Privacy

This page covers the three places on this website where you can hand us something — the contact form on Connect, the stay request form on Stay, and the newsletter signup. If you go on to apply for membership, the signing system has its own, more detailed notice, and you will be shown it there.

What the forms collect

The contact form asks for your name, your email address, what brought you here, and your message. The stay request form asks for your name, your email address, the dates you have in mind, how many people are coming, what interests you, and anything else you want to tell us. The newsletter signup asks for an email address and which topics you want, and nothing more — it has a section of its own further down.

All three also record the IP address the request came from and the time it arrived. That is used to limit how often the same visitor can submit, which is what keeps the forms from being useful to spammers.

Nothing on this site asks for payment details, and there is nowhere on it to enter any.

Like every web server, ours also keeps standard access logs — the IP address, the page asked for, and the time. We look at them only for security.

What we do with it

Your message is emailed to us and written to a file on the server that only we can read. A real person reads it and writes back. That is the whole purpose — writing to us signs you up for nothing, and nobody who fills in one of these forms is added to any list because of it.

We do not sell, rent, trade, or share any of it with anyone. No marketing partners, no data brokers, no advertising platforms.

The newsletter

There is now a newsletter, and it is the one part of this site that keeps a list. It is kept apart from the forms above on purpose. Nobody who has written to us, and nobody who has ever asked about a stay, has been put on it. The only way onto the list is to type your own address into the signup box and then click a confirmation link we email you — two steps, both of them yours. Until you click, nothing is sent to you and nothing is confirmed.

The list holds your email address, which topics you chose, the date and time you confirmed, and the IP address you confirmed from. Those last two are there so we can show, if anyone ever asks, that you did ask to be there. No name is required, and there is nothing else in the record.

It lives in its own database on our host — separate from the contact submissions, and separate again from the membership signing system, which shares nothing with it. The sending itself goes out through a specialist email delivery service rather than through this website's own host, because a small shared host is not a sound place to send mail from and one bad day would take down the address you use to reach us. That service is Amazon Simple Email Service; it passes each message on and keeps its own delivery records — whether a message was accepted, refused, bounced, or reported as spam. It is the only third party anywhere in this, and there is more about it further down.

We do not track what you do with the emails. There is no invisible image that reports back when you open one, and the links are the real links: they are not rewritten to send your click through a counter on the way. We could not tell you who opened the last one, because we never kept it. What we do see is the plain arithmetic of sending — how many were accepted, how many bounced, how many were marked as spam. That is information about the mail, not about you.

Every email carries an unsubscribe link and it works in one click: no login, no "are you sure", no questionnaire about why you are going. Most email programs will also show their own unsubscribe button at the top of the message, and that works the same way — it takes effect when you press it, not eventually. You can also drop one topic and keep the others, so losing interest in the tiny house does not cost you the notes about when meat is ready. If you would sooner we deleted the record of you altogether rather than marking it unsubscribed, ask and we will.

No cookies, no analytics, no third parties

This website sets no cookies. It runs no analytics, no advertising pixels, no session recording, no heatmaps, and no social media trackers. There are no embedded fonts, scripts, or images loaded from anyone else's servers — every file the page asks your browser for comes from lightfieldfarm.org.

The practical result is that, beyond the routine access logs described above, there is no record of your visit — here or with anyone else. The newsletter's delivery service is the single third party in any of this, it is involved only in carrying mail you asked for, and it never touches these pages.

How long we keep it

Submissions stay in our email and in the server-side log so we can pick the conversation back up later — someone who writes in spring about a summer stay should not have to start over. We do not have a fixed deletion schedule, so if you would like your message removed, ask and we will remove it.

A newsletter subscription is kept as long as you want it. When you unsubscribe we keep one thing: a note not to mail that address again, so that an import or a mistake on our end cannot quietly put you back. If you want even that gone, say so and we will delete the record outright — you should know it means we have nothing left to stop us mailing you by accident.

Where it lives

Our web host's servers are in the United States, so what you send through these forms is stored outside Canada. The newsletter list sits on that same host and is outside Canada for the same reason. While it is there it is subject to United States law, and could in principle be reached by courts or authorities in that country. That includes the possibility that a United States legal process could be served on the hosting company directly, without going through us. We mention it because you have a right to know where your message ends up before you send it — not because anyone has ever asked us for it.

The email delivery service that carries the newsletter is a separate company again, and each message passes through it on the way to you. It is Amazon Simple Email Service, and we send through their Canadian region, in Montreal — so the messages themselves are handled inside Canada even though the list they are addressed from sits on a server in the United States. Amazon is a United States company, so United States law reaches them wherever the servers are, and we would rather say that plainly than let the word "Canadian" do more work than it can.

We chose it for two reasons. It does not track anyone, and it does not insist on it — some of the better-known services cannot be told to stop counting opens and clicks, which would have made the paragraph above untrue. And it is priced per message, so a small list sending a few times a year costs a few dollars, which means nothing about this list ever has to grow to justify itself.

Security

The whole site is served over HTTPS, so what you type on these forms is encrypted in transit. The directory holding submissions is blocked from the web and readable only by us on the server.

We will not overstate this: it is a small farm's website on shared hosting, not a bank. Please do not send anything through these forms that you would be harmed by losing control of. For anything sensitive, ask us and we will find a better channel.

Asking us about your information

Write to community@lightfieldfarm.org and ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. We will do it. You do not need to explain why, and asking will not affect how we treat you.

Changes

If this changes, the change will appear here. Last updated 26 July 2026.