Privacy Policy

Last updated: 31 July 2026

This policy explains what happens to information when you visit thesidedoor.co.uk, and the honest headline is that very little happens at all. The site is a static publication about advertising inventory: it is not an ad network, not a gambling or adult operator, and not a service you can hold an account with. It runs one measurement tool, Google Analytics 4, and nothing else: no advertising script, no social widget, no comment system and no newsletter, so there is no account data, no contact database and no behavioural profile associated with you here. What follows sets out the small amount of processing that does occur, the lawful basis for it, how long anything is kept and what rights you can exercise, under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and under Regulation (EU) 2016/679 for visitors in the EEA.

Who is responsible

The controller is the operator of thesidedoor.co.uk, an independent publication about adult advertising inventory, contactable at [email protected] for anything in this policy. This site is an informational resource: it does not sell advertising, does not host adult content and does not process transactions of any kind. It is funded by a single affiliate relationship, described in the affiliate disclosure, which is relevant here only because following a sign-up button takes you to a third party with its own privacy practices. This version takes effect on 31 July 2026 and replaces any earlier version.

What we collect directly from you

Nothing, unless you email us. There is no form on this site, no registration, no login and no subscription box, so there is no moment at which you can hand over data through the site itself. If you write to one of the addresses on the contact page, we necessarily process your email address, your name if you give it, and whatever you put in the message, for the sole purpose of answering you. We do not add correspondents to a mailing list, and we do not use an address supplied for a correction to send anything other than a reply about that correction.

What is collected automatically

Standard web-server logs, kept by the hosting provider rather than assembled by us, and used for security and reliability rather than for analysis of individuals. A typical log line contains the following, and each entry is there for a technical reason:

• IP address. Required to deliver a response to your request at all, and used to identify abusive traffic patterns such as automated scraping or denial-of-service attempts.
• Requested URL and timestamp. Used to diagnose broken links and server errors, and to confirm whether a page was served correctly during an incident.
• User agent string. Identifies browser and operating system family, which is how rendering faults on a specific browser get found and fixed.
• Referrer, where the browser sends one. Indicates whether a visit arrived from a search engine or another site, at aggregate level.
• Response code and bytes served. Operational data used to monitor errors and bandwidth.

These logs are not combined with any other source, are not used to build a profile, and are not shared for marketing.

Analytics

The site runs Google Analytics 4 under property G-J5475ML98C, and that is the only measurement tool installed. It records page views, session duration, referring source, device and browser family, and an approximate location derived from your IP address; Google states that IP addresses are not logged or stored in Analytics 4. We use it for one purpose, which is to see which pages are read and which are ignored, so that research time goes where it is useful. We do not run Meta Pixel, heatmapping, session recording, A/B testing or any advertising tag, and we do not use Analytics data for remarketing or advertising personalisation. The two cookies this creates are named and explained in the cookie policy, and you can switch measurement off entirely with Google’s opt-out add-on or any blocker that filters googletagmanager.com.

Cookies

Two first-party cookies are set, both by Google Analytics 4, and both are named with their purpose and lifetime in the cookie policy. Third-party cookies can additionally reach you after you leave the site by following a sign-up button, at which point the destination platform applies its own rules. That page also explains how to inspect what is on your device and how to block measurement entirely.

Lawful bases

Server logs are processed on the basis of legitimate interests under Article 6(1)(f): the interest is keeping the site available and defending it against attack, the processing is limited to technical data, and it has minimal privacy impact because the logs are never used to single anyone out. Correspondence is processed on the basis of legitimate interests as well, namely answering a message you chose to send, and in some cases on the basis of legal obligation under Article 6(1)(c) where a record must be retained. Analytics cookies are non-essential, and where consent is required for them under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations you may withhold it by blocking the cookies or using the opt-out described above; we treat the resulting analytics processing as resting on legitimate interests in understanding which pages are read, limited to aggregate reporting. None of the processing described here involves special category data.

Sharing

We do not sell data, do not share it with advertising networks, and do not pass anything to the platforms discussed on the site. Three categories of third party are involved: Google LLC, as the provider of Analytics 4, which processes the measurement data described above; the hosting provider, which necessarily processes server logs as part of delivering the site; and the email provider that carries any correspondence with us. Outbound sign-up links are a different matter and worth stating plainly: when you follow one, you are visiting AdsCompass, and the referral parameters in the URL identify this site as the source of the visit. Those parameters describe where the click came from, not who you are.

International transfers

Google Analytics involves processing by Google LLC in the United States, and hosting and email infrastructure may also process data outside the United Kingdom. Where that happens, the transfer relies on the safeguards recognised under UK data protection law, such as adequacy regulations or the International Data Transfer Agreement, and the same technical data limits apply wherever the processing happens. Following an outbound link takes you to a platform that makes its own transfer arrangements, and its policy rather than this one governs from that point.

Retention

Analytics event data is retained on the shortest retention setting the product offers and then deleted by Google; aggregate reports built from it are not personal data. Server logs are retained for a short operational period, typically measured in weeks rather than years, and are then deleted or aggregated beyond identification by the hosting provider. Email correspondence is kept while a matter is open and for a reasonable period afterwards, so that a correction can be traced back to the message that prompted it, and is then deleted. Nothing on this site produces a long-lived record about a visitor, because nothing on this site creates a visitor record in the first place.

Your rights

• Access. You may ask what personal data we hold about you. In practice the honest answer is usually none, unless you have written to us, in which case it is your correspondence.
• Rectification. If something we hold about you is inaccurate, you can require it to be corrected.
• Erasure. You can ask us to delete correspondence, subject to any obligation to retain it.
• Restriction and objection. You can object to processing based on legitimate interests, and we will stop unless a compelling ground applies.
• Portability. Where the right applies, we will provide your correspondence in a common machine-readable format.
• Complaint. You may complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which supervises data protection in the United Kingdom, or to your local supervisory authority in the EEA.

Requests go to [email protected] and are answered within one month, which is the statutory deadline rather than an internal target. We may ask you to confirm the email address a request relates to, since that is normally the only identifier we hold.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS, so traffic between your browser and the server is encrypted in transit. Because it is a static publication with no database, no login and no user-generated content, the categories of breach that affect most sites, such as credential theft or database exfiltration, do not have an equivalent here: there is no store of personal data to lose. Access to hosting and email accounts is protected by strong authentication.

Age

This site is intended for advertising professionals aged 18 or over and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly process data relating to anyone under 18, and we do not carry content that is age-restricted in itself, since the subject is the buying and selling of advertising rather than the content it appears beside. The related limits on use are set out in the terms and conditions.

Changes

If the site ever adds a form, an analytics tool or any other processing, this page will be updated before that change goes live, and the date at the top will move to reflect it. We do not make silent changes to this document. Questions about anything here go to [email protected], and general enquiries to contact.

For the rest of the site: the comparison those rules apply to is the Adult Traffic page, who publishes this and why is on the about page, the background of the person writing it is on the author page. Beyond that, the sourcing method behind every figure is in how we check, the standards each page is written to are in the editorial policy, what can and cannot be bought is in the advertising policy.