LEGAL & COMPLIANCE SUITE // IT'S BALTIC

Privacy Policy & AdSense Disclosures

How It's Baltic handles your data, analytics, push notification tokens, and third-party advertising in compliance with UK GDPR and Google Publisher Policies.

📅 Last Updated: 24 October 2026 ⚖️ Jurisdiction: Northern Ireland (UK GDPR) 🛡️ Standards: UK Data Protection Act 2018

1. Introduction & Overview

Welcome to It's Baltic (accessible at itsbaltic.co.uk). It's Baltic is an independent Northern Ireland real-time winter weather, road cryospheric reconnaissance, and community alert platform operated in partnership with the NI Snow Days community.

We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018, and relevant consumer protection laws. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how it is used, how cookies are utilized, and your rights.

2. Information We Collect

We practice strict data minimization. We only collect information strictly necessary to provide live alerts and ensure application functionality:

  • Alert Preferences: When you configure notifications, we store your chosen Northern Ireland town or county (e.g. Ballymena, Belfast, Co. Antrim) and notification preferences (snow inbound, morning road freeze, gritter activity, school closures).
  • Web Push Subscription Tokens: If you voluntarily enable push notifications on your phone or computer, your browser generates a unique, anonymous endpoint token to deliver commute and defrost pings via Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) or Apple Push Notification service (APNs). No personal identity or phone number is collected.
  • Baltic Pro Pass Subscribers: When you purchase a Baltic Pro Supporter Pass (£3/year), our payment processor (Stripe) collects payment information. We receive your email address, purchase date, and assign a unique private Scout Key (e.g. BALTIC-XXXX). We do not store or process your credit/debit card numbers on our servers.
  • Server Log & Diagnostic Data: Standard technical logs including IP addresses, browser user-agent, operating system, and request timestamps to maintain server security and prevent malicious scraping.

3. Google AdSense & Third-Party Advertising (Mandatory Disclosure)

Third-Party Vendor Disclosures:

It's Baltic uses Google AdSense and other third-party advertising partners to display advertisements when you visit our website. These companies may use information about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you.

  • Third-Party Vendors: Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on It's Baltic.
  • Google's Advertising Cookies: Google's use of advertising cookies (including the DoubleClick DART cookie) enables it and its partners to serve ads to our users based on their visit to It's Baltic and/or other sites across the Internet.
  • Personalized Advertising Opt-Out: Users may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting:

4. Google Analytics Disclosure

We use Google Analytics (Google tag G-XR7YSCMPQP) to understand aggregate visitor engagement (e.g. which traffic cameras or weather corridors are viewed most during major snowstorms). Google Analytics collects aggregated, anonymized data such as pageviews, device category, approximate geographical region (Northern Ireland), and session duration. You can prevent Google Analytics from recognizing you on return visits by disabling cookies on your browser or installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.

5. Cookies & Local Storage Usage

Our website uses cookies and browser local storage:

  1. Essential / Functional Storage: Used to store your active UI preferences, selected map view, sound toggle, and your active Baltic Pro session state (itsbaltic_pro_active).
  2. Analytics Cookies: Google Analytics cookies to monitor platform stability and traffic surges during severe weather.
  3. Advertising Cookies: Google AdSense cookies to serve relevant advertisements, prevent ad fraud, and cap ad frequency.

For full details, please see our dedicated Cookie Policy.

6. Data Sharing & Third-Party Processors

We never sell, rent, or trade your personal data. We only share data with vetted infrastructure partners:

  • Stripe Inc.: PCI-DSS certified payment processing for Baltic Pro passes.
  • Google LLC: Analytics (gtag.js), web push dispatch (FCM), and advertising (AdSense).
  • cPanel / Exim Mail Relay: Transactional single-use verification codes (OTP) and Scout Key reminders sent from [email protected].

7. Data Retention & Your Rights

You have the following rights under UK data protection law:

  • The right to access any personal data we hold about you.
  • The right to rectification of incorrect email addresses.
  • The right to erasure ("right to be forgotten"): You can sign out and deregister push alerts at any time via the UI, or email [email protected] to have your subscriber record deleted.
  • The right to withdraw consent for notifications or cookies at any time.