Privacy notice
Last updated 3 August 2026
This is the plain-English version, and it’s the only version — we haven’t hidden anything in a longer document somewhere else. It explains what Mini Days Out collects about you, why, how long we keep it, and what you can tell us to do with it.
The short version: you can browse this entire site without giving us anything. You only have an account if you chose to sign in with Google. We don’t sell your data and we never store your raw IP address. We do carry adverts, and you choose whether they’re personalised to you — say no and they’re picked from the page you’re reading instead.
Who we are
Mini Days Out (minidaysout.com) is the data controller for the information described here. You can reach us at [email protected] or through our contact page.
What we collect, why, and for how long
“Lawful basis” is the legal reason UK GDPR requires us to have before we touch your data at all. Here is every one of ours.
| What we collect | Why | Lawful basis | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your name, email address and profile picture, from Google sign-in | To create your account, show you as signed in, and attribute your reviews | Contract — we can't give you an account without it | Until you delete your account |
| Your saved places (your favourites list) | So your list follows you between your phone and your laptop | Contract — it's the feature you asked for | Until you delete it or delete your account |
| Reviews you write: the text, the star rating, your display name, an age band and the month you visited | To publish them so other parents can read them, and to moderate them before they go live | Contract for publishing it; legitimate interests for moderation, so the site stays accurate and lawful | Until you delete it or delete your account. Moderation decisions are kept for 12 months |
| Referral clicks: which listing you clicked, when, the page you came from, your browser's user-agent string, and a salted hash of your IP address | To count outbound clicks, reconcile commission with booking partners, and spot bot traffic | Legitimate interests — we need to know our links work and get paid honestly | 90 days, then automatically purged |
| Page views: which page you opened (a listing, category, town or search page, say), when, the page you came from, your browser's user-agent string, and a salted hash of your IP address | To count how many people read each page, so we can tell a page that's genuinely useful from one nobody opens — and, next to the click count, whether the venues we recommend are ones people actually go on to | Legitimate interests — we can't decide what to write more of without knowing what gets read | 90 days, then automatically purged |
| Your cookie choice | So we honour it, don't ask you again, and can evidence that you were asked | Legal obligation — PECR requires us to keep a record of consent | About six months, then we ask again |
| Messages you send us through the contact form or by email | To answer you, and to fix listing errors you report | Legitimate interests — you wrote to us and would like a reply | Six months, then automatically purged |
| Admin audit logs: who changed or moderated what, and when | So there's a record if a listing or a review decision is ever disputed | Legitimate interests — accountability, and defending ourselves if challenged | 12 months |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we’ve weighed what we get out of it against what you’d reasonably expect, and kept the data as thin as we can. You can object to any of it — see “Your rights” below.
About those page views and referral clicks
We count two things, and we count them separately. Opening a page — a listing, a category, a town, a search — records a view. Tapping a “Book now” link passes through our own /go counter before sending you to the booking partner, and records a click. Between them we can tell which listings are worth writing more about, and commission gets reconciled honestly.
Neither one puts anything on your device or reads anything from it, so neither is waiting on your cookie answer. If you open the same page twice in half an hour we count it once — that check happens on our server precisely so we don’t have to leave a marker in your browser to do it.
We never store your IP address. We take it, add a secret salt, run it through a one-way hash, and store only the result. The hash lets us tell two visits apart without ever being able to work backwards to the address — including if someone stole the database. Both records are deleted automatically after 90 days by a scheduled job, not by anyone remembering to do it.
Children
This site is written for parents and carers, not for children. We deliberately don’t ask for a child’s exact age or the exact date you visited — reviews record only an age band and a month. An exact age, an exact date and a named venue together could identify a specific child in a specific place at a specific time, and that’s not a risk worth taking for slightly tidier data. Please don’t put children’s names or any other identifying details in a review; we’ll remove them if you do.
Who else sees your data
We keep this list short on purpose.
- Google— handles sign-in. When you choose “Sign in with Google”, Google tells us your name, email and profile picture. We never see your password.
- postcodes.io — turns a postcode into a map position when you search near you. We send the postcode or coordinates, nothing that identifies you.
- Google Analytics— counts visits so we know which pages are worth writing more of. If you haven’t turned analytics on, it runs without cookies: we see that a page was viewed, but nothing is stored on your device and you aren’t recognised between visits.
- ipapi.co and Open-Meteo— tell us roughly which town you’re in and what the weather is doing there, so the homepage can show sun or rain and offer indoor ideas on a wet day. It’s town-level at best, we don’t store it, and it never changes your search results unless you click something.
- OpenStreetMap — serves the map tiles. Your browser requests tiles directly, so OpenStreetMap sees your IP address, as it would with any image on any website.
- Affiliate booking partners— when you click through to book, you leave our site and their privacy policy takes over. If you accepted affiliate cookies, they’ll also see that the visit came from us.
- Our hosting and database providers— they store the data on our behalf, under contract, and don’t use it for anything of their own.
We don’t sell your data, and we don’t share it for anyone else’s marketing. Some of these providers operate outside the UK; where they do, transfers are covered by UK adequacy regulations or the International Data Transfer Addendum.
Cookies
We set as few as we can get away with, and the non-essential ones only fire after you’ve said yes. Full list and a switch to change your mind on the cookie policy page.
Your rights
Under UK GDPR you can ask us to:
- Show you what we hold — a copy of your data, in a portable format, free of charge.
- Correct itif something’s wrong.
- Delete it. Deleting your account removes your profile, your saved list and your reviews.
- Restrict or object to anything we do on the basis of legitimate interests.
- Withdraw consentfor cookies at any time — it’s a button, not an email.
The fastest route is your account page. Otherwise email [email protected] with “Data request” in the subject line and we’ll come back to you within one month. We may ask you to confirm you’re the account holder first — that’s to stop someone else deleting your data.
One thing we can’t undo: page view and referral click records aren’t linked to you in a way we can search, because the IP is hashed and the row may carry no account ID at all — a page view never does. They delete themselves after 90 days regardless.
If you’re unhappy
Please tell us first — most things are a misunderstanding we can fix the same day. But you always have the right to go straight to the regulator, and you don’t need our permission to do it.
Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)
Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF
Helpline: 0303 123 1113
ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint
Changes to this notice
If we change something that matters, we’ll update the date at the top and — if it affects cookies — ask you to make your choice again.