Privacy Policy

Spark Hub is operated by Spark Hub Family Ltd, a company based in England, United Kingdom. We're a small, family-run team helping parents across North West England find local children's activities, venues and events.

Contact: hello@sparkhubfamily.co.uk

If you have any question about this policy, or about how we handle your information, that's the best way to reach us.

When you sign in with Google:
We receive your email address, display name, and profile photo from Google and store them on our servers to create and manage your Spark Hub account. We don't collect a password — Google handles authentication on your behalf.

When you sign in as a venue owner or organiser:
If you're a merchant, council or trust managing a listing through our Partner Portal, you sign in with your business email instead of Google. We send a one-time sign-in link to that email and store a hashed, single-use token to verify it's really you — we never see or store an email password or inbox. We store the business email itself to run your Partner Portal account.

As you use the site:
Community tips and votes you submit are stored on our servers. When a tip is published, it displays either a pseudonym you choose (defaulting to your first name and last initial from your Google account) or as "A local parent" if you opt to post anonymously. Votes are never publicly attributed — only aggregate counts are shown. Regardless of whether a tip is posted anonymously, we always retain an internal link between the content and the account that submitted it, for moderation and abuse prevention purposes. If you're signed in, your saved day plans, wishlist and activity preferences sync to your account — stored in our database, hosted by Neon — so they're available on any device. If you're signed out, they stay only in your browser and we never see them.

Your children's details (optional):
If you choose to add your children's details to your account, we store their birth month and year, and optionally their first name. This information is provided by you, the parent or guardian, and is used only to tailor activity suggestions. It is never shown publicly, never shared with third parties, and never used to build profiles of individual children.

Feedback and tip submissions:
When you use "Share a Tip", flag something wrong with a listing, or contact us as a venue, business, or creator, we collect whatever you choose to give us — typically your email address, the details of the tip or issue, and any images or files you attach.

When you claim a listing or submit a new venue:
We collect your organisation's name and type (merchant, council or trust), any evidence you provide to support your claim, and — if you're submitting a new venue — its address, postcode, phone number, website, description, pricing and any photos you upload. We use this to verify ownership and, once approved, to publish or update the listing.

Basic technical logs:
Like most websites, our hosting provider automatically keeps basic technical logs — such as IP address and browser type — for security and performance. We don't use these to identify you personally.

• Running your account and helping you plan a day out — contract (necessary to provide the service you've asked for).
• Moderation and abuse prevention — legitimate interest (keeping the platform safe and trustworthy for all families).
• Responding to tips, feedback and business enquiries — legitimate interest (keeping our listings accurate and useful) and consent (you choose to submit them to us).
• Understanding how Spark Hub is used — legitimate interest (improving the site), through aggregated and anonymised analytics. We never link usage data to individual users.

We only ever use your information for the purpose you gave it to us. We don't sell it, and we don't use it for advertising.

We use a small number of trusted providers to run Spark Hub. Each only processes data on our instructions, and only for the purposes below:

• Google — sign-in authentication, venue photos, and "Directions" links that open Google Maps in your browser.
• Neon — hosts our database, where account data, votes, and tips are stored.
• Vercel — hosts Spark Hub, stores photos you upload (tip photos and venue submission photos) via Vercel Blob, and provides privacy-friendly, cookieless page-view analytics.
• Resend — sends the emails our forms and account actions generate: tips, feedback, business enquiries, sign-in links, and claim or venue-submission decisions.
• IONOS — hosts our email (hello@sparkhubfamily.co.uk).
• Anthropic — automatically processes tip submissions (images, text, links) to help us extract venue and event details. In line with Anthropic's commercial API terms, this data is not used to train their AI models.
• postcodes.io — looks up map coordinates for a venue's postcode when a new venue is submitted. Only the venue's postcode is sent — never your personal details.

We use one session cookie, managed by Auth.js, to keep you signed in. This is an essential cookie — without it, sign-in wouldn't work. Because we only use essential cookies, no cookie consent banner is required.

We use Vercel Analytics to understand which pages are popular. It's cookieless and only records aggregated page-view counts — it doesn't track you individually, doesn't follow you across other websites, isn't used to build an advertising profile, and doesn't share data with advertisers.

We do not use advertising, tracking, or profiling cookies of any kind.

We keep information for as long as we need it, and no longer.

Account data (email, name, profile photo, children's details) is kept for as long as your account is active. You can delete your account yourself at any time from Account settings — this permanently removes your account and associated saved data (see below) and can't be undone. If you'd rather we do it for you, email us at hello@sparkhubfamily.co.uk.

Published community tips are kept indefinitely as part of the platform's venue data. Tips that are not published (rejected or still under review) are deleted after review, typically within 30 days.

Community votes are kept in our database indefinitely, but votes older than six months are no longer displayed on the site. Votes are never publicly attributed.

Account deletion and content: If you delete your account, your published tips and votes will be either deleted or fully anonymised — all internal links between that content and your account will be removed.

Saved day plans and preferences are stored in your account for as long as it's active, and deleted when you delete your account. If you're signed out, they stay only in your browser — clearing your browser data removes them and we never see them.

Contact and feedback emails are kept only as long as we need them to act on, then deleted. You can ask us to delete anything sooner.

Under UK GDPR, you have the right to:

• Access — ask us what information we hold about you.
• Correction — ask us to fix anything that's inaccurate.
• Deletion — ask us to delete your information.
• Object or restrict — ask us to stop or limit certain processing.

You can delete your own account at any time from Account settings. For anything else — access, correction, or objecting to processing — email us at hello@sparkhubfamily.co.uk.

If you're unhappy with how we've handled your data, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk. We'd appreciate the chance to put things right first — just email us.

Spark Hub is a tool for parents and carers, not for children to use directly. We don't knowingly collect personal information directly from children.

Where you tell us your children's birth month and year, and optionally their first name, to help us suggest age-appropriate activities, that information is provided by you, the parent or guardian. It is used only to tailor suggestions, never shown publicly, and never used to profile individual children.

If you believe a child has given us personal information directly, please contact us and we'll delete it.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time as Spark Hub grows and we add new features. When we do, we'll update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page.

If a change is significant, we'll let registered users know.