Privacy

Who we are

Puppy Training Tips is a community site for dog owners, run from the United Kingdom. We decide how the information described here is used, which under UK GDPR makes us the data controller for it.

What we collect

When you add a dog or create an account, we store:

• Your email address, and the first name you give us.
• Your dog's name, breed, sex, date of birth, when they came home, anything you write about them, and their photo.
• Whether you asked for the newsletter, and the date you asked.

We do not store a password, because there isn't one — you sign in through a link we email you. We keep only a one-way scramble of the most recent sign-in link, so that a copy of our database would not let anyone sign in as you.

What is public

A dog profile is public by default. That is what the site is for, and the form that makes one says so before you fill it in. A public profile shows your dog's name, breed, sex, an approximate age, whatever you wrote about them, their photo once it has been approved, and your first name only.

Some things you give us are never published. Your email address is one. Your dog's exact date of birth is another — the page works out an age from it and shows that instead.

You can turn a dog's profile off at any time from your dashboard, and it disappears from the site.

Photos

Photos are stored with Cloudflare and served from photos.puppy-training-tips.com. Every photo waits for a person to approve it before it appears on a profile. If we reject one, we delete it.

One thing worth stating plainly: while a photo is waiting to be approved, anyone who has its exact web address can open it. The address is a long random string that we don't publish, so it isn't findable — but it isn't secret either. Please don't upload anything you would mind a stranger seeing.

Email

We email you to sign you in, and to tell you if your dog has been featured. If you asked for the newsletter, we email you that too. We don't sell your address and we don't pass it to anyone for their own marketing.

Our email is sent through Sender (sender.net), who handle it on our behalf.

Why we're allowed to

• To run the site. Publishing your dog's profile, signing you in and telling you when your dog is featured are the service you asked for.
• The newsletter is consent, and only consent. It's off unless you tick it, and you can withdraw it without affecting anything else.
• Keeping the site usable — moderating photos, removing spam — is our legitimate interest in a community that works.

How long we keep it

• If you never confirm your email address, we delete your account, your dogs and your photos after seven days.
• A photo that is uploaded but never attached to a dog is deleted within a day.
• Otherwise we keep your account and your dogs until you ask us to remove them.

Cookies and measurement

This section changed on 25 August 2026, and it used to say the opposite. Until that date the site set one cookie, only after you signed in, and measured nothing. It now uses two analytics tools, so the honest thing is to say so at the top of the section rather than further down it.

The cookies are:

• The one that signs you in. It only exists once you have signed in, and it holds the token that keeps you signed in. Nothing works without it.
• Google Analytics. It counts visits, which pages get read, roughly where in the world readers are, and which site sent them to us. Google is the processor.
• PostHog. It counts the same page views, and it also records the handful of specific actions listed below. Its cookie is set by us, on our own domain, and the data is held on PostHog's servers in the European Union.

The actions PostHog records are: asking for a sign-in link, signing in, subscribing to the newsletter, submitting a dog, uploading a photo, sending a tip, reading a guide, starting and submitting an article, saving an expert profile, adding or editing a directory listing, and searching the directory. Each one records that the thing happened and one or two facts about it — a tip's topic, a search's filters and how many results it found. It never records what you wrote.

If you are signed in, PostHog attaches your account to what it records: your identifier, your name, your email address, your role, and whether you are on the newsletter. If you are not signed in, it holds a random identifier for your browser and nothing that names you.

There is still no advertising on this site, and we do not sell or share any of this with anybody for their own purposes. We have not asked you to accept these cookies. Analytics cookies are not strictly necessary, so under the UK's PECR rules asking is the correct thing to do, and at the moment we do not. You can refuse them today by turning on Do Not Track or a content blocker in your browser, or by using the rights below. We would rather tell you that plainly than leave this paragraph out.

The number on a guide

Each guide shows how many times it has been read. It is a single running total held on the article itself. We do not record who read it, when, from where, or what they read next — there is nothing stored beside the number, so there is nothing that could be traced back to you. It exists because the people who write our guides are paid in readers rather than in money, and they are entitled to see how many they got.

That number used to be the only thing counted anywhere on the site. It is not any more — the section above is the rest. The number itself has not changed: it is still one integer on the article, with nothing beside it, and it is still what a contributor is paid in.

Who else handles it

Five companies process data for us, under contract and on our instructions: Fly.io (hosting and the database), Cloudflare (photo storage and delivery), Sender (email), PostHog (product analytics, on EU servers) and Google (Google Analytics). Nobody else receives it.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. You can also withdraw newsletter consent, or object to what we're doing.

Deleting an account isn't self-service yet, so write to [email protected] and we'll do it by hand — within 30 days, and normally much sooner. Deleting your account deletes your dogs and their photos with it.

If you think we've got this wrong, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. We'd rather you told us first.

Contact

Email [email protected] for anything on this page.