Legal

Privacy & Cookies

Last updated 24 July 2026

The Urban Forecast is published by Ackroyd Lowrie. This page explains what information we collect when you read the site, subscribe to the newsletter, or get in touch, and what we do with it.

The short version

We don’t use tracking cookies. We can see which companies, not people, read the site, using a tool called Leadinfo. If you subscribe to the newsletter, we keep your email address to send it. If you email us, we keep a record of that and may add publicly available professional details, like your job title or company. We never sell your data.

Information we collect

Site analytics

We use Vercel Web Analytics to understand how many people visit the site and which articles they read. It is anonymous by design: visitors are identified only by a one-way hash of the request, it sets no cookies, and the underlying data is discarded within 24 hours. We cannot use it to identify you.

Company-level visitor identification

We use Leadinfo to see which organisations visit the site, which helps us understand our readership. It works by matching your network’s public IP address against a company database. It places no cookies and does not identify you as an individual, only the organisation whose network you are browsing from. If you would rather your organisation was not shown to us this way, email oliver@ackroydlowrie.com and we will opt you out.

Subscribing to The Weekly Forecast takes you to our newsletter platform, beehiiv, where you provide your email address to sign up. Beehiiv processes that on our behalf, and their own privacy policy governs how they handle it. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in every issue.

If you get in touch

If you email us, we keep a record of that conversation and your contact details so we can reply and manage our relationship with you. We may add publicly available professional information to that record, such as your job title, company or LinkedIn profile, to keep it accurate and useful. We do this on the basis of legitimate interest, not consent, weighed against your right to privacy. You can ask us what we hold, correct it, or delete it at any time (see “Your rights” below).

Cookies

This site does not use cookies for advertising or tracking. The tools above are deliberately chosen to work without them. If that ever changes, we will update this page and ask for your consent first, as UK law requires.

How we use this, and who we share it with

We use this information to run the site, publish the newsletter, understand our readership, and manage relationships with people and organisations who contact us. We share it only with the processors named above, each contractually limited to using it for the service they provide us, plus Notion, where we keep records of business contacts. We do not sell or rent your information to anyone.

Where your data is processed

Some of our processors (Vercel, Leadinfo, beehiiv, Notion) may process data outside the UK, including in the US. Where that happens, they do so under recognised safeguards, such as the UK extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or standard contractual clauses.

How long we keep it

Analytics data is discarded within 24 hours. Newsletter details are kept until you unsubscribe. Records of business contacts are kept while the relationship is active and reviewed periodically after that.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to access what we hold about you, correct anything inaccurate, ask us to delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, and take your data elsewhere. You have an absolute right to stop us using your details for marketing at any time. To use any of these rights, email oliver@ackroydlowrie.com. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

Changes to this policy

We will update this page if what we collect or how we use it changes, and update the date at the top.

Contact us

Questions about this policy or your data: oliver@ackroydlowrie.com.