Privacy & Cookie Policy

1. Data Protection Compliance
Little Toller Books Ltd (“we”, “us”, Our) acts as the Data Controller under the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018. Our website address is: https://www.littletoller.co.uk. We are committed to protecting your privacy; we do not sell, rent, or share customer personal details with third parties.

2. Comments & User Interaction (The Clearing & Site Features)
When visitors leave comments on our site or submit pieces to The Clearing, we collect the data shown in the comments form, as well as the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to assist in automated spam detection.

• Gravatar Service: An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service Privacy Policy is available at https://automattic.com/privacy/. Once your comment is approved, your profile picture becomes visible to the public in the context of your comment.
• Media Uploads: If you upload images to our website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can potentially download and extract any location data from images hosted on the site.

3. Payment & Transaction Security
All internet transactions are fully secured. Electronic payments are securely managed and encrypted via Xero or PayPal. Little Toller Books does not store, host, or keep any credit card, debit card, or banking details on our website servers or in our offices.

4. Customer Accounts & Subscriptions
If you choose to create a customer account or purchase a Patron Saint, Friends & Family, or Nature Library Collector subscription, your name, contact details, and transaction history are stored securely in your user profile on our password-protected cloud database.

• Registered users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except their username). Website administrators can also view and edit that profile information.
• If you request a password reset, your IP address will be securely included in the reset email.
• To comply with UK company law, financial invoices are retained for 7 years both digitally and on paper in our alarmed offices.

5. How Long We Retain Data

• If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely so we can recognise and approve follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
• Standard business transactions and profile information are kept according to the structural terms outlined in Section 4.

6. Newsletters & Embedded Third-Party Content
We send occasional emails regarding forthcoming publications, events, and literary essays from The Clearing via Mailchimp. You will only be added to this list via an explicit, active opt-in checkbox at checkout.

• Embedded Content: Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, or articles). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website directly. These third-party websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional tracking, and monitor your interaction with that content, especially if you have an active account with them.

7. Website Cookies
Our website uses cookies to manage your shopping cart and remember your display choices:

• Comment Cookies: If you leave a comment on our site, you may opt in to saving your name, email address, and website in cookies for your convenience. These last for one year.
• Login & Session Cookies: If you visit our login page, we set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies; this contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser. When you log in, we set cookies to save your login info (lasting 2 days) and screen display choices (lasting 1 year). Selecting “Remember Me” keeps your login active for two weeks. Logging out clears these cookies.
• Editor Cookies: If you edit or publish an article or journal post, an additional cookie indicating the post ID is saved in your browser and expires after 1 day.
• Analytics Tracking: Non-essential tracking cookies will only load once you click “Accept” on our website cookie banner.

8. Your Rights Over Your Data
If you have an account on this site or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold. This does not include any data we are legally obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security backup purposes. Contact us at books@littletoller.co.uk to process these requests.