Privacy Policy

Who we are

FarmFinder.ie is a free, open directory of Irish food producers, operated by Robert Porter (the data controller for the purposes of the EU General Data Protection Regulation). Contact: info@farmfinder.ie.

If you just browse the site

• Analytics: we use Plausible, a cookieless, EU-hosted analytics tool. It counts page views in aggregate and cannot identify you, follow you across the web, or build a profile of you. It respects your browser's "Do Not Track" setting.
• Browser storage: your favourites, preferences and recent searches are stored in your own browser (localStorage) and are not sent to us.
• Rate limiting: to keep the AI meal planner free and prevent abuse, we record a one-way hash of your IP address (not the address itself) against a daily usage count. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in protecting the service. Retention: 12 months.

If you create an account

Accounts are optional. If you sign up (email/password or Google/Facebook sign-in) we process your email address, display name, and anything you choose to save — favourites, saved meal plans, and meal planner preferences (county, budget, household size, dietary preferences). Legal basis: performance of a contract (providing the features you signed up for).

Deleting your account is self-serve and immediate: Dashboard → Settings → Delete account. This permanently removes your profile, saved plans, preferences and any business claims. Shared meal-plan links you created stop working.

If you use the AI meal planner

Your meal-planning request (county, locality, budget, household size, dietary preferences, disliked ingredients, pantry items) is sent to Anthropic, our AI processor, to generate your plan. Under our agreement with Anthropic, this data is not used to train AI models. Plans are not stored on our servers unless you explicitly save them to your account.

Dietary preferences can be sensitive (they may hint at health or beliefs). We use them only to build your plan, store them only if you save them, and you can delete them at any time.

Producers and listed businesses

This section is our transparency notice under Article 14 GDPR for the people behind the businesses we list — many Irish food producers are sole traders, so their business details are also personal data.

• What we list: business name, address/Eircode, location coordinates, products, opening hours, website, business phone and email, and a short description.
• Where it comes from: publicly available sources — established directories (e.g. Good Food Ireland, Farm Shops Ireland, Bord Bia programmes, craft and trade associations), official public registers (e.g. the UK Food Hygiene Rating Scheme for Northern Ireland), OpenStreetMap, YourHonestyBox, producers' own public websites, and submissions from producers or the community. Every listing credits its source and links back to the original listing where the source provides a per-listing link.
• Why (legal basis): our legitimate interest — and the public's — in a free, open directory that helps people buy food directly from local producers. We list only business-facing details that producers have already made public to attract customers; we believe this is squarely within their reasonable expectations. Individual notice to every listed producer would involve disproportionate effort (Art 14(5)(b)), so this public notice applies instead.
• Your controls as a producer: (1) claim your listing (free) to edit it yourself and see its statistics; (2) use the "request a correction or removal" link at the bottom of your listing page; or (3) email us. We act on removal and correction requests within 30 days, normally much faster. Objection to being listed (Art 21) is honoured by delisting — we don't argue with farmers.

If you claim a business

Claiming requires verifying you represent the business — via your business email domain, the contact email on file, or an uploaded document (e.g. business registration). Verification documents are stored privately in EU data centres, used solely to decide the claim, never published, and deleted on request. Claim records are kept while your ownership of the listing stands.

Who processes data for us

We don't sell or share personal data for marketing. These processors handle data on our instructions:

Where processing happens in the United States, it is covered by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and/or Standard Contractual Clauses. Donations via Buy Me a Coffee happen entirely on their site under their own privacy policy — we receive no personal data from them.

How long we keep things

Cookies and browser storage

We use no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, which is why you don't see a cookie banner. The only browser storage we use is strictly necessary or holds features you asked for:

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can:

• Access the personal data we hold about you (Art 15)
• Correct inaccurate data (Art 16)
• Erase your data (Art 17) — self-serve for accounts, one link for listings
• Restrict or object to processing (Arts 18 & 21)
• Port your data to another service (Art 20)

Exercise any of these via info@farmfinder.ie or the contact form — we respond within 30 days. You also have the right to complain to the Irish supervisory authority, the Data Protection Commission.

Children

FarmFinder is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect children's data. Household composition in the meal planner ("2 adults, 2 children") is a portion-sizing number, not data about identifiable children.

Changes

We'll update this policy as the service evolves and change the date at the top. Material changes affecting account holders will be flagged on the site.