Cookies & Privacy Policy
Last updated: 23 October 2026
Who we are
This site is Glasgow News (www.glasgownews.org.uk), an independent guide to Glasgow. We decide how your personal data is used, so under UK data protection law we’re the “controller”. To contact us about your data, use our contact form.
What we collect and why
Contact and advertise forms
If you use the contact form or the advertise form, we collect your first and last name, email address, subject and message. The form also records which page you sent it from.
We use this only to answer you, to fix a mistake you’ve told us about, or to reply to a sponsored feature enquiry. Our legal reason is that it’s in our legitimate interests to answer people who write to us. We keep your message only as long as needed to answer you and deal with anything that follows. We don’t add you to a mailing list.
The forms use Google reCAPTCHA to stop spam. It checks how the form is used, and Google gets some data from your browser when it does. Google’s privacy policy covers that.
Analytics
We use Google Analytics 4, set up through the Google Site Kit and Rank Math plugins, to see how many people visit and which pages they read. This helps us decide which guides to check and improve.
We only use analytics cookies with your consent. For visitors in the UK and the European Economic Area, Google’s consent mode starts with analytics storage denied. No analytics cookies are set until you press Accept in the cookie banner. Until then, Google may still get a basic, cookie-free signal that a page was viewed, which it uses to estimate visitor numbers. If you press Reject, it stays off, and any analytics cookies already set are deleted. Your choice is kept for up to 180 days in a small cookie called gn_consent (some browsers, such as Safari, keep it for 7 days, so you may be asked again). To change your mind at any time, use this button:
If you accept, Google Analytics collects information such as the pages you view, your approximate location, your device and browser type, and your IP address. Google may process this in other countries. You can read how Google handles it in its privacy policy, and you can block Google Analytics with the browser add-on Google provides.
Security
We use Wordfence to protect the site. It may set cookies and log IP addresses to spot and block attacks and bad bots. This is needed to keep the site safe and working, and it’s in our legitimate interests. See the Wordfence privacy policy. Security logs are kept only as long as needed to spot and block attacks.
Other companies’ servers
When a page loads, your browser may fetch fonts from Google Fonts and some photos from Unsplash and from the websites of the places we write about. That means those companies can see your IP address. We don’t send them anything else.
Affiliate links and advertising
Some pages have affiliate links in boxes labelled “Ad”. If you click one, you go to Awin, the affiliate network we use, and then on to the company’s site. Awin sets its own cookies so it can track the sale and pay us a commission. We aren’t told who you are. Read Awin’s privacy policy to see what it does with your data. More is on our affiliate disclosure page.
We don’t run display advertising on this site.
Who we share data with
We don’t sell your data. We use the companies named above to run the site: Google, Wordfence and our hosting provider. If you click an affiliate link, Awin and the company you go to are also involved, as set out above.
How long we keep data
- Messages from the forms: only as long as needed to answer you.
- Security logs: only as long as needed to spot and block attacks.
- Analytics data: held by Google under the settings of our Analytics account.
- Data held by Awin or the companies you buy from: set by them. See their policies.
Your rights
Under UK GDPR you can ask to see the personal data we hold about you, have it corrected or deleted, limit or object to how we use it, and take back consent you gave. To do any of these, use our contact form.
If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk. We’d rather you spoke to us first, but you don’t have to.
Changes to this policy
If we change how we use data, we’ll update this page and the date at the top.
