Privacy Policy

Last updated: 26 July 2026

The short version

We only collect what you type into a form yourself. There is no account to create, no newsletter, no advertising.
Audience measurement stays off until you accept it. Declining costs you nothing — every page works exactly the same.
We never sell or rent your information, and we never share it for advertising.

Who we are

Lighthouse School is an English-speaking Christian school in Antananarivo, Madagascar, for children from 3 months to 10 years old. We decide what this website collects and why — in legal terms, we are the data controller.

Lighthouse School
EAN 132 Antsofinondry, Sabotsy Namehana, Antananarivo, Madagascar
lighthouse.school261@gmail.com · +261 34 09 621 67

What we collect, and why

The online registration form

If you register a child online, we collect the child’s full name, date of birth, chosen programme and desired start date, together with the parent or guardian’s full name, phone number, email address, home address, and an optional message.

Why: to process and follow up your admission request. That is the only purpose.

Where it goes: the request is saved as a private record inside the school’s own management tool, on this website’s server. Only the head teacher and the admissions staff can open it. It is never published, and its page is not reachable from the public site.

The contact form

The contact form sends nothing to this website. When you press send, it opens your own email program with the message already written; you send it yourself, from your own address. We then hold your message in the school’s mailbox, like any other email.

Protection against automated submissions

When a registration is submitted, the server counts how many requests came from the same internet connection in the past hour and refuses more than five. Your IP address is not stored with your request: it is turned into a one-way fingerprint held in a temporary entry that expires after one hour.

Audience measurement — only if you accept

If you accept cookies, we load Google Analytics 4, which tells us which pages are actually read, from which country, and on which kind of device. We use it for nothing else: there is no advertising tag anywhere on this site.

If you decline — or simply ignore the banner — Google Analytics is never loaded, and any analytics cookie left by an earlier acceptance is deleted. You can change your mind at any time with the Cookie settings link at the bottom of every page.

Cookies

Every cookie this site can place, and nothing else.
Cookie	Set by	What it does	Lifetime
`lh_consent`	This site	Remembers whether you accepted or declined measurement. It contains one word — “granted” or “denied” — and identifies nobody.	180 days
`_ga`, `_ga_…`	Google	Tells returning visits apart for Google Analytics. Placed only after you accept.	Up to 2 years

School staff who sign in also receive WordPress session cookies. That does not concern visitors.

Photographs of children

This website shows photographs taken at school in which pupils can be recognised. They are published for one purpose only: to show families what daily life here looks like. They are never sold, never given to a third party, and never used for advertising.

Your child’s image belongs to you. A parent or legal guardian may refuse it, or withdraw an agreement already given, at any time and without giving a reason. Write to lighthouse.school261@gmail.com naming your child; we remove the photograph from the website within seven days, and from our own social media as soon as we can reach it there.

Withdrawing changes nothing about your child’s place, teaching or treatment at the school.

The map on the Contact page

Our Contact and About pages show a Google map so families can find the school. It does not load on its own. The page shows a button, and nothing is requested from Google until you press it — so simply opening those pages tells Google nothing about you.

If you press it, Google receives your IP address and browser details, as it would for any map. The address, the phone number and the directions link work without loading the map at all.

Who else sees your data

OVH — our hosting provider. The website and its database sit on an OVH server in France, so this data is stored outside Madagascar.
Google — Google Analytics (only after you accept), Google Maps (only if you press the button), and Gmail for the school’s mailbox. Google may process this data outside Madagascar and outside Europe.
Nobody else. No advertising network, no data broker, no social network tracker.

How long we keep it

A registration request that does not lead to enrolment: deleted or anonymised within 12 months of the last contact.
A registration that leads to enrolment: it becomes part of the pupil’s school record and follows the school’s archiving rules, which exist so that a former pupil can still obtain proof of their schooling years later.
Your cookie choice: 180 days, after which we ask again.
Measurement data: kept by Google for the retention period set on our Analytics property.

Your rights

You can ask us at any time to show you what we hold about you or your child, to correct it, to delete it, or to stop a particular use. Write to lighthouse.school261@gmail.com with enough detail for us to find the record. We answer within one month.

The school is established in Madagascar and applies Malagasy law on the protection of personal data; the supervisory authority there is the CMIL. If you are in the European Union, the GDPR gives you the same rights, and you may also complain to your national data protection authority.

Children

The registration form is meant to be filled in by a parent or legal guardian, never by the child. We do not knowingly collect information directly from children through this website.

How we protect it

The whole site is served over HTTPS. Registration records are private and readable only by the staff whose role requires it. The school’s records are backed up in encrypted form, and pupil photographs are stored outside the public part of the server.

Changes to this policy

If anything here changes, we update the date at the top of the page.

Contact