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Privacy policy

By Chris and Steph

This site collects very little. It sets no cookies of its own for visitors, has no accounts, no newsletter and no contact form. The one thing it records in any detail is a click on a referral button, and that record contains no IP address and no identifier.

Bracken, a black and white border collie, and Roxy, a tan mixed breed, sitting side by side and looking at the camera

Who we are

Honest Dog Food (https://honestdogfood.co.uk) is an independent publication run by Chris and Steph, who are the data controllers for the small amount of personal data described here. The site is not part of Bella & Duke or any other brand. For anything in this policy, email hello@honestdogfood.co.uk. The contact page has more on how we handle email.

What we collect

Vercel Analytics

The site is hosted on Vercel and uses Vercel Analytics, which is designed to be privacy-friendly: it sets no cookies and produces aggregate page-view and referrer counts.

Google Analytics 4 (only if switched on)

The site loads Google Analytics only when a measurement ID has been configured. When it does, it runs with IP anonymisation on and with Google signals and advertising personalisation off, so it is used for aggregate statistics and never for advertising. It records events such as a referral click, a code copy or a calculator result, with the page path, the button location and, for calculators, the tool name and the result figures.

Server logs

Requests to the site pass through Vercel’s servers, which keep standard technical logs for security and reliability under Vercel’s own retention rules. We do not combine them with anything below.

Email you send us

If you email us, your message sits in an ordinary mailbox until it has been dealt with, then is deleted unless it concerns a correction we may need to refer back to.

The referral click log

The site earns money in one way: Bella & Duke account credit when someone signs up with our friend code and their first box is delivered. To see which pages are useful enough that people go on to sign up, we keep a first-party record when someone clicks a referral button or copies the referral code. Each record contains:

  • The page you were on, its title, and which button or box you used.
  • The page you first landed on, the site that referred you (if your browser sends one), and any campaign parameters in the address.
  • Coarse session details for the current tab: how many pages you had viewed, how long you had been on the page and on the site, and how far down the page you had scrolled.
  • Your window size, your browser’s user-agent string, and the device type, browser and operating system worked out from it.
  • Country, region and city, as worked out by Vercel from your IP address at the moment of the request. The IP address itself is not passed to us or stored.

The session details come from your browser’s sessionStorage, which holds a small note of your landing page, referrer, campaign parameters, start time and page count for the current tab only. It contains no identifier and your browser clears it when the tab is closed.

Records are stored in a database and viewed only by the site owner, in a private dashboard. Traffic that the user-agent string identifies as automated is stored but flagged as a bot, so it can be left out of the figures.

Page-view count. We also count page views in the same cookieless way, so we can see which pages people read. Each record holds the page address, whether it was the first page of the visit, the referring site’s domain (for that first page only), the device type (mobile, tablet or desktop) and the country. It holds no IP address, sets no cookie and carries no identifier, so views cannot be linked to each other or to you.

What we do not collect

  • No accounts, logins or profiles for visitors.
  • No newsletter or mailing list, and no visitor email addresses.
  • No advertising, retargeting or social media pixels of any kind.
  • No contact form, so nothing you write is stored on our servers.
  • Nothing you enter into the calculators is sent to us; they run in your browser.
  • Fonts are served from our own domain, so no request goes to a font provider.

We rely on legitimate interests under UK GDPR: measuring how the site is used, understanding which pages lead people to sign up so the site can be maintained, and keeping it secure. We have weighed that against your rights and kept the data to a minimum: aggregate analytics, and a click record with no IP address, cookie or identifier. If you would rather not appear in the click log at all, go to bellaandduke.com directly instead of using our button. The how we make money page explains what that means for the sign-up bonus.

Retention

  • Click log: kept while the site takes part in Bella & Duke’s referral scheme, because it is the only record of how the site’s single income source performs. We review it each year and delete anything no longer needed.
  • Analytics: held by Vercel and, if switched on, Google under their standard retention settings.
  • Server logs: held by Vercel under its own retention rules.
  • Email you send: deleted once dealt with, as described above.

Third parties

  • Vercel: hosts the site, runs its analytics, keeps server logs and works out the country, region and city in the click log from your IP address.
  • Neon: the database provider that stores the click log.
  • Google Analytics: only if switched on, as described above.
  • Bella & Duke: when you click through to Bella & Duke you leave this site, and Bella & Duke’s own privacy notice applies to anything you do there. Our referral link lets Bella & Duke attribute a sign-up to our account; it carries nothing about you, and we never add tracking parameters to it.

We do not sell or share data with anyone else.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you can ask what data we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected or erased, and object to processing based on legitimate interests. Because the click log contains no identifier, we usually cannot pick out your records from anyone else’s, and we will explain that honestly if you ask. Where we can identify data as yours, such as an email you sent, we will act on the request. Email hello@honestdogfood.co.uk. If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

Cookies and browser storage

The public site sets no cookies of its own. The one exception does not affect visitors: when the site owner signs in to the private admin area, a session cookie is set in that browser so the admin pages recognise it. It is never set for anyone browsing the public pages.

If Google Analytics is switched on, it sets its own cookies to tell one browser’s visits from another’s. Those are set by Google’s script; we configure it with IP anonymisation on and advertising features off.

The site does use sessionStorage, which is not a cookie and is never sent to a server on its own. It holds the small note about the current tab’s visit described above, with no identifier, and the browser discards it when the tab closes. If your browser blocks storage, the site works the same and simply records less.

Changes to this policy

If we add a service or change what is collected, this page will be updated and the date below will move. Material changes will also be noted in the news section. This policy was last updated on .

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