Privacy Notice

Who we are

Brighttail Studios Ltd is the controller of any personal information handled through this website. You can contact us about privacy at any time by emailing info@brighttailstudios.com.

What this notice covers

This notice applies to this website only. It explains what information is handled when you browse the site, email us, or join the Explorer Club. It is written for the United Kingdom data protection framework: the UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018, and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) where they apply.

What information is handled, and how we get it

• Information you send us by email. If you choose to email us, we receive your email address and whatever you write in your message.
• Technical and security data. Like almost every website, our hosting and content-delivery infrastructure necessarily processes standard technical data — such as IP address, browser and device details, the pages requested, timestamps, and diagnostic or security logs — in order to serve pages and keep the site secure.
• Explorer Club subscriptions. If you join, MailerLite receives your email address, adult marketing consent, form source and technical subscription records such as time and IP address. Double opt-in records confirm your request. See Explorer Club: how joining works below.

Why we handle it, and our lawful bases

• Answering your enquiries — we use the email address and message you send us to reply and to manage the conversation. Lawful basis: legitimate interests (responding to ordinary correspondence).
• Operating and securing the website — technical data is processed to deliver pages, diagnose faults and protect against misuse. Lawful basis: legitimate interests (running a safe, reliable website).
• Sending the Explorer Club emails — we use your email address to send you the occasional Brighttails book news, printable activities and studio updates you asked for. Lawful basis: consent. Direct electronic marketing is sent only to people who have explicitly requested it.

We do not sell personal information or use automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects. Optional Meta tracking may contribute to advertising personalisation by Meta, as described below.

Optional website and advertising measurement

With Analytics consent, Google Analytics 4 measures page views, book views, selected link clicks, sources, country and broad device information. It uses cookie identifiers and receives technical request information such as IP address. Google Signals, Google advertising personalisation, enhanced automatic measurement and user-provided data collection are disabled. Cloudflare Web Analytics measures visit and performance information without analytics cookies; we also require Analytics consent before loading its beacon.

With Marketing consent, Meta Pixel sends page views, book views and selected Amazon, Facebook and Explorer Club clicks to Meta. Meta receives technical information including IP address, browser details, page URL and cookie identifiers, and may match activity to a Meta account and personalise advertising under its policies. We do not send form contents, email addresses, payment information or purchase confirmations to these measurement tools. Automatic advanced matching and automatic event detection are disabled. Amazon clicks are not purchases; this website cannot observe completed Amazon purchases.

Consent is our basis for optional measurement. Rejecting it does not prevent browsing or buying books. Withdrawal stops future optional measurement and removes its first-party cookies on this site. It does not undo earlier lawful processing or delete data already received by providers. Contact us about deletion requests.

Brighttail Studios and Meta act as joint controllers for collection and transmission of certain event data under Meta's applicable controller terms; Meta is responsible for its subsequent processing. See Meta's Privacy Policy, Business Tools Terms, Google's Privacy Policy and Cloudflare's Privacy Policy for provider uses, rights and international transfers. Providers may process information in the United States and other countries using applicable adequacy decisions or contractual safeguards.

Explorer Club: how joining works

The Explorer Club is for parents, guardians and other adults. Enter your email address and actively tick the marketing consent box. The form submits directly to MailerLite, our mailing-list provider. Your address is not stored in this website's source or browser storage.

MailerLite sends a confirmation email. You must click its confirmation link before becoming an active subscriber in the Brighttails Explorer Club group. Submitting the form alone does not confirm your subscription.

MailerLite maintains your email address, consent wording and its version, subscription source, status and native subscription and confirmation timestamps so we can manage the list and demonstrate consent. It processes standard technical information to deliver and protect the subscription service.

Unsubscribing from the Explorer Club

You can withdraw your consent and leave the club at any time using the unsubscribe link in each club email, or by emailing info@brighttailstudios.com. We will stop sending you club messages. Withdrawing consent does not affect the lawfulness of any processing that happened before you withdrew.

Cookies and similar technologies

Necessary technologies deliver and secure the site and remember your choices. Optional measurement stays off until a visitor confirms they are 18 or over and consents to the relevant category. This is self-declaration, not age verification. Change your choice using Cookie preferences in the footer. For details, see our Cookie Policy.

Sharing, service providers and third-party links

Our website uses service providers, including:

• Cloudflare hosting and content delivery, which serves pages and assets and processes technical and security requests;
• MailerLite, which processes Explorer Club subscriptions, consent and confirmation records and delivers club emails on our behalf;

This site also links to third-party websites, including Amazon.co.uk for book purchases. We do not control those sites, and their own privacy notices — not this one — govern what happens when you follow those links. Please read their notices before providing them any information.

International transfers

Some of the service providers involved in delivering this website may process information outside the United Kingdom. Where personal data is transferred internationally, appropriate safeguards are used where required by data protection law.

How long information is kept

We keep personal information only for as long as it is needed for the purpose it was collected for, and to meet any legal, accounting or reporting obligations. Email correspondence is kept for as long as reasonably needed to handle the enquiry and any follow-up; technical logs are rotated by our infrastructure in the ordinary course of hosting and security operations. Google Analytics user and event data retention is set to two months, without resetting on new activity. Aggregated reports may remain longer. Meta controls retention under its Business Tools Terms, which state a maximum of two years for event data. Cookie lifetimes are listed in our Cookie Policy.

For the Explorer Club, we keep your email address on the active list while you are subscribed. If you unsubscribe, we remove it from the active list and retain only the minimum suppression and consent record reasonably needed to respect your request and meet legal obligations.

Security

We take reasonable steps to protect personal information handled through this website. No website or transmission over the internet can be guaranteed to be completely secure, so we cannot promise absolute security, but security is part of how the site is operated and hosted.

Children's privacy

This is a children's publishing website and children may browse it. However, it is not intended to collect children's optional measurement data. Optional measurement requires confirmation that the visitor is 18 or over and choosing for their own browsing. We do not verify their age. It is disabled on activities, characters, valley and Nature Detective pages. Please reject optional tracking when sharing a device with a child. We do not intentionally profile children. The Explorer Club is for parents, guardians and other adults only: children must not join, or email us their own personal information, themselves. A parent, guardian or other adult must do it on their behalf.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR, you have rights over your personal information. Depending on the circumstances, these can include:

• access to the personal information we hold about you;
• correction of inaccurate information;
• erasure of your information;
• restriction of how it is processed;
• objection to processing based on legitimate interests;
• portability of information you have provided, where applicable;
• withdrawal of consent, where processing relies on consent.

These rights are context-dependent and not absolute — some apply only in particular situations. To exercise any of them, contact info@brighttailstudios.com and we will respond in line with data protection law.

Complaints

If you have a concern about how we handle personal information, we would welcome the chance to resolve it first — please contact info@brighttailstudios.com. You also have the right to complain to the UK supervisory authority, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), via the ICO's complaints page.

Changes to this notice

We may update this notice from time to time — for example, if the site's features or our data practices change. The "last updated" date at the top of this page always shows the current version.

Contact

For any privacy question, right request or concern, email info@brighttailstudios.com.