Privacy Policy
What this page is
PLAY AT HOME FEST is free to read and paid for by advertising, which means information about your visit passes through more hands than we would like. This page says whose hands, what they receive, and how you stop most of it. We have tried to write it in plain language rather than in the dialect these documents usually arrive in.
You do not have to give us anything to read a story. There is no account to open, no registration wall, and no email address demanded before a breaking update. Most of what is collected is not a file about you as a person. It is a record of requests and pages, a distinction that matters less to advertising technology than it should.
What we collect
Log data arrives whether anyone asks for it or not. Our host and delivery network record the IP address making a request, the browser it reports, the page wanted, the page you came from, and the time. That is simply how a web server works, and it is how we tell a genuine traffic surge on a big story from an automated script hammering the site.
On top of that sit analytics, an email address if you subscribe to a newsletter, a name and message if you write to us, and whatever you choose to include. Advertising is the noisy part. The ad server and the exchanges bidding on our inventory set their own identifiers, cap how often a given advertisement reaches you, and, where you have consented, select advertisements from a profile built elsewhere across other sites. We do not run device fingerprinting and we do not ask for precise location.
Why we process it, and on what basis
The purposes are short to list. Serve the site and keep it standing when a major story multiplies our traffic in minutes. Count readers, because knowing which stories are read and finished is how we decide what to cover more. Send newsletters people asked for. Moderate any reader messages, catch abuse and invalid ad traffic, sell and serve advertising, and keep what the law requires us to keep.
Under the GDPR and its UK equivalent, consent covers analytics, advertising, and newsletters, and withdrawing it costs you no articles. Legitimate interest covers server logs, security, and aggregate measurement, because a site that cannot see its own traffic cannot stay up. Legal obligation covers the narrow remainder. Nothing here feeds an automated decision about a person, because we do not make decisions about people. We publish stories.
Who else receives it, and where it goes
By category, because the specific companies change and a list frozen in prose goes stale within a quarter: our host and delivery network, our analytics provider, the ad server and the programmatic exchanges with their downstream partners, the newsletter service, and, rarely, an adviser or an authority acting on a valid legal order.
Real-time bidding fires a request at many companies at once, and we will not pretend we can name every one from memory. The consent manager holds the list that is actually current. Your email address is not sold, swapped, or rented, and our sources are not identified to anyone. The rules that keep advertisers away from the desk are on our advertise page.
Those providers run servers in several countries, so your data is processed outside the country you are sitting in. Processors are bound in writing to use it only for what we asked. Where data covered by European or UK law moves somewhere without an adequacy finding, the transfer runs on standard contractual clauses or another approved mechanism. No legal instrument makes a foreign server local, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Cookies, and the banner
Strictly necessary cookies keep the site working and remember your consent choice. Analytics, preferences, and advertising wait for consent where the law requires it, and refusing them breaks nothing you came here to read. The categories, who sets them, how long they last, and how to change your answer are set out at length in our cookie policy. If you clicked through the banner quickly, the consent manager reopens from the footer link on every page, and your new answer replaces the old one.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct, delete, or restrict it, object to processing we run on legitimate interest, withdraw any consent, and take what you gave us in a portable form. You can complain to your data protection authority without coming to us first. Write to support@playathomefest.com with PRIVACY at the front of the subject line, and we answer within a month.
One limit, plainly stated. Where a request is really an attempt to erase or rewrite published journalism, data protection law in most places carves out journalism, and we treat the matter as a question of accuracy instead. If a story is wrong about you, that is a correction, and our corrections policy says what happens next.
California readers
If you are in California you can know what we collect and disclose, have it corrected or deleted, opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, limit the use of sensitive personal information, and be treated no worse for exercising any of it. We take no money for handing over anyone’s personal information, but serving behaviourally targeted advertising still counts as sharing under the statute, so we treat it that way rather than argue about wording. Use the Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information control in our consent manager, or write with PRIVACY in the subject. We also honour the Global Privacy Control signal.
How long things are kept, and children
Delivery and server logs are held for about thirty days, then discarded or reduced to counts with no identifier attached. Event-level analytics is capped in the provider’s configuration. Aggregate reports that say a story was read a certain number of times are kept indefinitely, because they contain nothing about anybody. A newsletter address stays until you unsubscribe, after which a minimal suppression record survives so we do not mail you again by accident.
This is a general news site for adults. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under thirteen. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child has given us something, write with PRIVACY in the subject and we will delete it and confirm.
Changes, and where to write
When this policy changes in a way that affects you, the date below moves, a short note sits at the top of the page for a while saying what shifted, and where the law requires fresh consent we ask again rather than treating an old click as permanent. The rules governing your use of the site are separate and live in our terms of service. Everything here routes to support@playathomefest.com, and other ways to reach us are on our contact page.
Last updated: August 2026
