Privacy and cookies

The short version: nothing this site's own code does sets a cookie, and it holds no personal data about you at all unless you give us your email address. If you do, it holds that address, what you asked to be alerted about, and — only if you ask for that too — the listing ids of your saved properties, and nothing else. The one thing here that can put a cookie on your device is advertising, which is what pays for the site: the adverts are Google's, you are asked before any advertising cookie is set, and your answer is remembered and can be changed. Everything written to your browser is listed below rather than buried.

Cookies and browser storage

This site sets no cookies of its own. Nothing in our own files writes one, reads one, or needs one: no session, no login, no counter, no preference. What can set one is Google's advertising code, and only after you have said it may — which is why this site now shows a consent message, and why it shows nothing else to click. That message is Google's own; what it is, what your answer does, and how to change it are under Advertising below.

Saved properties are the properties you have tapped Save on. Tapping Save stores that list on your own device, in browser storage, under ohp:shortlist — the listing ids and the date you saved each one, no name, no address, nothing about you. By default it stays there and goes nowhere: we cannot see it, it does not follow you to another browser or another phone, and that is why your saved properties are there when you come back to the same phone and are not there when you use a different one. It is storage you asked for by tapping Save, for a feature that cannot work without it, so there is nothing to consent to and no banner to click — and it is not a cookie, so the line above stands. Take a property off the list by tapping the heart again, or clear the lot by clearing this site's data in your browser.

Your email is your account. There are two ways, and only two, that your saved properties stop being on-device-only, and you take both of them deliberately. If you press “Keep my list and get alerts” under your saved properties and finish the signup, or if you open the “your alerts and saved homes” link in one of your alert emails, the list is stored with your email address from then on, so it is the same on every device. There is no password, and what that means, plainly: your saved properties can be read and changed by anybody who has the link from those emails. Forward an alert to a friend and that friend can open the page, see which houses you saved, change the search behind the alert and switch the weekly email off. They cannot see your email address — the page shows it masked — and they cannot unsubscribe you, because that link is a different one. It is the same trust the unsubscribe link in the same email has always carried, and this is what an account without passwords is. If you would rather your saved properties stayed on your phone, do not use either of those two things: saving a property is still local, still silent, and still not sent to us.

While you have that page open, the link's token is kept in this tab's sessionStorage, under ohp:manage, so that a change you make still saves after the address bar has been tidied. It is never put in a cookie, it is taken out of the address bar as soon as the page has read it, and it is gone when you close the tab.

Once that page has opened on a device, the site keeps one more item in that browser’s local storage, under ohp:account. It is a single flag — the value 1 and nothing else: no token, no email address, no identifier — and it does one thing: from then on the button in the header says Your alerts and takes you to that page, instead of offering you a signup you have already done. It stays until you remove it. Press Forget this browser on the “your alerts and saved homes” page, or clear this site’s data, and it is gone.

There are other entries in local storage, and those are not ours: they belong to Google's advertising code and its consent tool. The one we have measured is google_auto_fc_cmp_setting, which is where the consent tool keeps the fact that it has something to ask you; when you answer the message, your answer is stored on your device too, by Google and not by us, so that you are asked once rather than on every page. We measured the first of those on 31 August 2026 by loading the home page in a fresh browser: one local-storage entry, zero cookies, and blocking that one script left nothing behind at all. Since 15 September 2026 the consent message is live and advertising may follow it, so that measurement is a floor and not a total — what Google stores once you have answered is Google's to describe, and the link to their account of it is under Advertising. Ours is the whole of the list above: your saved properties, the manage-link token and the account flag, and nothing else goes to localStorage, sessionStorage or any other browser storage. The only other state the site keeps — which filters you have applied on a results page — lives in the address bar, in the part of the URL after the #, and disappears when you close the tab.

Measurement

Visitor numbers come from Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookieless: it counts page views without setting anything on your device, without an identifier that follows you between visits, and without sharing anything with an advertising network. It is the only measurement we run, and the numbers it gives us are page counts, not people. There are no social buttons and no tag managers. The third-party JavaScript on this site is that beacon, Google's advertising code and Google's consent tool, and nothing else; the advertising code and the consent tool are described under Advertising, directly below.

Advertising

This site is free to read and is paid for by advertising. The advertising is Google's — AdSense — and its code is on every page. What that means for you in one sentence: when an advert is served, Google and the advertising partners it works with receive your IP address and the page you asked for, and, if you have allowed it, may set and read cookies in your browser so that what you are shown is chosen from what you have looked at elsewhere.

