PrivacyPolicy

Fox Hut collects very little about its readers, and this page explains exactly what, why, and how to say no to any of it.

Last updated: 29 August 2026

Fox Hut ("Fox Hut", "we", "us" or "our") operates the website at foxhut.online (the "Site"), where readers can find original field guides and articles about foxes. We respect your privacy. This policy explains what we collect when you use the Site, why we collect it, who we share it with, and what you can do about it. By using the Site you agree to the practices described here; if you do not agree, please stop using the Site.

The Site is operated from the United Kingdom, and information is processed there and in the countries where our service providers operate. Wherever you are reading from, the rights set out in sections 10 and 11 are available to you.

1. What we collect

Information you give us

You do not need an account to read anything on Fox Hut, and we do not ask you to create one. We only hold personal information you choose to send us — which in practice means:

Email correspondence. If you write to us at contact@foxhut.online — to report an error, ask a question, send a sighting or file a copyright notice — we hold your email address, your name if you give it, and the contents of your message.
Photographs and sightings you send us. If you send an image or a description of a fox, we hold what you sent along with any location detail you include.

Information collected automatically

Like almost every website, we and our providers record technical information when you visit: IP address, approximate location derived from it, browser and device type, operating system, referring page, the pages you view, and the time of your visit. This is used to run, secure, measure and improve the Site. It is not used to work out who you are.

Information we deliberately do not collect

We do not ask for and do not want payment card details, government identifiers, precise GPS location, or any special-category data such as health or political information. Please do not send them to us.

2. Cookies, and how to control them

Cookies are small files stored on your device. We use essential cookies that make the Site work and remember your preferences, analytics cookies that tell us which articles people actually read, and — because advertising pays for the Site — advertising cookies set by our advertising partners. The full list, including names and durations, is in our cookie policy.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser at any time. Where the law requires it, we ask for your consent before anything non-essential is set, using Google's certified consent management platform (Privacy & messaging in AdSense, formerly Funding Choices) — see section 3a for how that works and how to change your answer. Turning off some cookies will change how parts of the Site behave.

Consent on this Site is handled by Google's certified consent management platform (Privacy & messaging in AdSense, formerly Funding Choices). It is the consent tool built into Google AdSense, and it is certified by Google for use with its advertising products.

In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, a consent message appears before advertising or analytics cookies are set, in line with the EU user consent policy that Google requires of publishers and with the UK and EU GDPR. Nothing non-essential is set until you make a choice, and you can refuse.
Your choice is recorded as an IAB Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF v2.2) signal and passed to Google and to the advertising vendors it works with, so that your decision travels with the ad request rather than depending on us to enforce it.
In the United States, the same tool presents a state-privacy message where required and records your choice as an IAB Global Privacy Platform (GPP) signal.
You can change your mind at any time using the “Privacy & cookie settings” link in the footer of every page, which reopens the consent choices.

The consent tool stores your preference on your device — see the cookie policy for the specific entries it uses. If you clear your browser storage, you will be asked again.

3. Advertising

Fox Hut is free to read and is paid for by advertising, served through Google AdSense. That arrangement means:

Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your previous visits to this Site or to other websites.
Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to this Site and other sites on the internet.
Advertising vendors may set and read cookies, use web beacons, or use your IP address to collect information as a result of serving ads here. Some ads are personalised; others are contextual, based only on the page you are reading.

Where you decline personalised advertising, or where you are covered by a rule that requires it, Google serves non-personalised ads instead: contextual ads based on the page you are reading and coarse location, which still use cookies for frequency capping, ad measurement and fraud prevention.

Your advertising choices. You can turn off personalised advertising from Google at My Ad Center, read how Google uses data from partner sites at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites, and opt out of many other vendors through the Digital Advertising Alliance at optout.aboutads.info or, in Europe, youronlinechoices.eu.

4. Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how people find and use the Site — which articles get read, which get abandoned halfway, and which search terms bring people here. It collects pages viewed, session length, traffic source, approximate city-level location, and device and browser type. IP addresses are anonymised and are not stored by default, and Google processes this data on our behalf.

You can opt out of Google Analytics on every website you visit by installing the Google Analytics opt-out add-on, or decline analytics cookies in our banner.

5. Session analytics

We use Microsoft Clarity to see how readers interact with pages, through aggregated behavioural metrics, heatmaps and session replay. Clarity records interactions such as mouse movement, clicks, scrolling and pages visited, and automatically masks input fields; it is not designed to capture passwords or payment details, and we do not use it to identify individuals. See the Microsoft privacy statement for how Microsoft handles this data.

Declining non-essential cookies in our banner stops this collection.

6. Why we use this information

What we do	Why	Lawful basis
Serve the Site and keep it secure	So pages load and abuse is prevented	Legitimate interests
Reply to your emails	To answer questions and fix errors	Legitimate interests
Measure how articles perform	To decide what to write and what to correct	Consent (analytics cookies)
Show advertising	To pay hosting costs and keep the Site free	Consent (advertising cookies)
Handle copyright notices	To meet our legal obligations	Legal obligation

Purposes and, for UK/EU readers, the lawful basis for each

We do not sell your personal information, and we never have. We share limited data with the providers that make the Site work, each under its own privacy policy: our hosting provider and CDN, our email provider, and the advertising and analytics services named above. We will also disclose information where the law requires it, to enforce our terms, or to protect people from harm.

Using advertising and analytics cookies may count as “sharing” personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising under some US state laws — see section 11.

8. How long we keep it

Emails and sightings: kept while the conversation is live and for up to two years afterwards, so we can trace where a correction came from.
Copyright and DMCA notices: kept for six years, because we may need to evidence how we handled them.
Analytics data: kept for the retention period configured in each provider, typically 14 months.
Server logs: kept for a short period for security and troubleshooting.

9. Security

The Site is served over HTTPS, and access to the small amount of correspondence we hold is limited to the person who runs Fox Hut. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security — but we also hold very little about you, which is the most effective protection there is.

10. Your rights (UK and EU readers)

Under the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR you have the right to ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, to have inaccurate data corrected, to have data erased, to restrict or object to processing, to data portability, and to withdraw consent at any time — including by changing your cookie choices.

To withdraw consent for advertising or analytics cookies, use the “Privacy & cookie settings” link in the footer — withdrawing is as easy as giving consent, and takes effect immediately. To exercise any other right, email contact@foxhut.online. We will respond within one month. If you are unhappy with our response, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or to your national data protection authority in the EU.

11. Your rights (California and other US states)

If you are a California resident, the CCPA as amended by the CPRA gives you the right to know what personal information we collect and why, to have it deleted, to have it corrected, to opt out of its “sale” or “sharing” for cross-context behavioural advertising, and not to be treated differently for exercising those rights. Residents of other US states with comparable laws have similar rights.

We do not sell personal information for money, but our use of advertising cookies may count as "sharing". To opt out, use the “Privacy & cookie settings” link in the footer, or the advertising opt-outs in section 3.

When you opt out, we enable Google's restricted data processing for your session. Under restricted data processing, Google acts as a service provider under the CCPA and processes the data only for a limited set of purposes — such as serving non-personalised ads, measurement, fraud prevention and legal compliance — and not to build advertising profiles. Your choice is also passed to advertising vendors as an IAB Global Privacy Platform signal.

We honour Global Privacy Control signals: when your browser sends one, we treat it as an opt-out of sharing for that browser without you needing to do anything else. For access, deletion or correction requests, email contact@foxhut.online; we may need to verify your identity, and you may use an authorised agent where the law allows.

12. Children

Fox Hut is written for a general audience and is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their personal information. Children are welcome to read the articles — plenty of the questions we answer come from school projects — but please do not send us personal details. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, write to contact@foxhut.online and we will delete it.