The Old Country

Privacy

Plain words about what this site collects, how we watch how the site is used, and what our social-media tools can see. Last updated 5 September 2026.

Who we are

The Old Country is a small publisher of Scottish and Irish surname histories, run by The Good Company (Dubai, UAE). This site is theoldcountrytv.com. You can reach us at hello@thegoodcompany.me.

What this website collects

Very little, and nothing hidden.

• The free clan chart. If you ask for it, you give us an email address. We use it to send the chart and, only if you tick the box, occasional emails about new reports. Every one has an unsubscribe link. We never sell or share the list.
• Buying a report. Payment is handled entirely by Stripe. We never see or store your card details. We receive your email address so we can deliver the report and help if something goes wrong.
• Commissioning a surname report. You tell us a surname and an email. That is what we keep.
• Giving a report as a gift. You give us the recipient's email address, a name for the card and, if you like, a message. We keep those with your own order email until the report has been sent on the day you chose, so we can fix a wrong address or date if you ask. The recipient gets one email, on the day, and is not added to any list.
• Asking to be told when a name is written. If your surname is not on the shelf you can leave an email to be told when it is. We keep that email and the surname together, send one confirmation, and one more email the day the report exists. Only if you tick the box do we add you to the occasional-emails list.

Our own counter, which stays anonymous

Our page-view counter records which pages are visited and which surnames are searched, so we know what to write next. By design it stores no cookies, no visitor ID, no IP address and no browser fingerprint. It cannot tell one visitor from another, and we built it that way on purpose. A separate analytics beacon from our hosting provider (Cloudflare) reports country and device type in aggregate only.

Session recording and heatmaps

Since 1 September 2026 this site also uses two outside tools, Microsoft Clarity and Contentsquare (formerly Hotjar), to understand how people actually use the pages. We are telling you plainly because these are a different thing from the counter above.

• What they record. A replay of your visit to this site: the pages you open, where you move and click, how far you scroll, and roughly where in the world you are. They also build aggregate heatmaps showing where visitors click and stop reading.
• They set cookies. Unlike our own counter, both tools store a cookie or similar identifier in your browser so a single visit hangs together as one session. They start working as soon as a page loads.
• What is hidden from them. Both are set to mask what you type. The surname you enter, your email address and everything on Stripe's payment pages are not captured as readable text. We never see your card details in any form — those pages belong to Stripe, not to us.
• We do not use them to identify you. We read them to fix confusing pages, not to build a profile of any individual, and we never match a recording to a customer, an order or an email address.
• Opting out. Contentsquare offers its own opt-out at hotjar.com/policies/do-not-track and honours a browser Do Not Track setting. Clarity is governed by the Microsoft Privacy Statement. Blocking third-party scripts in your browser, or using its private mode, stops both. Nothing on this site stops working if you do.

If you would rather we deleted a recording of your visit, email us and we will — see Your rights below.

Our Instagram and TikTok tools

We run our own small software to post our videos to Instagram and TikTok and to read and reply to comments on them. That software connects only to our own accounts (@theoldcountrytv). It reads the public comments left on our posts — the same comments anyone can see — so that we can answer surname requests. It does not access anyone's private account, messages, followers or profile beyond what Instagram and TikTok show publicly. Nothing from those platforms is sold, shared, or combined with data from this site.

Data we keep, and for how long

• Clan-chart emails: until you unsubscribe.
• Notify-me requests: the email and the surname, until the report is written and its one email sent, or until you ask us to delete it.
• Gift orders: the recipient's address, the card name and the message, until the report has been sent on the chosen day, and after that only as part of the order record.
• Order emails: as long as we need to deliver and support the report, and as required for accounting.
• Surname searches and page counts: indefinitely, but they contain nothing personal.
• Clarity session recordings: 30 days. Heatmaps built from them: 9 months.
• Contentsquare session recordings and heatmaps: 1 month.

Your rights

Ask us at any time what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, and we will. Email hello@thegoodcompany.me. Unsubscribing from emails is one click, in every email.

Third parties we rely on

Stripe (payments), Resend (email delivery), Cloudflare (hosting and analytics), Microsoft (Clarity) and Contentsquare for the session recording described above, and the Instagram and TikTok platforms themselves. Each has its own privacy policy, and each sees only what it needs for its own job.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, the date at the top will change with it.