Privacy

This site uses no cookies, no advertising and no tracking, and needs no account.

Where They Stand is applying to register as a charity in England and Wales. Until it is registered, the sites are run by its founder, Rob Mitchell, who is the data controller for the personal information described here. Once it is registered, the charity will be. This notice is a draft, to be adopted by the charity's trustees.

Visitors

• Questions and briefings. Each briefing is saved with its question, so it can be shared at its own address, answered again without paying for a new briefing, and checked against exactly what was shown if someone complains. Saved briefings aren't listed anywhere and aren't linked to the person who asked. Please don't put personal details in a question.
• A daily visitor code, not your IP address. To apply the daily limit on new briefings and prevent abuse, your IP address is turned into a scrambled code. The secret used to make it changes every day and the old one is deleted, so the code can't be linked to the next day's or turned back into an address. The address itself isn't stored.
• Reports. A problem report or takedown request is saved, with your email address if you choose to give one. The address is used only to reply, and is deleted when the report is dealt with.
• Questions are answered by an AI model. Your question and the minutes found are sent to Anthropic, which provides the Claude model that writes briefings. Under Anthropic's terms for its API, they aren't used to train its models.
• Cloudflare carries visits to the site. It passes each visit to the server and shields the site from floods of automated requests. It sees each request as it passes, including your IP address, possibly outside the UK, under Cloudflare's privacy policy. Its analytics and visitor tracking are turned off for this site. If Cloudflare ever has to check that a visitor isn't an automated program (during an attack, say), it may set a short-lived security cookie of its own for that purpose only.
• The hosting provider runs the server and has no access to the site's data beyond keeping it running. Requests aren't logged.

People named in council records

Councillors are described using public information about their role: their party on the date, offices held, how they voted and what the minutes record them as saying, and interests they declared at meetings. This is processed in the public interest of reporting on how councils work.

Other people named in minutes (members of the public who speak, ask questions, present petitions, apply for planning permission or object, and council staff) are not identified. Their names are removed before anything is searched, shown or sent to the AI model, and licensing hearings are not included. Links go to the council's own record, which remains the council's responsibility.

If you are named and think something is wrong or should not be shown, tell us. The official record itself can only be corrected by the council.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask for a copy of information held about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, or object to its use. Because the site doesn't know who visitors are, we may need your help to find it, such as the address of a briefing or the date you sent a report. If you're unhappy with the answer, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Contact: admin@wherecouncilsstand.com.