Privacy Policy

We’ve written this in plain English rather than legalese — you’ve got enough to wade through without adding impenetrable small print to the pile. If anything’s unclear, get in touch. It won’t cost you many spoons.

Who we are

Burntwood Spoonies Connect is a peer support community for people living with chronic illness and disability, and their carers, in Burntwood, Lichfield and the surrounding Staffordshire area. This website is run by the group under the Wheely Happy Days brand.

What we collect

This site uses GoatCounter, a privacy-friendly, self-hosted analytics tool, to understand how people use the site — which pages get visited, roughly where visitors are coming from, and general browser and device information. GoatCounter doesn’t use cookies or any other tracking storage in your browser, doesn’t collect names, email addresses, or anything that identifies you personally, and doesn’t store your full IP address.

Fonts on this site are loaded from Google Fonts, which means visiting this site sends your IP address to Google as part of loading those fonts. That’s the only third-party service this site uses.

Apart from the suggest-a-service form described below, that’s genuinely it. No advertising cookies, no Facebook pixel, no Google Analytics, no data sold or shared with anyone else.

How to opt out

Because GoatCounter doesn’t use cookies or tracking storage, there’s no consent banner and nothing to opt out of on this site directly — the only way your visit is counted is anonymously and in aggregate, never tied to you.

The “suggest a service” form

The Directory page has a form for suggesting a service we should list. If you use it, we collect the name, email address and message you type in.

It’s emailed to info@burntwoodspoonies.uk, and we use it only to look into the service and, if needed, to reply to you. A copy is also kept on the website’s server, run by Aardvark Web, who built this site, in case the email doesn’t arrive. That copy is deleted automatically after 30 days. If the email failed to send, the copy is kept longer, until we’ve dealt with it.

To help stop spam, the server also records the internet address (IP address) your form came from and the type of browser you used. These are kept with the copy and deleted with it.

The form also uses Cloudflare Turnstile to check that a person, not a computer program, is sending it. Usually you won’t see it; now and then it asks you to tick a box. To do this, Cloudflare looks at information about your browser and device, and your IP address. It doesn’t set advertising cookies, and Cloudflare uses the information only to tell people from programs and to keep its service secure.

We don’t share what you send with anyone else, we don’t sell it and we don’t use it for advertising. To have your suggestion removed, email info@burntwoodspoonies.uk.

Facebook groups

Our community lives mainly in private Facebook groups, which are run under Meta’s own terms and privacy policy — not this website’s. Anything you share there is governed by Facebook’s rules, not ours, and we have no control over how Meta handles data on its platform. This isn’t legal advice, just a heads-up about where our responsibility for your data ends and Meta’s begins.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you can ask what data we hold, request it be deleted, or raise a concern about how it’s handled. Because we don’t collect anything that identifies you personally through this site, there’s rarely much to ask about — but you’re welcome to get in touch regardless.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data can go to info@burntwoodspoonies.uk. The site’s data controller is Paul Taylor, contactable via that address. We don’t publish a separate postal address or phone number.

Changes

If how we handle your data changes in any meaningful way, we’ll update this page and the date below.

Last updated: 5 October 2026