Privacy notice

DRAFT: This page is waiting for review. Figures and wording may change before launch.

About this notice

This notice explains how we use personal information. Personal information means any information that can be linked to you, such as your email address.

It follows UK data protection law. This includes the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). PECR covers cookies and marketing emails.

Some words on this page have a legal meaning. We explain them in plain words as we go. You can also look them up in our glossary.

Who is responsible for your information

The person responsible for your information is called the controller. For this site, the controller is Matt Harrison-Jones (placeholder until the trading business is confirmed). We will add the business name and address here when they are confirmed (DRAFT).

You can contact us about your information at hello@emergencyprepared.co.uk (placeholder).

Our tools: checklist builder, water calculator, household plan and help with costs

These tools run in your web browser, on your own device. When you enter details about your household, such as how many people or pets you have, those details are not sent to us.

The only time household details leave your device is if you ask us to email something to you. You can read about that in the section on emailing your list below.

Help with costs

The help with costs tool asks a few optional questions, such as whether anyone at home is aged 66 or over. It never asks for your income, benefit amounts or names. Your answers stay on your device and are not sent to us. They appear as short codes in the page’s web address, for example ?n=w&a=1, so you can bookmark or share your list. The tool does not save anything.

If you have looked up a postcode on this device before, the tool may fill in which part of the UK you live in. It reads this from the copy of the area page your browser saved for offline use. It reads only the nation, never the postcode, and nothing is sent to us.

Saving your household plan

You can choose to save your household plan. If you do, it is saved only on your device, in your browser’s storage. We cannot see it. You can delete it at any time with the “Delete the plan saved on this device” button on the plan page, or by clearing your browser’s data for this site.

Display settings

If you change the text size, line spacing or colours, we save your choice in your browser’s storage (called localStorage). This is so the site remembers your choice on each page. It stays on your device and is not sent to us. This is “strictly necessary” for the feature you asked for, so the law does not require us to ask for your consent first.

Looking up your area by postcode

When you look up your area, your postcode is sent to our server. Our server then:

• sends your postcode to postcodes.io, a free postcode service, to find your area
• sends your approximate location to the flood warning service for your nation, to find warnings near you. In England this is the Environment Agency. In Wales it is Natural Resources Wales

We don’t keep a record of your postcode or your location. We use them only to answer your question, then they are thrown away. Our server does not write your postcode to its logs.

Your postcode appears in the web address of your results page, for example emergencyprepared.co.uk/area/sw1a1aa/, so you can bookmark or share it. This means it will be in your browser history, like any other page you visit. We ask search engines not to list these pages.

When the household plan looks up your local phone numbers, such as your power cut number, it sends only the first half of your postcode (for example, “SW1A”).

Analytics: how we see which pages are used

We use a service called PostHog to count how people use the site. This helps us find out which pages are useful and what needs fixing.

We set PostHog up so that it:

• does not use cookies
• does not give you an ID that follows you from visit to visit
• does not get your internet address, because what we record goes through our own server first
• counts which pages are visited, without the part of the web address that holds your tool answers
• records the name of the website that sent you here, such as a search engine, but not the page
• records simple events, such as “tool started” or “postcode lookup”

From the help with costs tool, we record only that it was started and finished, and which part of the UK was chosen, if any. We never record the other answers.

We do not record visits to postcode results pages. When someone looks up a postcode, we record only which county it is in, such as “Kent” or “Wrexham”. Where there is no county council, this is the council area. We never record your postcode or the page address, and we do not work out where you are from your internet address.

Our emails

You can sign up to get emails from us, such as reminders to check your kit.

What we store

If you sign up, we store:

• your email address
• the date you signed up
• which emails you agreed to get
• a consent record: what you agreed to, the exact wording you saw, when you agreed, and where on the site you signed up

How signing up works

We use double opt-in. This means that after you sign up, we send you an email with a link. You only start getting our emails after you click that link. This makes sure nobody can sign you up without you knowing.

Product recommendations are separate. We only send you emails about products if you tick a separate box to say yes.

Stopping our emails

Every email has a link to unsubscribe in one click. You can also change which emails you get on our email preferences page.

“Email me this list”

If you use “Email me this list”, or ask for a copy of a printable checklist, we send you one email. We do not keep your list. This does not sign you up to our other emails.

To stop people misusing this to send lots of emails, we keep a scrambled code (called a hash) made from the email address and from your internet address for 24 hours. The code cannot be turned back into your address. We delete it after 24 hours.

Who helps us send emails

• Resend sends our emails.
• Netlify hosts our website, runs our server code and stores our email list in its database.

These companies act on our instructions. They are called processors. They are not allowed to use your information for their own purposes.

Our legal reasons for using your information

The law says we must have a legal reason, called a lawful basis, for using your information.

• Consent for marketing emails. This means you have said yes. You can take back your consent at any time by unsubscribing.
• Legitimate interests for basic security logs. This means we have a fair reason that does not override your rights: keeping the site safe and working. Our hosting provider keeps short-term logs, such as internet addresses, to stop attacks and fix faults.

How long we keep your information

• Household details from our tools: we never receive them, unless you ask us to email something. We do not keep lists we email to you.
• Postcodes and locations: not kept. Analytics records only the county.
• Email sign-ups: kept while you are signed up.
• After you unsubscribe: we keep your email address only as a suppression record, plus your consent history. A suppression record is a short “do not email” list. It stops us emailing you again by mistake. We keep this until you ask us to delete it (DRAFT: owner to confirm this period).
• Security logs: kept for a short time by our hosting provider (DRAFT: period to be confirmed).

If you ask us to delete everything, we will. But we will then have no record to stop you being added again by mistake.

Sending information outside the UK

Some of our providers may handle information outside the UK. When this happens, we make sure there are proper legal protections in place, such as contracts approved under UK law (DRAFT: owner to confirm which providers and which protections).

Cookies

We do not use any cookies that are not essential. We do not use cookies for adverts or tracking.

If this ever changes, we will add a cookie banner so you can choose whether to allow them, and we will update this page.

Your rights

You have the right to:

• access: ask for a copy of the information we hold about you
• rectification: ask us to correct information that is wrong
• erasure: ask us to delete your information
• restriction: ask us to stop using your information for a while
• objection: object to us using your information
• portability: ask for your information in a format you can take elsewhere

You can also take back your consent at any time.

To use any of these rights, email hello@emergencyprepared.co.uk (placeholder). We will reply within one month. It is free.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we use your information, please tell us first so we can try to put it right.

You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s data protection regulator. You can make a complaint on the ICO website.

Changes to this notice

We will update this notice if anything changes. The date at the top of the page shows when we last reviewed it.