This Privacy Policy explains how Alterplay collects, uses, shares, and protects your personal data when you visit our website, subscribe to our alerts, or submit a player report. It applies to everyone who interacts with our site, regardless of where you are based.
We have written this policy in plain English. If anything is unclear, contact us and we will explain.
Who We Are
Alterplay is a casino sister-site research publication operated by [COMPANY_NAME], a company registered in England and Wales under company number [COMPANY_NUMBER], with its registered office at [REGISTERED_ADDRESS].
For the purposes of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018, [COMPANY_NAME] is the data controller for personal data collected through this website. Our ICO data protection registration number is [ICO_REGISTRATION].
If you have any questions about this policy or how we handle your data, you can reach our privacy team at [PRIVACY_EMAIL].
What Information We Collect
We collect three categories of personal data:
Information you give us directly. When you subscribe to our operator alerts, you give us your email address. When you submit a player report, you give us whatever you choose to include in that report — typically a casino brand name, the date of your experience, a description of what happened, and optionally your first name. When you contact us by email, we receive whatever information is in your message.
Information collected automatically. When you visit Alterplay, our hosting infrastructure and analytics tools automatically log technical information about your visit. This includes your IP address, the type of device and browser you are using, the pages you view, the date and time of your visit, the website you came from (if any), and how long you stay on each page. This information is collected through server logs and cookies.
Information from third parties. If you click an affiliate link from Alterplay to a casino operator, the operator's affiliate network may share back limited, aggregated information about whether you registered an account or made a deposit. This information is used to calculate commission. We do not receive your name, email address, account details, or anything you do once you are on the operator's site.
We do not collect special category data (health, ethnicity, political opinions, biometric data, etc.) and we ask you not to include any such data in player report submissions.
How We Use Your Information
We use your personal data for the following purposes:
To send you the operator alerts you signed up for. This is the only marketing email we send. We do not send promotional offers from casinos, and we do not pass your email address to any operator.
To publish player reports. If you submit a report, we may publish it on Alterplay alongside our editorial commentary. We do not publish your email address or any contact details. We do not publish your full name unless you explicitly include it and ask us to.
To run and improve our research. We use aggregated, anonymised analytics data to understand which research articles are useful, which pages have technical problems, and where to focus future investigation.
To track affiliate referrals. If you click through to a partner operator and register an account, the operator's affiliate network records the referral so that we can be paid commission. This is how we fund our research.
To respond to your enquiries. If you email us, we use the information in your message to reply to you.
To meet our legal obligations. We may use or retain personal data where the law requires us to — for example, to respond to lawful requests from regulators, to comply with tax record-keeping rules, or to defend ourselves against legal claims.
To protect our site. We use server logs and security tools to detect, investigate, and block fraud, scraping, automated abuse, and attempts to interfere with our research data.
We do not use your personal data for automated decision-making or profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects on you.
Legal Bases for Processing
Under UK GDPR, every use of personal data must rely on a specific legal basis. We rely on the following:
Consent. When you subscribe to our alerts, you give us consent to send you those emails. You can withdraw that consent at any time using the unsubscribe link in every email. We also rely on consent for non-essential cookies — see the Cookies & Tracking section.
Legitimate interests. We rely on legitimate interests to operate our research index, to understand how visitors use the site through analytics, to track affiliate referrals so we can be paid, and to protect our site from abuse. We have assessed each of these interests against your rights and freedoms and consider them proportionate. You have the right to object to processing based on legitimate interests — see Your Rights.
Contract. When you submit a player report, the act of submission forms a basic contractual relationship with us — you agree to the terms governing submissions, and we agree to consider the report for publication.
Legal obligation. Where we retain or disclose personal data because we are legally required to, we rely on this basis.
Cookies & Tracking
Cookies are small text files stored on your device when you visit a website. We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Strictly necessary cookies keep the site working. They allow you to navigate between pages and remember your preferences during a visit. These cookies do not require consent under UK ePrivacy rules and cannot be turned off without breaking the site.
