What we know about you

You can read every page on this site without telling us who you are, and we would not be able to work it out if we tried. There is no account to make, no newsletter, no advertising, and nothing here follows you to another website.

The one time we hold anything is when you deliberately write to us — and for almost everyone that means an email, in a mailbox, like any other email. Ask us to publish a match report and, once we do, that one is the exception — see below.

Both of these stay in your browser. The lists themselves are never sent to us, and nobody else can read them.

• The club you pin is kept in a cookie called my-club, so the home page can lead with your club instead of asking every time. It is only written when you press the button. It is also the one thing here that travels — see What we count below.
• The games you mark as attended are kept in your browser's local storage under games-attended. Same rule — only written when you tick something.

Clearing your browsing data removes both. Be warned that it really does remove them: we hold no copy, so a cleared list of games cannot be got back. That is the trade for not having to make an account.

Because there is nothing to accept. The rules require consent for things stored on your device that you did not ask for — trackers, advertising, analytics that follow you about. Ours are two preferences you set yourself by pressing a button, which is the one case that has never needed a pop-up.

A banner here would be asking your permission for something we are not doing, and teaching you to click through the next one that matters.

The contact form asks for a name, an email address, your message, and photographs if you have them. All of it becomes a single email to hello@upthepyramid.co.uk and nothing else. A correction or a question is not written to our database at all — the mailbox is the whole of the filing system for those, exactly as it always has been. Two things you have asked us to publish are the exceptions — a match report, and a photograph — and both are described below.

Your address is used to reply to you, and for nothing else. It goes on no list. Messages stay in the mailbox while they are still useful — a correction we have not yet made, a conversation still going — and are deleted when they are not. Ask us to delete yours sooner and we will.

The form asks you to confirm the photograph is yours and that we may use it with a credit. That permission is the only reason it would ever appear on the site, and you keep the copyright either way. Change your mind at any point, including long afterwards, and it comes down — no reason needed.

Give that permission and the photograph is kept, along with the name you want on it and your address, so a person can look at it and decide. Nobody else sees it unless and until we put it up. Without that permission it stays what it always was: an attachment on an email, and nothing more.

Photographs taken on a phone are shrunk by your own browser before they are uploaded, which strips the embedded camera data along with them. That includes the GPS coordinates a phone quietly records, so where you were standing does not travel with the picture.

Writing in about a game works exactly as any other message does, unless you tick the box agreeing we may publish it. Only then is anything saved beyond the email: the report itself, the name you want it credited to, and your address — kept so we can reply, never shown to anyone. Nobody sees a word of it until a person on our side has read it and chosen to put it up, and at most one report is ever shown for a given match.

Change your mind at any point, published or not, and we will take it down and delete what we hold — no reason needed, same as a photograph.

We count page views, so we know which parts of the site are worth the effort. We also count a short list of things people actually do: pinning a club, ticking a game or a ground, pressing play on highlights, following an invitation to write in, and starting or posting a comment. That is the whole list. It exists because a page view cannot tell us whether any of this is used — only that a page was opened.

If you have pinned a club, its name goes along with those counts, and it is the only thing attached to them. Not which game you ticked, not what you typed, and nothing that could be joined back up into a person. It tells us that somebody who follows Aldershot played a video, which on a site about the non-league pyramid is the most useful thing we could know and about as far as we want to go.

It is Vercel's analytics, which sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device, and builds no profile — there is no way for us to look up an individual person, and no way to recognise you on any other site.

Like every website, our host briefly handles your IP address in order to send you the page at all. Nothing is done with it beyond that.

You do not have to be counted. This switch stops it for this browser, straight away:

• Vercel host the site and provide the visitor counts.
• Resend deliver the email when you use the contact form, so your message passes through them on the way to us.
• Neon hold the database. Overwhelmingly it is football — clubs, grounds, fixtures, results — and nothing whatsoever about the people reading. The one exception is a match report you have asked us to publish, which carries your address and credited name until we act on it, as described above.
• OpenStreetMap draw the map on a ground page, where we know the coordinates. That map is loaded from their servers, so opening one of those pages tells them your browser asked for it. It is the only thing that reaches out to somebody else simply because you opened a page — even the fonts are served from our own domain rather than Google's.
• YouTube host the match highlights on some club pages, and they are Google. Nothing of theirs loads until you press play: the picture on the card is our own copy, served from our own storage, so simply reading the page tells Google nothing. Press play and you are watching a video on their player, on their terms, same as anywhere else.

You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. In practice the answer is nearly always “an email you sent us”, and deleting it takes a moment. Write to hello@upthepyramid.co.uk.

Where something rests on your say-so, you can take it back. The counting switch above works in both directions and takes effect the moment you use it. If you have sent us a photograph and told us we could use it, saying so later is enough — it comes down, and you do not owe us a reason.

If you think we have handled something badly and we have not put it right, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK regulator.

The date at the top moves and the new version replaces this one. Up the Pyramid is a fan project run by one person, not a company, and if any of that changes in a way that affects what is written here, it will be written here.