Privacy Policy

Last updated: 1 October 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how personal information is handled when you visit Meditation Research, subscribe to the newsletter, create a membership account, become a Research Member, post a comment, or contact us.

1. Who is responsible for your information?

Meditation Research is a trading name of Peter Malinowski, sole trader in the United Kingdom. Peter Malinowski is the data controller for the personal information described in this policy, except where a third-party provider acts independently under its own privacy terms.

Peter Malinowski
Level One, Basecamp Liverpool
49 Jamaica Street
Liverpool
L1 0AH GB

Email: admin@meditation-research.org.uk

Meditation Research is hosted and operated using Ghost(Pro), a managed publishing platform that provides the website, membership accounts, newsletters and comments. In this policy, 'Ghost' refers to that service.

2. What information we collect and why

The information we process depends on how you use the site.

Visiting the website

When you visit the site, technical information may be processed as part of normal website operation, security and server logging. This may include your IP address, browser and device information, requested pages, referrer information and the date and time of a request.

We use this information where necessary to operate, secure and troubleshoot the website and to protect it against abuse. Our lawful basis under UK data-protection law is our legitimate interest in running a secure and reliable website.

Website analytics

We use Ghost's built-in web analytics, which uses Tinybird as its analytics infrastructure provider. Ghost states that this analytics system is cookie-free and does not use persistent browser storage to identify visitors across sessions, browsers or devices. It provides aggregate information such as page views, referrers and member-source attribution. For Ghost(Pro) sites, Ghost states that analytics data is stored in EU regions.

We use this information to understand which content is useful to readers and how people find the site. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in understanding and improving Meditation Research without using behavioural advertising or cross-site tracking.

Membership accounts

If you create a free or paid membership account, Ghost processes information such as your email address, name where supplied, membership status, signup source, subscription details and account activity needed to provide the membership service.

Ghost uses passwordless sign-in links. When you sign in, Ghost may set cookies needed to recognise your member session and keep you signed in.

We process membership information because it is necessary to provide the service you request and to administer our contract with paid members.

Paid memberships and Stripe

Payments for Research Membership are processed by Stripe. Stripe processes payment and fraud-prevention information under its own privacy terms. We do not receive or store your full card details.

Because Ghost's built-in membership and signup interface (called Portal) is used for paid membership, Stripe technology is loaded as part of the site even before a visitor opens checkout. This may involve network requests to Stripe and fraud-prevention cookies such as __stripe_mid, __stripe_sid and related Stripe security technology. These are used in connection with payment security and fraud prevention rather than advertising or audience profiling.

We process the membership and transaction information we receive from Stripe as necessary to administer your membership, payments, accounting and related legal obligations.

If you subscribe to the free newsletter, we use your email address to send the newsletter and research updates you have requested.

If you become a Research Member, the Meditation Research newsletter and related research updates are included as part of your membership service. You can unsubscribe from newsletter emails at any time without cancelling your Research Membership.

We may retain a suppression record after you unsubscribe so that we do not accidentally add you back to a mailing list you have opted out of.

We do not use newsletter open or click tracking. Ghost's newsletter engagement tracking is disabled for Meditation Research.

Comments

Paid members can comment on eligible blog posts using Ghost's native commenting system. If you post a comment, Ghost associates it with your member account and processes the comment and related account information in order to publish and administer the discussion.

We use this information to provide the commenting feature, to moderate discussions and to protect the site and other users where necessary.

If your member account is later deleted, Ghost may retain comments already posted while replacing the author identity with a label such as "Deleted member". You can contact us if you want us to consider removing a particular comment.

Contacting us

If you email us, we process your email address, the contents of your message and any other information you provide so that we can respond and keep an appropriate record of the correspondence.

Depending on the context, our lawful basis will usually be taking steps at your request before entering into a contract, performing a contract, or our legitimate interest in responding to enquiries and administering Meditation Research.

3. Cookies and similar technologies

Meditation Research does not use advertising cookies or third-party behavioural analytics.

