Privacy policy

The data controller for wheretoswim.eu is Sevenoways Innovations Limited. For anything on this page, write to hello@wheretoswim.eu.

Browsing spot pages, maps, warnings and collections requires no account, no sign-up and no personal information. Almost everyone who uses this site gives us nothing at all, and that is the intended way to use it.

Rybbit is our primary analytics. It is self-hosted on infrastructure we control, sets no cookies and records no personal identifiers, so it needs no consent and is unaffected by the consent dialog. It tells us how many people viewed a page, not who they were.

Google Analytics 4 runs alongside it with Consent Mode v2 defaulting to denied. Until you accept, it sets no analytics cookies and reports modelled rather than observed figures. That costs us accuracy, and it is the correct way round: an analytics cookie needs consent before it is set, not after.

We may show advertising supplied by Google AdSense. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this and other websites.

Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads based on your visits to this site and other sites. You can opt out of personalised advertising at Google Ads Settings, or opt out of third-party vendors’ use of cookies at aboutads.info.

If you are in the UK or the EEA, you will be asked for consent before any advertising or measurement cookie is set, and you can change that decision at any time from the privacy and cookie settings link in the footer.

Advertising never influences the water-quality information on this site. A business can be featured near a spot; a spot is never presented as safe because somebody paid for it.

If you ask to be emailed when a spot’s status changes, we store your email address and which spot you chose. Nothing else — no name, and not your IP address.

We confirm by email first, so an address cannot be signed up by someone else, and that confirmation is also our record that you consented. The lawful basis is your consent, and you can withdraw it at any time.

Every alert carries a one-click unsubscribe link. Using it deletes the record immediately; there is no dormant copy and no suppression list. One honest caveat: encrypted nightly database backups are retained for a few months, so an unsubscribed address persists in those until they age out. Unconfirmed sign-ups are deleted automatically after seven days.

Our web server keeps standard access logs — IP address, time, the page requested, browser user-agent — which are used to keep the site running and to spot abuse. They rotate automatically and are not used to build any profile of you.

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it with anyone for their own marketing. Data is processed by the services that make the site work: our hosting provider, our email provider for alerts, Google for analytics and advertising where you have consented, and our backup provider (data encrypted before it leaves our server).

The site, its database and its backups are hosted in the European Union. Where a provider such as Google processes data outside the EEA, it does so under the safeguards those services publish.

You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, object to processing, or withdraw consent. Write to hello@wheretoswim.eu. In practice, for almost everyone, the answer is that we hold nothing — and if you have an alert set up, the unsubscribe link in any of our emails deletes it faster than we could.

If you think we have handled your data badly you can complain to your national data protection authority — the Data Protection Commission in Ireland, or the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK.

For what this site can and cannot tell you about water quality, see how we know and the terms of use.