed record and sends one message asking you to confirm. Nothing else is ever sent to an address that has not confirmed, so the form cannot be used to mail somebody who did not ask.
The lawful basis is consent, which you give by following the confirmation link. You can withdraw it at any time using the unsubscribe link in any message we send.
If you write to us
Mail sent to an address at this domain is stored so that we can reply and keep track of the conversation. The raw message is deleted after 90 days; the readable copy is kept while the matter is open. If you send us a correction to a religious date, we may keep a note of the correction itself after deleting the correspondence, because the change to the calendar has to be explicable later.
Where it is held
Everything is stored in Amazon Web Services in Ireland, in the eu-west-1 region. Mail is sent through Amazon Simple Email Service in the same region. Our operational logs are kept for 30 days.
We check the wording on this site against religious bodies’ own published pages, and part of that check uses an external language model. It is given public pages from those bodies and nothing else. Your email address, your preferences and your correspondence are never sent to it.
Who else sees it
We do not sell personal data, share it with advertisers, or pass it to anyone for their own purposes. It reaches Amazon Web Services because they host the service on our behalf, and it reaches nobody else unless the law requires it.
How long we keep it
- An unconfirmed subscription is deleted if it is not confirmed.
- A confirmed subscription is kept until you unsubscribe.
- After you unsubscribe we keep the record briefly so that a later mailing cannot reach you by mistake, then delete it.
- Raw incoming mail is deleted after 90 days.
Your rights
Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018 you may ask for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, object to what we are doing with it, or ask for it in a portable form. Write to privacy@beliefcalendar.app and we will answer within one month.
If you are not satisfied you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk (opens in a new tab), or by telephone on 0303 123 1113.
Changes
If we change this notice we will change the date at the top. If a change affects what we do with an existing subscriber’s data, we will say so by email before it takes effect.
Who we are
Belief Calendar is the data controller for the information described here. Our registered details and our entry on the Information Commissioner’s register are published on this page once registration is complete. Until then, please write to privacy@beliefcalendar.app for anything you would ordinarily address to a registered office.