Data protection
Privacy and Data Handling
People are being asked to share observations about their homes, their water, their animals and sometimes their health. That places an obligation on this project, and this page sets out how it is met.
Detail
What is collected and what happens to it
| Data | Used for | Published? |
|---|---|---|
| Name and contact details | Only to contact you if you asked to be contacted | Never |
| Observation description | Analysis and, with consent, anonymised map display | Anonymised, after review, with consent |
| Exact location or address | Spatial analysis | Never at address precision |
| Health information | Anonymised pattern analysis only | Never |
| Animal health information | Anonymised pattern analysis only | Never at household level |
| Photographs | Evidence review | Only with your explicit consent |
| Sensitive wildlife locations | Withheld from all public outputs | Never |
| Property and financial documents | Aggregate economic analysis | Never |
Special category data
Health information is special category personal data under UK GDPR. It is collected only where you choose to provide it, on the basis of your explicit consent, and it is used solely for anonymised pattern analysis.
It is never published, never shown on a map, never included in any download, and never shared with a regulator unless you specifically consented to that.
Your rights
You can ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, and withdraw consent at any time. Withdrawing consent does not affect anything already lawfully done, but the record will be removed from all future outputs.
Aggregate statistics already published cannot always be recalculated retroactively, but they contain no identifying information in any event.
Security
Storage and small-number suppression
Submissions are stored in a database with row-level security. Public pages can read only aggregate counts through a function that has no access path to names, contact details, free text, health information or precise coordinates.
Where a category contains only a small number of submissions, no breakdown by location or date is published. In a community of this size, small cells identify people, and no analytical value is worth that.