Hundreds of protected areas are under pressure from Scotland’s massive deer herd. Most agree deer numbers must be controlled to protect the environment, but are split on what should be done.
Edinburgh University students were “interrogated” by police at their desks over posters featuring Palestinians killed by the Israeli military, prompting dozens to complain.
Unsafe levels of faecal bacteria were recorded at dozens of Scotland’s best beaches this summer. Swimmers and paddlers could be at risk, but officials insist water quality remains high.
The Ferret is committed to maintaining your privacy and collects only the minimum information we need about you to provide our services effectively.
We will collect and use individual user details only if we have your permission or where we need to do so in order to manage your membership, for marketing our stories and events and products, and providing key services and updates to members.
We never sell, trade, or rent personal identification information to others. We may access, preserve, or disclose personal information only when required by law, regulation, or legal process. This could include responding to lawful requests from public authorities or to protect the rights, property, or safety of our organisation, our members, or others.
Some of our webpages use content provided by other organisations. For example, this could include embedded media from Youtube or Twitter. If you browse our website, whilst also being logged into an account with these companies they may be able to link your use of The Ferret website to your account with them.
On our website, all registered users, via their account page, can manage and edit key personal information we hold about them from this page, as well as contact preferences.
Information from our website, community and membership systems is kept separate from the data we may hold in order to help us produce journalism.
Our journalists may gather, receive and store personal information in the course of writing, producing and researching stories for this website.
The law sets out the basis on which we may do this. More information on regulations that apply are available on the Scottish Information Commissioner’s website.
We only keep material held for this purpose for as long as we require it, and we work to ensure it is stored securely.
The Ferret is regulated by Impress and therefore required to comply with the Impress Standards Code. It has a specific section on privacy and related guidance materials.
The Ferret will only store your personal data for as long as it is necessary to provide you with a service or to comply with applicable laws and standards set-out by any relevant regulatory bodies.
The Ferret uses cookies and tracking ‘tags’ in order to provide access to our stories depending on your membership level.
A cookie is a small file that stores information in your browser. A tracking ‘tag’ is a piece of code that may gather information about your browser, and the way you use our website.
Our paywall is essential to the functioning of our service. When you visit our site we add a cookie to your browser that monitors how many pages before the paywall you have viewed. It does not pass any information to other third parties. If you wish to opt-out of this cookie from our site, please alter the settings in your browser.
Our security software also uses a cookie to keep our users safe and protect our site against unauthorised use.
From time to time we may also use trackers provided by some third party organisations, in order to better understand the demographics of our audience and our members and the way they are using our site. This helps us to make the most efficient use of our digital marketing budget and may inform other management decisions.
You should be able to manage how they treat the information they derive from tracking technologies on their sites.
At checkout, we will collect your name and email address. This information is used to set up your account for our site.
At checkout, we may also collect your credit card number, expiration date, and security code. This information is passed to our payment gateway to process your purchase. The last 4 digits of your credit card number and the expiration date are saved by our subscription management service providers to use for reference and to send you an email if your credit card will expire before the next recurring payment.
We use cookies to track some of your activity on our site including logins, visits, and page views.
If you are a member of The Ferret and are logged in you will be able to leave a comment below our articles. If you comment on a story, you should be aware that anything you write or link to will be publicly available, if it is approved.
You can only comment if you are registered with the site. We may set additional cookies to make it easier for you to add a comment.
We use a service called Freshdesk to manage our inbound emails and provide support services. The Freshdesk privacy policy is here.
From time to time we may send surveys or questionnaires to our readers, members or stakeholders. We may retain personal information we receive through these surveys and combine it with other records we have about you. We do this so that we can better understand the views of our readers, to provide a better service to our members, and to improve The Ferret.
We may analyse and aggregate information you provide to us and share it publicly or with third parties – such as funders. However, we will not share identifiable personal information about you that has been gathered this way without your explicit permission.
Access to the data collected is strictly limited only to staff who need access to do their work.
When you subscribe to The Ferret, online card payments are managed on our behalf by Stripe. You can find the Stripe privacy policy here.
Donations to The Ferret are handled via Paypal or Stripe. In some circumstances you may also be able to make payments to us using Google Pay or Apple Pay. They also make some of your personal details available to us, but they do not share details of your payment card or bank account with us.
We may use third-party services to help us promote and manage events.
For example, we have used Eventbrite to help us sell tickets and promote our events. Therefore when you buy a ticket for one of our events you may share some personal information with these services.
We will use the information shared to us by these third-party services to contact you in connection with the event and also, if you agree, other subsequent Ferret initiatives you may be interested in.
If you attend an event organised through these services you will always be able to opt-out of any direct communications from us, although this may mean that you do not receive important information relating to the event. You will also be able to contact the third party service provider to manage any data they may hold about you.
The main Ferret website is hosted via Ghost. Our membership onboarding and some other functionality is provided by Outpost.
We use a number of third-party productivity tools to manage our activities. These include Slack, Trello, and Google G-Suite.
We audit these tools regularly to ensure that only appropriate people have access and that any personal data is not retained for longer than necessary.
Sometimes we may perform automated analysis on the personal data that we hold. This analysis may also be informed by data from other publicly available information sources.
We do this in order to ensure the communications we send are as useful as possible and the marketing we undertake is appropriately targeted.
For example, we may analyse the responses we get to messages we send to identify people who frequently read them and people who rarely read them. We may try to group our audience by interest, location or contact preference, and send communications tailored to these groups.
Similarly, we may send automated messages to people whose subscription is due to end in order to remind them that they need to renew their membership.
We do not sell the results of these analyses to any third-party organisations.
You may, at any time ask us to confirm whether or not we are processing personal data about you and, if we are, you shall have the right to access that personal data and to the following information:
Upon request, we shall (without adversely affecting the rights and freedoms of others including our own) provide you with a copy of the personal data undergoing processing within one month of receipt of the request, which period may be extended by two months where necessary, taking into account the complexity and number of the requests.
We shall inform you of any such extension within one month of receipt of the request, together with the reasons for the delay.
If you are a paying member, you can cancel your account by logging in and altering your billing details on the account page.
You can request a copy of all the data we hold about you, or request that we delete all the data we hold about you by asking us using our contact page.
This policy was last updated on 13/11/2025.
