Privacy Policy

Last updated: 28 July 2026

This policy is written in plain English to describe, accurately, what FindTheCool actually collects and does with your data. It is a starting point rather than a substitute for professional legal advice, and hasn't been reviewed by a solicitor.

Who we are

FindTheCool ("we", "us", "the site") is a community-driven directory of air-conditioned and otherwise cooled venues in the UK, at findthecool.com. You can reach us at admin@findthecool.com with any privacy question or request.

What we collect

We collect only what's needed to run the directory and its community features:

• Account details. An email address and password if you sign up directly, or basic profile info (name, email) if you sign up with Google. We never see your Google password.
• Username. Every account has a public username, chosen by you, shown next to your contributions (submissions, confirmations, leaderboard position). It does not need to be your real name.
• Venue contributions. Venues you submit (name, address, description, type, city, optional photo) and cooling confirmations you make (rating and optional comment) — these are the core of the directory and are shown publicly once approved.
• Saved venues. Venues you "heart"/save are private to your account and never shown to anyone else, except in the narrow case of a friend group's "loved by this group" filter, which only reveals which specific venues are loved by a group you are already a member of — never who saved what individually.
• Reports. If you report a venue (closed, no longer cooled, wrong address, etc.), we record the reason, any details you add, and your account so admins can follow up if needed.
• Gamification data. Points, achievement tiers and friend-group membership are derived automatically from your public contributions (confirmations, submissions, photo adds) — there's no separate tracking beyond what's described above.
• Location, only when you provide it. If you use "Use my current location", search a postcode/town, or allow mobile auto-locate, your coordinates are used in your browser to sort venues by distance and to check the local temperature (see "Third parties" below) — we do not store a history of your location on our servers.
• Uploaded photos. Photos you add to a venue are stored in our Supabase Storage bucket and become part of that venue's public listing once approved.

Cookies and local storage

FindTheCool does not use tracking cookies, and doesn't show a cookie banner, because it doesn't need one:

• Your login session is kept in your browser's local storage (not a cookie) so you stay signed in between visits.
• A small local storage flag remembers whether you've dismissed today's heatwave banner.
• Our page-view analytics (see below) are cookieless by design.

None of this is used for advertising, cross-site tracking, or sold to anyone.

Third parties we rely on

• Supabase — hosts our database, authentication and photo storage.
• Google — if you choose "Continue with Google" to sign in, Google's own privacy policy covers that step.
• Resend — sends our transactional emails (signup confirmation, password reset) on our behalf. We don't send marketing emails.
• Vercel — hosts the site and provides Vercel Web Analytics, a cookieless, aggregated page-view counter. It does not track individual visitors across sites.
• OpenStreetMap — the map on our site loads its map tiles directly from OpenStreetMap's servers, which will see your browser's IP address like any map tile request, independent of FindTheCool.
• Open-Meteo — if we've learned your location (see above), your coordinates are sent directly from your browser to Open-Meteo's free weather API to check whether it's currently hot enough to show the heatwave banner. No API key or account is involved on either end.

What we don't do

We don't sell your data, run third-party advertising, or use your data for anything beyond running the site's features described above.

How long we keep data

We keep account and contribution data for as long as your account is active. Points already earned from a confirmation or submission are not retracted if you later delete that confirmation or venue — this is a deliberate design choice, the same way most community platforms treat past contributions as having already happened.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, at any time, from "My Account" (the last row, "Delete account"). It takes effect immediately and cannot be undone. Your login, email address, username, saved places, notifications, group memberships, points, leaderboard place, Wardery Realm, Titles and any Seat you hold are deleted. The places, photos, ratings, tags, amenity facts, Crawls, check-ins and Wardery honours you contributed stay on the site with your name removed, because other people rely on them; any comments and notes you wrote are removed. Photo files keep the random folder name they were uploaded under, which no longer identifies anyone once the account is gone.

Your rights

You can update your username and review your own submissions/confirmations any time from "My Account", and delete your account there as described above. To request a copy of your data or a correction, email admin@findthecool.com — as a small, single-admin project, those two requests are handled manually.

Children

FindTheCool is not directed at children, and we don't knowingly collect data from anyone under 13.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a meaningful way, we'll update the date at the top of this page.