You are asked first. The message you see is Google's own consent tool — Funding Choices — and it is on this site precisely so that the question is put before an advertising cookie is set rather than after. Say no and adverts may still appear, but they are not personalised and the cookies that personalise them are not set. Your answer is stored on your device, by Google, so that you are asked once rather than on every page, and you can change it at any time by reopening that message. Neither answer changes a single thing about the site itself: the same properties, in the same order, with nothing withheld.

What we do not do: we do not see, receive or store anything Google collects; we are never told who you are; nothing about you, your saved properties or your alerts is ever passed to Google or to an advertiser; and nobody pays us to show one property before another or to show a property at all. Google's own account of what it and its partners collect is at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites, and their advertising controls are at myadcenter.google.com.

Maps

The maps draw their tiles from OpenStreetMap's servers. Loading an image from someone else's server means that server sees your IP address, the page you asked for it from, and your browser's user-agent string — that is how the web works, and it is true of the map tiles on every site that uses them. Apart from the map tiles, the Cloudflare analytics beacon and the Google advertising and consent code named above, everything on this site is loaded from this site's own domain — and a map only loads once you scroll one into view.

Server logs

The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and the alert signups are handled by a small Cloudflare Worker. Cloudflare processes requests on our behalf and holds its own short-term operational logs, as any host does. We do not run our own analytics on those logs, and nothing that could identify you is written to any log we keep — the signup service is deliberately built so that request logging is off and neither email addresses nor IP addresses appear in it.

Property alerts

A property alert is an email we send when a new property matches what you asked for. If you sign up for one, we store your email address and the criteria you chose — an area, a price, a street name, a bedroom count, or one listing you asked to watch — plus the date you signed up and the date you confirmed. If you have asked for your saved properties to be kept across your devices, their listing ids are stored with the same record; see the two ways that happens, above. That is the whole record, and there is one of it per address: signing up again replaces the criteria you gave before rather than adding a second subscription, though it keeps your saved properties, so signing up on a laptop does not delete what you hearted on your phone. No name, no phone number, no address, no profile, no tracking of what you look at on the site, and nothing bought from or shared with anybody.

To stop the signup form being used to flood somebody with confirmation email, the service counts signup attempts from each internet connection and refuses more than five in an hour. What it stores for that is a scrambled (hashed) form of your IP address and a number, never the address itself, and the counter deletes itself an hour later. Every attempt is counted, including ones that go no further.

If you lose the “your alerts and saved homes” link, you can ask us to send it again from your saved properties or from the page itself: we email that link, and only that link, to the address already on the record. Entering an address that is not with us adds nothing and sends nothing. The reply on the page is the same sentence whether or not that address has a subscription, on purpose — so the form cannot be used by anybody else to find out whether you have one — and an address that has not confirmed is never emailed. Three requests per address per day.

Signup is double opt-in. When you submit the form we send one email to the address you gave, with a link in it. Until you click that link nothing else is sent, and if you never click it the half-finished signup deletes itself after seven days. That is both the law working properly and the only way to stop somebody signing up an address that is not theirs.

The lawful basis is your consent, given by sending the signup form under the wording shown beside it and then confirming by email. What you consent to is exactly this, which is the wording stored alongside your signup: “We email you only what you ask for here. Emails may include a message from a site sponsor at the foot. Unsubscribe any time.” Every email we send carries an unsubscribe link that needs no login and no reply. Using it removes your address and your criteria from our store — not a flag set on a record we keep, an actual deletion. You can also email hello@outerhebridesproperty.co.uk and ask us to remove you, correct something, or tell you what we hold, and we will do it.

Alert emails are sent through Resend, an email delivery service, which processes your address for the purpose of delivering the message. Delivering email requires handing an address to something that can deliver email; it is not used for anything else.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask for it corrected, ask for it deleted, or withdraw consent at any time. Given how little there is — one email address and a few search criteria — all four are the same email to hello@outerhebridesproperty.co.uk and take a day at most. If you think we have handled your data badly you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Changes

If this site ever adds something that needs a cookie, browser storage, or any data beyond what is described above, this page changes first and the change is described here plainly. It will not be slipped into a banner.

Last updated 15 September 2026 · questions to hello@outerhebridesproperty.co.uk.