Analytics cookies help us measure how visitors use Alterplay. We use these cookies to count visits, identify which research articles are most useful, and find pages that have technical problems. The information they collect is aggregated and we cannot identify individual users from it.
Affiliate tracking cookies are set when you click an outbound link to a partner casino operator. These cookies allow the operator's affiliate network to report back to us whether the click resulted in a registration. We do not use these cookies to track you across other websites or to build a profile of your gambling activity.
Third-party cookies may be set by services we use to operate the site (for example, content delivery network providers, font providers, and analytics platforms). We do not control third-party cookies directly — those services have their own privacy policies, which we encourage you to read.
You can control cookies through your browser settings. Most browsers let you block all cookies, block third-party cookies, or delete cookies after each session. Blocking strictly necessary cookies will break parts of Alterplay; blocking analytics or affiliate cookies will not.
If we add a cookie consent banner to Alterplay in the future, you will be able to accept or reject non-essential cookies through that banner, and revisit your choice at any time.
Affiliate Links & Commercial Relationships
Alterplay earns revenue from affiliate partnerships with UK-licensed casino operators. When you click certain links on our site and subsequently register an account with the operator, we may earn a commission.
This relationship is disclosed throughout the site and explained in full on our Affiliate Disclosure page. The commercial relationship does not influence our editorial judgement, our research methodology, or the factual accuracy of our operator profiles. We publish negative findings about partner operators when the public record supports them.
When you click an affiliate link, the destination operator becomes a separate data controller responsible for any personal data it collects from you. We do not see the data you provide to the operator, and the operator does not see the data you have provided to us.
How We Share Your Information
We do not sell your personal data. We do not share it with casino operators for marketing purposes. The only circumstances in which we share personal data are these:
Service providers. We use a small number of third-party services to operate Alterplay — for example, our website host, email delivery provider, analytics provider, and hosting infrastructure. These providers process personal data on our behalf, under contract, and only for the specific purposes we instruct. They are not permitted to use your data for their own purposes.
Affiliate networks. When you click an affiliate link, technical referral data (typically a click ID and timestamp) is shared with the operator's affiliate network so that any subsequent registration can be attributed correctly.
Legal and regulatory disclosure. We may disclose personal data where we are legally required to — for example, in response to a court order, a lawful regulator request, or a tax investigation.
Corporate transactions. If [COMPANY_NAME] is sold, restructured, or merged, personal data may be transferred to the new owner as part of that transaction. We will notify subscribers in advance and will not transfer data to a buyer that does not commit to honouring this Privacy Policy.
We do not transfer personal data to advertising networks, data brokers, or any party seeking to use it for unrelated commercial purposes.
International Data Transfers
Some of our service providers are located outside the United Kingdom. Where personal data is transferred outside the UK, we rely on one of the following safeguards required by UK GDPR:
A UK adequacy decision, where the destination country has been formally recognised by the UK government as providing equivalent data protection.
International Data Transfer Agreements (IDTAs) or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, where no adequacy decision exists.
Specific exemptions in narrow circumstances, such as where the transfer is necessary to perform a contract with you.
If you would like more information about a specific transfer or to obtain a copy of the safeguards in place, contact us at [PRIVACY_EMAIL].
Data Retention
We do not keep personal data longer than we need it. The retention periods we apply are:
Subscriber email addresses are retained for as long as you remain subscribed, plus a short period after unsubscribe to prevent accidental re-addition. Unsubscribed addresses are then deleted or anonymised.
Player report submissions are retained indefinitely as part of our research record, but identifying details (email address, full name) are stripped from any published version, and any unpublished submissions are deleted within 12 months unless we have a specific reason to retain them.
Server logs containing IP addresses and request data are retained for up to 90 days for security and debugging purposes, then deleted.
Email correspondence with our support team is retained for up to 24 months after the conversation closes, then deleted.
Affiliate referral records are retained for as long as required by our partner operators' commission reconciliation processes, typically up to 24 months after the referral.
Where we are required by law to retain data for longer (for example, accounting records under UK tax law), we will do so for the period required and no longer.
