Privacy

Short version: we collect as little as we can, we run no advertising and no analytics, we have never sold or shared personal information and do not intend to start, and you can have whatever we hold deleted by asking. We will not make you explain why.

This policy covers thecorkreview.com. It was last updated on 28 July 2026.

What we collect

When you read the site. Our host records standard server request data, including your IP address, your browser’s user agent string, the page you asked for, and the time you asked for it. It is used for aggregate traffic figures and for blocking abusive traffic. We do not use it to build a profile of you, and we do not combine it with anything else.

When you subscribe to the newsletter. We store the email address you type, and the date we received it. That is the whole record. Your address is the only thing the form sends: we do not record which page you subscribed from, we do not ask for your name, we do not store one, and we do not try to work one out.

When you email us. We receive your address and whatever you write. There is no contact form on this site, so nothing reaches us unless you deliberately send it. Correspondence is kept so we can reply, and where it concerns a correction to a review it is kept as part of the editorial record.

When you buy a business licence. Payment is taken by Stripe on Stripe’s own pages. Card details never touch this site and never reach us: we do not embed Stripe’s scripts, so the subscribe button is an ordinary link that hands you over to them. From Stripe we receive your email address, your billing name and country, the last four digits of the card, and whether the subscription is active. We need those to know whether a licence is live and to answer a billing question.

What we do not do

This list is the substance of the page, so it is stated plainly rather than buried in a negative clause:

• We run no advertising of any kind. No advertising network, ad exchange, or data broker receives anything from this site.
• We run no analytics. There is no Google Analytics, no tag manager, no Plausible, no Matomo, and no pixel of any description in the pages we serve.
• We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Not for money, and not for anything else.
• We do not profile you, segment you, or make automated decisions about you.
• We do not require an account to read anything, so there is no account for us to hold.

Cookies

This site sets no cookies. Not for preferences, not for sessions, not for measurement. You can confirm it in your browser’s developer tools on any page here.

Cloudflare, which serves the site, may set a strictly necessary security cookie to tell a person from an automated attack. It has no advertising or profiling function and we cannot read anything from it.

Stripe sets its own cookies on Stripe’s pages once you follow a subscribe or billing link. Those pages are Stripe’s, governed by Stripe’s privacy policy, and outside our control.

Who else necessarily sees something

The newsletter list itself sits on our own servers rather than inside a marketing platform, so it is not enriched, scored, or cross-referenced against anything, and no list service holds a copy of it.

Beyond that we use as few processors as a working site allows, and each is here because it does a job that cannot be done without it:

• Cloudflare serves every page and protects the site from attack. It processes request data, including IP addresses, on our behalf.
• SMTP2GO delivers the newsletter. To send you an email it necessarily processes your address, and it records whether each message was delivered, bounced, or reported as spam, which is how we know to stop sending to a dead address.
• Stripe takes payment and holds the subscription record for business licences. Stripe is the controller of the card data it collects.
• Google Fonts serves the two typefaces the site uses. Loading a page makes a request to Google’s servers from your browser, which necessarily discloses your IP address to Google.

Google Fonts is the only one of these we would rather not need. Self-hosting the typefaces would remove it entirely and remains on our list.

We do not otherwise disclose personal information, except where we are legally required to or where it is necessary to establish or defend a legal claim.

Where your data is held

We are a US business, so if you are reading or writing to us from the UK or the EU your information is transferred to the United States. Our processors operate internationally and each maintains its own transfer safeguards for that. The volume of personal data involved is, in most cases, a single email address.

How long we keep it

Newsletter subscriptions: your address is kept so we can send you the newsletter. You can ask us to delete it at any time.

Correspondence: as long as it is useful. Where an email records a correction to a review it is kept indefinitely, because the whole value of a correction record is that it persists and can be checked later.

Business licence records: for the life of the subscription, and afterwards for as long as tax and accounting rules require us to keep a record of a transaction.

Delivery records for the newsletter: held by SMTP2GO under its own retention schedule. Deleting you from the list stops future sends; it does not reach back into logs of messages already delivered.

Server logs: short lived, and held by Cloudflare under its own retention schedule rather than by us.

Your rights

You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or ask for a copy. Write to info@thecorkreview.com. We will act on it, and we will not ask you to justify the request or cite a law at us.

If you are in the UK or the EU, those are your rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection under the UK GDPR and the GDPR. Our lawful basis is consent for the newsletter, which you may withdraw at any time; contract for a business licence; and legitimate interest for keeping the site online and answering correspondence. You may complain to your national supervisory authority, and in the UK to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

If you are in California, you have rights to know, delete, and correct, and a right not to be treated differently for using them. We do not sell or share personal information as the CCPA and CPRA define those terms, so there is no opt out for us to offer. We do not process sensitive personal information.

Security

Everything is served over HTTPS. Access to the newsletter list is limited to the two of us. We are a small publication rather than a bank and will not claim guarantees we cannot make: no system is perfectly secure, and the honest mitigation here is that we hold almost nothing worth stealing.

Age

This site is about alcoholic drinks and is intended only for people of legal drinking age in their own jurisdiction. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has sent us their details, write to us and we will delete them.

Changes

If this policy changes materially the change will be described here rather than silently swapped in, and the date at the top will move.

Contact

Privacy questions, requests, and complaints all go to the same place: info@thecorkreview.com.

Corporate entity

The Cork Review is published by MalterTravel LLC, a Delaware limited liability company, which is the data controller for the purposes of this policy.