Privacy notice
This notice explains what personal information the Helmdon History website collects and what we do with it. The website is run by volunteers of the Helmdon Local History Group (“we”).
In short
- We don’t use advertising or tracking cookies, and we don’t use visitor-tracking or analytics services.
- We don’t sell or share your information.
- We keep only what we need, for no longer than we need it.
If you contact us
When you use our contact form, your name, email address and message, and any photos or documents you attach, are sent to our volunteer editor by email so that we can reply. They are not stored on the website. We keep the email only as long as we need it to deal with your message, and we don’t pass it to anyone else without your agreement. If you send us a photograph, document or memory to add to the archive, we will agree with you how you would like it credited before anything is published.
If you use “Ask the archive”
“Ask the archive” uses an AI service, Claude, provided by the company Anthropic. When you ask a question, your question and passages from this archive are sent to Anthropic so that it can write an answer. Please don’t include personal details, such as your own name, address or email address, in a question.
We keep a record of the questions asked, for up to a year, to help us improve the archive. It does not include who asked them or your internet address. To stop any one visitor asking too many questions in a day, the website counts questions using a scrambled code made from your internet address. The code can’t be turned back into your address, and it is thrown away after a day.
Cookies and outside services
The website doesn’t set cookies for visitors. Volunteers who log in to edit the site receive the cookies WordPress needs for that.
Our pages use fonts from Google Fonts, and our maps use map pictures from OpenStreetMap and map software from unpkg.com. As with any website, those services receive your internet address when your browser fetches them.
Some pages show videos from YouTube. If you play one, YouTube may set its own cookies and collect information under its own privacy policy, which we do not control.
People named in the archive
The archive records the history of the village: articles, documents, press cuttings, photographs, obituaries, memories, parish notices and old message-board posts. Many of them name people. We remove private contact details – email addresses, telephone numbers and private home addresses – from what we publish.
If you, or a relative, appear in the archive and you would like something corrected, or would prefer something removed, please contact us. We will look at every request sympathetically.
Press cuttings and photographs
Press cuttings and photographs are reproduced for local history, and their sources are credited. If you hold the copyright in something on the site and would like it credited differently or removed, please contact us.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you can ask to see the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or object to how we use it. Please contact us to do any of these. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.
Last updated October 2026.