The small print: Privacy

Who we are

Boulder Shack is Southampton's not-for-profit bouldering gym, at Unit 4 Imperial Park, Empress Road, Southampton SO14 0JW.

Boulder Shack Climbing Gym is run by Rock Routes Limited, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 09994629. Its registered office is Unit 4 Imperial Park, Empress Road, Southampton SO14 0JW, and it is the data controller.

What this website collects

As little as possible. You can read every page on this site without an account, and it never asks you for personal details.

We count visits ourselves, to see which pages help people find what they came for and book. For each page somebody looks at, our own system records the page, how far down it they got and how long each part of it was on screen, which links and buttons were pressed and roughly where on the page, whether a booking button was pressed, the website or advert that brought them here, the kind of device by the size of its screen, and roughly where they are (country, region and city), which is worked out from the internet address of the visit.

When we try two versions of a page, to see which helps people more, it also records which version each visitor was shown, and a second cookie makes sure they are shown the same one every time.

It never records names, email addresses, internet addresses or anything typed into a form, and it makes no recordings of anybody’s visit. To tell one visitor from another it uses one cookie, which holds a random code and nothing else. Detailed records are turned into daily totals and deleted after 90 days.

You can switch our counting off at the top of the cookies page, and it stops straight away. Switching it off also deletes what has been recorded about your visits so far.

We also count visits with Vercel Web Analytics, which sets no cookies. It records the page, the site somebody arrived from, roughly where they are and the kind of device and browser they use, and counts when a booking button is pressed. It keeps no names, email addresses or IP addresses, and to tell one visit from another it uses an anonymous code that is thrown away after 24 hours.

The contact form on the contact page is provided by PeerVantage, the system our team answers enquiries from. What you type into it is sent to PeerVantage and on to us, so that we can reply.

Only if you say yes

The cookie banner asks whether four tools from other companies may load. If you say yes, and only then, this site loads them, and each sets cookies of its own, which the cookies page lists:

• •Google Analytics, which shows us how the site and the booking portal are used: which pages people look at, where they came from and what they book.
• •The Google Ads tag, which tells Google when somebody who saw one of our adverts visits or books, so we can see which adverts are worth paying for and show them to people likely to be interested.
• •The Meta Pixel, which does the same for our adverts on Facebook and Instagram.
• •Microsoft Clarity, which records how a visit to this site went, where people scrolled, tapped and got stuck, so we can find what is confusing. Anything typed into a box is hidden from it. It is never loaded on the booking portal.

If you say no

If you say no, or do not answer, none of the four is loaded on this site. You can change your answer at any time, at the top of the cookies page or with Cookie settings at the foot of every page. Phones and computers at Boulder Shack never load them at all.

Google, Meta and Microsoft handle what their tools collect under their own privacy policies as well as ours, and those say what each does with it.

Bookings and payments

Bookings, memberships, gift cards and payments are handled on the Redpoint portal at portal.bouldershack.co.uk. That is a separate service with its own privacy policy, which applies to anything you enter there. This website never sees your payment details.

The portal follows your answer to the banner. With a yes, Google Analytics and the Meta Pixel work there too. With a no, or no answer, the Meta Pixel is not loaded there, and Google’s tag is told not to use cookies before it starts, so it sets none.

The portal also tells our own counting which of its pages are looked at, and when something is put in the basket or bought, with what it was and what it cost. It never tells us who bought it, or anything they typed, and a purchase’s reference is kept only as a scrambled code. This is how we can tell which pages of this site lead to bookings.

Where the site lives

The site is hosted by Vercel, in their London region, and the records of visits are kept in a database run by Neon, also in London. Some images on the blog and the team page are still served from the previous site’s storage.

The fonts are served from this site itself, so loading a page does not send a request to Google for them.

The contact page shows a map from Google in a frame, to everyone, and the contact form on the same page loads from PeerVantage. Each of those is a request from your browser to that company, carrying what any web request carries. The cookies page says what Google may set inside the map.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have rights over your personal data, including the right to see a copy of it, correct it, have it deleted, and object to or restrict how it is used. This website holds very little: the records of visits above, which are tied to a random code rather than to you. Switching counting off on the cookies page deletes the ones for your browser. Most other requests will be about the booking portal or about our records at the centre.

Ask us anything about this by emailing team@bouldershack.co.uk.

If you are not happy with how we handle your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

Changes

If any of this changes, this page changes with it and the date below moves.