Privacy & Cookies

Last updated 4 September 2026

Who we are

This website is run by York Lodge No. 236, a Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons in the Province of Yorkshire, North & East Ridings, meeting at the Masonic Hall, Duncombe Place, York, YO1 7ED. For the purposes of data protection law, the Lodge is the data controller for the personal data described here.

Questions about this notice, or about your data, should go to the Lodge Secretary [contact details to be confirmed].

Cookies and similar technology

This site keeps things deliberately simple. It does not run advertising or analytics trackers of any kind.

• Signing in. If you sign in to the members area, your browser stores a small piece of data (using localStorage, a browser storage technology similar to a cookie) so that you stay signed in as you move between pages. This is strictly necessary for the members area to work, and is removed when you sign out.
• Remembering your cookie choice. When you dismiss the banner on this site, we store that choice in the same way, so we don’t ask again on every page.
• Fonts. Page text is displayed using Google Fonts, loaded from Google’s servers. Loading a font involves your browser making a request to Google, which will see the request came from your IP address. Google’s own privacy policy applies to that request.

Because none of this is used for advertising, profiling or analytics, and everything here is either strictly necessary or a basic part of showing the page, we don’t run a cookie preference centre with categories to switch on and off — there is nothing optional to switch off. If that changes (for example, if analytics are added later) this notice, and the banner, will be updated first.

If you contact us or make an enquiry

If you use the enquiry form on this site, or email or write to us, we will use the details you give us (such as your name and email address) only to respond to you, and to consider any application to join the Lodge. We do not add you to any mailing list without your separate agreement.

If you are a member

Members of the Lodge hold an account in a members’ area that is not visible to the public. To administer the Lodge, we hold considerably more information about members than about a visitor to the public site, including:

• Name, preferred name, email address, telephone number and postal address
• Date of birth
• Masonic details: Mother Lodge, Lodge of initiation, date of initiation, Craft degree and the Lodge offices you hold or have held
• A scanned or photographed copy of your certificate of initiation, if you choose to upload one
• Dietary requirements and allergies, for catering at the Festive Board
• Emergency contact details

We ask for this because it is what a Masonic Lodge needs in order to run: to know who its members are, to organise dining safely, to reach someone in an emergency, and to keep the kind of record of Masonic progress that is customary in Freemasonry. We do not use it for any other purpose, and none of it is visible to the public.

Dietary requirements and allergy information can reveal something about your health, which UK data protection law treats as a more sensitive (“special category”) type of data. We only hold this because you choose to tell us, when you explicitly agree to this notice and enter it yourself — you are always free to leave it blank.

Emergency contact details belong to someone else, not you. By giving them to us, you are confirming that person is happy for the Lodge to hold their name and telephone number for use in a genuine emergency.

Most of your profile is visible only to you and to Lodge administrators (typically the Secretary). A limited subset — your name, the offices you hold and your Mother Lodge — is visible to other signed-in members on the membership roll, so that Brethren can see who is who. Your address, phone number, date of birth, dietary and allergy information, emergency contact and certificate are never shown to other members.

Our legal basis for processing member data

We process most member data because it is necessary to administer your membership of the Lodge, which is a legitimate interest of the Lodge and something you would reasonably expect. Where we hold anything more sensitive — principally dietary and allergy information — we rely on your explicit consent, given when you accept this notice, and on the vital interest of keeping you safe in a genuine emergency.

Who we share it with

We use a small number of specialist service providers to run this website. Each acts as a data processor on our behalf, under a contract, and is not permitted to use your data for its own purposes:

• Supabase — hosts the Lodge database, in the EU.
• Netlify — hosts this website.
• Brevo — sends emails on the Lodge’s behalf, such as invitations and notices.

We do not sell or rent personal data to anyone, and we do not share it with other organisations for their own marketing.

How long we keep it

We keep member data for as long as you remain a member, and for a reasonable period afterwards for the Lodge’s own records and archive. [The Lodge is still finalising exact retention periods; this section will be updated once agreed.] You can ask us to delete your data sooner — see “Your rights” below.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

• ask what personal data we hold about you, and get a copy (a “subject access request”)
• ask us to correct anything that is inaccurate
• ask us to delete your data, or restrict how we use it, in certain circumstances
• object to processing based on our legitimate interests
• ask for a copy of your data in a portable format
• withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on consent (for example, dietary or allergy information)

Much of this you can already do yourself, at My details once signed in. For anything else, contact the Lodge Secretary. If you are unhappy with our response, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s data protection regulator.

Changes to this notice

We may update this notice from time to time. If a change is significant, members will be asked to review and accept it again the next time they sign in, before continuing into the members area.