What BeerHQ knows about you

Who is responsible

HEKNO Ltd, company SC895711, registered office Borthwick Farm Cottage, Gorebridge, EH23 4QZ, United Kingdom, is the controller unless a service states otherwise. Privacy contact: privacy@hekno.co.uk.

BeerHQ is a brand operated by HEKNO Ltd, not a separate company. HEKNO Ltd is registered in Scotland under company number SC895711. Registered office: Borthwick Farm Cottage, Gorebridge, EH23 4QZ, United Kingdom. The HEKNO privacy notice applies to BeerHQ; what follows is the product-specific schedule — what this site in particular does.

The short answer

BeerHQ has no accounts, no sign-in, no newsletter, no comment system and no shopping basket. It asks for no personal information and there is nowhere to enter any. It runs no advertising, sets no advertising identifiers, and shares nothing for advertising.

Two values are stored in your browser: your answer to the age question, and your answer about analytics. If you have not answered the analytics question, or answered no, nothing about your visit is transmitted anywhere and no third-party script is loaded.

The age question

BeerHQ asks whether you are 18 or over and stores your answer in your browser's local storage under the key "beerhq.age-confirmation". The stored value is the answer itself and the date you gave it — nothing else. No date of birth, name or identifier is collected, the value is never sent to a server, and it is not used for analytics or advertising. It is kept for 365 days, after which BeerHQ asks again. Clearing site data for BeerHQ removes it.

Answering it is not consent to anything else, and BeerHQ does not treat it as such. See cookies and local storage for the full list of what is kept in your browser, and alcohol information for why the question is asked at all.

Server logs

Whoever hosts BeerHQ will keep ordinary web-server logs — the address a request came from, what was requested and when. That is a function of being on the internet rather than a choice BeerHQ makes, and the hosting supplier and retention period will be named here when the site is actually served from beerhq.app rather than from a development machine.

Analytics, if you allow it

BeerHQ asks whether it may measure how the site is used and stores your answer in your browser's local storage under the key "beerhq.analytics-consent". The stored value is the answer itself and the date you gave it — nothing else. It is kept for 182 days, after which BeerHQ asks again. If you say no, or have not answered, nothing is transmitted to either analytics destination. Clearing site data for BeerHQ removes it, which returns you to being asked.

The question is asked separately from the age question, because the two are different decisions and letting the answer to one stand in for the other is how a site ends up treating “I am 18” as permission to be measured. You can change your answer from the control at the foot of every page; withdrawing is the same single click as granting.

What is measured, event by event

Six kinds of thing, chosen because each answers a question BeerHQ would act on. Nothing here identifies you, and none of it is combined with anything else.

• Which routes are read, and through which section. Recorded as page_view, carrying route, section, entity_kind — and nothing else.
• Whether search finds anything, and for which kind of question. Recorded as search_performed, carrying result_count, top_result_kind, matched — and nothing else.
• How often the alcohol policy refuses a query, by refusal category. Recorded as search_refused, carrying purpose_refused — and nothing else.
• Whether a discovery journey reaches a recommendation. Recorded as finder_completed, carrying finder, constraint_count, result_count — and nothing else.
• Which calculators are actually used. Recorded as calculator_used, carrying calculator, completed — and nothing else.
• Whether pairing is reached from a food page or a beer page. Recorded as pairing_viewed, carrying direction, has_editorial — and nothing else.

The one worth stating twice: the words you type into search are never recorded. What is kept is whether the search matched and what kind of thing came top. A search box is where people type unpredictable things, and a log of real queries would be personal data collected by accident rather than by decision.

Deliberately absent: scroll depth, time on page, mouse movement, hover, and anything per-element. None of them would change a decision BeerHQ makes, and each is a further detail about you for no return.

Where the measurements go

Two destinations, both only after you say yes. The first is HEKNO Analytics, a first-party service operated by HEKNO Ltd — the same organisation that operates BeerHQ, so this is not a transfer to anyone else. The second is Google Analytics, which is a third party in the United States.

Fewer kinds of event go to Google than to the first-party service. The count of questions BeerHQ refuses on safety grounds, in particular, is kept for BeerHQ’s own use and is not sent onward.

Both are reached through one governed dispatcher with a single consent check, rather than through separate scripts. That is an implementation detail with a privacy consequence worth stating: there is one place where the decision to send is made, so there is no second path that could keep sending after you withdraw.