Your Rights Under UK GDPR
UK GDPR gives you the following rights over your personal data:
The right to be informed about how we collect and use your data — which is what this policy is for.
The right of access to a copy of the personal data we hold about you. You can request this at any time by emailing [PRIVACY_EMAIL].
The right to rectification of inaccurate or incomplete personal data we hold about you.
The right to erasure (the "right to be forgotten") in certain circumstances — for example, if the data is no longer necessary for the purpose we collected it for, or if you withdraw consent and we have no other legal basis to continue.
The right to restrict processing of your data in certain circumstances, for example while we investigate a rectification request.
The right to data portability — to receive a copy of the personal data you have given us in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, and to ask us to transmit it to another data controller.
The right to object to processing based on legitimate interests, including objection to direct marketing. We will stop processing on receiving a marketing objection. For other legitimate-interest processing, we will stop unless we can show compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests, or we need to continue for the establishment, exercise, or defence of legal claims.
The right to withdraw consent at any time, where we are relying on consent. Withdrawing consent does not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out before withdrawal.
The right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK's data protection regulator. You can contact the ICO at https://ico.org.uk or by phone on 0303 123 1113. We would appreciate the chance to address your concerns first, before you go to the ICO — but you do not have to.
To exercise any of these rights, email [PRIVACY_EMAIL]. We will respond within one calendar month. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request, particularly for access or erasure requests, to make sure we do not disclose data to the wrong person.
There is no fee for exercising your rights, but we may charge a reasonable administrative fee or refuse to act on a request that is manifestly unfounded or excessive (for example, repeated identical requests).
How We Protect Your Information
We take the security of personal data seriously. The technical and organisational measures we use include:
Encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS) on every page of Alterplay, so that data in transit between your browser and our servers cannot be read by third parties.
Access controls on our internal systems, so that only authorised members of our small team can access subscriber lists or unpublished player report submissions.
Regular review of the third-party services we use, including verification that they apply appropriate security measures.
Prompt patching of security vulnerabilities in our hosting platform, content management tools, and dependencies.
Logging and monitoring to detect unauthorised access attempts and unusual activity.
No security measure is perfect, and we cannot guarantee that data transmitted to us over the internet is fully secure. If a personal data breach occurs and presents a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify the ICO within 72 hours and contact affected users without undue delay, as required by UK GDPR.
Children & Age Verification
Alterplay is a research index covering UK-licensed gambling operators. UK law requires gambling participants to be 18 or older. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18, and our content is not directed at children.
If you believe a child has submitted personal data to Alterplay — for example, by subscribing to alerts or submitting a player report — contact us at [PRIVACY_EMAIL] and we will delete the data promptly.
If you are struggling with gambling, support is available from GamCare, BeGambleAware, and GamStop.
Third-Party Sites
Alterplay links to many third-party websites, including UK-licensed casino operators, the UKGC public register, Companies House, and responsible gambling organisations. This Privacy Policy applies only to Alterplay. When you click an outbound link, you are leaving our site and entering a separate website with its own privacy practices.
We are not responsible for the content, privacy practices, or data handling of third-party websites. We encourage you to read the privacy policy of any site you visit, particularly before submitting personal data or registering an account.
Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in how we operate, in the law, or in the services we use. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page tells you when the most recent revision was made.
For minor changes (clarifications, fixed typos, updated contact details) we update the policy without further notice. For significant changes (new categories of data collection, new processing purposes, new categories of recipients) we will notify subscribers by email at least 30 days before the change takes effect, and we will display a notice on the homepage during that period.
Your continued use of Alterplay after a change takes effect constitutes acceptance of the updated policy. If you do not accept a change, you can unsubscribe from alerts and stop using the site.
Contact & Complaints
For any privacy-related question, request, or complaint, contact us by email at [PRIVACY_EMAIL].
For postal correspondence: [COMPANY_NAME], [REGISTERED_ADDRESS].
We will acknowledge your message within five working days and respond substantively within one calendar month, as required by UK GDPR.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office at https://ico.org.uk or by calling 0303 123 1113.