Some cookies or similar technologies are nevertheless used to provide functions of the site, including:

Ghost member-session cookies when you sign in;
Stripe security and fraud-prevention technology associated with paid membership and Ghost Portal; and
any temporary technical storage needed to operate site features.

Ghost's native website analytics is cookie-free.

YouTube videos are not loaded automatically. Where a post contains a YouTube video, the site first displays a local placeholder. No YouTube player is loaded until you deliberately click to play the video. When you do so, the video is loaded from YouTube's privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com domain and your browser then connects to Google/YouTube. Google's privacy terms apply to that interaction.

The site currently loads the Figtree web font from Google Fonts, Google's web-font service. As a result, your browser connects to Google's font servers and sends technical information such as your IP address in order to retrieve the font files.

4. Services and organisations that process information

We use a small number of providers to operate Meditation Research. Links below lead to the providers' own privacy information where available. These include:

Ghost(Pro) for website hosting, membership accounts, newsletters, comments and related infrastructure;
Tinybird, through Ghost's native analytics, for aggregate website analytics;
Stripe for paid memberships, payment processing and fraud prevention;
Google Fonts for web-font delivery; and
Google/YouTube when you choose to load an embedded YouTube video.

Some providers use their own sub-processors. Where a provider does not publish a complete sub-processor list publicly, we do not attempt to guess or reproduce it here.

These providers may process information outside the United Kingdom. Where UK data-protection law requires safeguards for an international transfer, the relevant provider is expected to use an applicable adequacy arrangement or other lawful transfer mechanism. Their own privacy notices provide further information about their processing and international operations.

5. How long we keep information

We keep personal information only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purpose for which it was collected, taking account of legal, accounting, security and dispute-resolution requirements.

In particular:

cancelling a paid subscription does not automatically delete your Ghost member account;
membership information may therefore remain until the account is deleted or no longer reasonably needs to be retained;
if we delete a member account, Ghost may retain existing comments in anonymised/de-identified form such as "Deleted member";
Stripe retains transaction and payment-related information according to its own legal and regulatory retention obligations; and
an email address may remain on a suppression list after newsletter unsubscribe so that we can honour the opt-out.

If you would like us to consider deleting your membership account or other personal information, contact us at admin@meditation-research.org.uk. Some information may need to be retained where the law requires it or where it is reasonably necessary for legal claims, fraud prevention or accounting.

6. Our lawful bases

Depending on the processing involved, we rely on one or more of the following lawful bases under UK data-protection law:

contract — where processing is necessary to provide a membership or another service you have requested;
consent — for example where you independently choose to subscribe to the free newsletter and consent is the appropriate basis;
legitimate interests — for proportionate activities such as securing and administering the website, responding to correspondence, moderating comments and using privacy-preserving aggregate analytics; and
legal obligation — where information must be retained or processed to meet tax, accounting or other legal requirements.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we consider whether the processing is necessary and whether your interests, rights or freedoms override those interests.

7. Your rights

Depending on the circumstances, UK data-protection law may give you the right to:

ask for access to personal information we hold about you;
ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete information;
ask us to delete information in certain circumstances;
ask us to restrict processing in certain circumstances;
object to processing based on legitimate interests;
object at any time to the use of your personal information for direct marketing;
receive certain information in a portable format where the right to data portability applies; and
withdraw consent at any time where we rely on consent, without affecting processing that was lawful before withdrawal.

These rights are not absolute and may be subject to exemptions or legal requirements.

To exercise a right, email admin@meditation-research.org.uk. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request.

8. Complaints

If you have a concern about how we use your personal information, please contact us first and we will try to resolve it.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK's data-protection regulator. Information about how to make a complaint is available at https://ico.org.uk.

9. Security

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect personal information against unauthorised access, loss, misuse or alteration. No internet service can guarantee absolute security, but we use established hosted services and encrypted HTTPS connections appropriate to the nature of the site.

10. Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy when the site, our providers or legal requirements change. The current version will always be published on this page with its update date.