Privacy policy

Last updated: 4 September 2026 · Effective: 4 September 2026 · Data controller: Cluckology · Contact: privacy@trafficstacklynx.net

This policy covers the website at trafficstacklynx.net and all of its subpages. It is written to satisfy the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the UK GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended (CCPA/CPRA), and Google's own publisher and advertiser requirements including the EU User Consent Policy.

1. Short version

You can read every article on this site without giving us anything. We do not require an account. We do not sell personal information. Advertising and analytics cookies stay switched off until you press Accept all on the consent banner — and if you press Essential only, no advertising or analytics identifier is written to your device at all.

The two situations where you deliberately hand us data are the newsletter form and the contact form. Both are optional, and both are described below.

2. Who we are

Cluckology is an independent publication about the domestic chicken, operating the website trafficstacklynx.net. For the purposes of the GDPR we are the data controller for personal data processed through this website.

Write to us about anything in this policy at privacy@trafficstacklynx.net. We respond to data-protection requests within 30 days, and will tell you promptly if we need an extension.

3. What we collect

3.1 Information you give us

• Newsletter sign-up: your email address, plus the date and time of the subscription and the confirmation event.
• Contact form or email: your name, email address, the topic you select, and the content of your message.
• Correction and permission requests: whatever you choose to include in the message.

We never ask for a date of birth, a postal address, a phone number, a government identifier or payment details. Nothing on this site is for sale, so we do not operate a payment system and never see card data.

3.2 Information collected automatically

• Server logs (always active, strictly necessary): IP address, timestamp, requested URL, HTTP status, referring URL, user-agent string. These are generated by the hosting infrastructure and are needed to serve pages and to detect abuse.
• Consent record (always active, strictly necessary): a single entry in your browser's local storage recording whether you accepted or declined non-essential cookies, so we do not ask again on every page.
• Analytics data (only with consent): pages viewed, approximate location derived from a truncated IP address, device and browser type, referral source, and interaction events such as opening a FAQ entry.
• Advertising data (only with consent): identifiers that let advertising partners limit how often you see an ad, measure whether an ad led to a visit, and personalise which ads are shown.

The interactive features on this site — the myth-or-fact quiz, the animated statistics and the FAQ accordions — run entirely in your browser. Your quiz answers are not transmitted anywhere and are not stored.

4. Why we use it, and our legal basis

We do not carry out automated decision-making or profiling that produces legal effects for you. Ad personalisation is profiling in the ordinary sense, and it happens only if you consent.

5. Cookies and consent

A full, itemised table of every cookie and storage key — including provider, purpose and lifetime — lives in our separate cookie policy. In summary:

• Strictly necessary storage is set without consent because the site cannot function without it. Currently this is only the consent record itself.
• Analytics and advertising cookies are blocked until you accept them. We implement Google Consent Mode v2, which means ad_storage, ad_user_data, ad_personalization and analytics_storage are all set to denied before any tag loads.
• You can change your decision at any time using the cookie settings link, which appears in the footer of every page. Withdrawing consent stops future collection; it does not retroactively delete data already collected, though you can request erasure separately.

6. Google Analytics and Google Ads

This site uses advertising and measurement products supplied by Google Ireland Limited and Google LLC. Because these are the services most people want detail about, they get their own section.

6.1 What is enabled

• Google Analytics 4 — aggregate audience measurement. IP addresses are truncated by Google before storage and we do not enable any feature that would let us identify an individual visitor.
• Google Ads — conversion measurement, and remarketing audiences used to show our own ads to people who have previously visited this site.
• Third-party display advertising — vendors, including Google, may serve ads on this site and use cookies to do so.

6.2 The disclosures Google requires us to make

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites.
• Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites on the internet.
• You may opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings.
• You can opt out of a third-party vendor's use of cookies for personalised advertising at aboutads.info and the NAI opt-out page. European visitors can also use Your Online Choices.
• Google's own explanation of how it handles data from sites that use its services is at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites, and its privacy policy is at policies.google.com/privacy.

6.3 Blocking Analytics specifically

Beyond declining consent here, Google publishes a browser add-on that prevents Google Analytics from running on any site: tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

7. Third parties and processors

We keep the list of companies that touch your data deliberately short.

Each processor is bound by a data-processing agreement and may only use the data to provide the service to us. We may also disclose data where we are legally required to, or to protect our rights, but we have no interest in doing so otherwise.

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it with data brokers.

8. International transfers

Some of our processors are established in, or transfer data to, the United States. Where personal data leaves the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, the transfer relies on one or more of the following safeguards: the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, or the provider's certification under the EU–US and UK–US Data Privacy Framework. You can ask us for details of the safeguard applying to a specific provider.

9. How long we keep data

10. Your rights

If the GDPR or UK GDPR applies to you, you have the right to:

• Access — get a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Rectification — have inaccurate data corrected.
• Erasure — have your data deleted where no overriding basis to keep it applies.
• Restriction — have us pause processing while a dispute is resolved.
• Portability — receive data you gave us in a machine-readable format.
• Objection — object to processing based on legitimate interests.
• Withdrawal of consent — at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing before withdrawal.

To exercise any of these, email privacy@trafficstacklynx.net. We do not charge a fee, and we do not require you to create an account to make a request. We may ask a question or two to confirm you are the person the data relates to.

11. California residents

Under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA you have the right to know what personal information is collected, to delete it, to correct it, and to opt out of its sale or sharing for cross-context behavioural advertising.

We do not sell personal information as that term is defined in the CCPA, and we do not knowingly share the personal information of anyone under 16 for cross-context behavioural advertising. Declining non-essential cookies on the consent banner, or sending a Global Privacy Control signal from your browser, functions as an opt-out of sharing for advertising purposes. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights.

12. Children

This site is written for a general audience and is not directed at children under 13 (or under 16 in the EEA and the UK). We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, contact privacy@trafficstacklynx.net and we will delete it promptly.

The Chicken Road game features are suitable for all ages and contain no wagering, purchases or user-to-user communication.

13. Security

The site is served exclusively over HTTPS. We apply a restrictive content security policy, keep the number of third-party scripts to a minimum, and store no personal data on the web server itself. Correspondence and newsletter data sit with the providers named above, protected by multi-factor authentication on our accounts.

No system is perfectly secure. If we become aware of a breach affecting your personal data, we will notify the relevant supervisory authority within 72 hours and inform you directly where the law requires it.

14. Do Not Track and global signals

There is still no agreed standard for handling the Do Not Track header, so we do not rely on it. We do honour the Global Privacy Control (Sec-GPC) signal: if your browser sends it, we treat it as a refusal of advertising and analytics cookies without showing you the banner.

15. Changes to this policy

When we change this policy we update the date at the top of the page. If a change materially affects how we use your data, we will reset the consent banner so you are asked again rather than opted in silently.

16. Complaints

Please raise a concern with us first at privacy@trafficstacklynx.net — most issues are a misunderstanding we can fix quickly. You also have the right to complain directly to a supervisory authority: in the EEA, the data protection authority of your country of residence; in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

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Related documents: cookie policy · terms of use · about and editorial standards.