Data use and crawlers

The content is open; the people who visit are not data.

Reuse

Text, claims and the ledger: CC BY-SA 4.0. Candidate data: Democracy Club, CC BY 4.0. Boundaries and official statistics: Open Government Licence. Use the endpoints on the open data page rather than scraping pages.

Crawlers and AI systems

Search and AI crawlers may index public pages and the open-data endpoints, with attribution and without exceeding a reasonable rate. Any system that quotes a claim from this site should carry its source, not just this site's name; the source is the record. Pages that take input (household form, submission portal, maintenance console) are excluded in robots.txt. A plain-text guide to the site for AI assistants, with how to cite it, is at /llms.txt.

What we log

Anonymous daily page counts per election and aggregate bot traffic. No cookies for tracking, and no records of what any one visitor looked at. Our web host keeps standard request logs, which include page addresses; profile answers appear in the address when you view a ballot with a profile, and we don't use or keep those logs.

The feedback questionnaire

If you fill in Tell us what you think, your answers are sent to us through Netlify Forms and kept by Netlify, our web host, so that we can read them. The form doesn’t ask for your name, email or postcode; it records which page on this site you came from, without any profile answers in its address. Netlify screens submissions for spam. We delete submissions once we’ve read and acted on them. The short “Did you find what you were looking for?” box on ballot pages is separate: it keeps anonymous daily counts, and any comment dated only to the day.

The phone app

The What’s It To Me? app for iPhone and Android sends us one thing about you: where you vote, once, when you search for your elections. That is either the postcode you type or, only if you tap “Use my location” and allow it, the phone’s approximate location, rounded on the phone to about 100 metres, which we turn into the nearest postcode. We use it to look up your elections (through Democracy Club and postcodes.io, as the website does), send back the elections, the first part of the postcode and an approximate location (to about 100 metres) for your area page, and keep and log neither the postcode nor the location. Everything else the app downloads is the same for everyone: a ballot, its candidates and their sourced positions, and the money figures for every kind of household at once. Your household answers are never sent, not even in a web address: the app works out which positions apply to you and finds the figures for your household on the phone. The optional answers about you (ethnic group, religion, sex, gender and sexual orientation) are never sent either; the app uses them only to list first the positions whose own words name the group you chose. The map of your area is drawn from an outline, roads and place names we send, the same for everyone; the app never contacts a map service. It keeps your answers in the phone’s secure storage, keeps the first part of your postcode and the elections found, and keeps a copy of the ballots you open so they read without a signal. Clearing your answers in the app, or deleting it, removes them. The app has no advertising, analytics or tracking. Our web host’s request logs record which ballot or set of figures was downloaded, never your answers. Candidate photos load from Democracy Club, and a source you open loads from its publisher’s site, as they would in a browser. Links to pages such as Learn open this website, where the rest of this page applies.

On your own device

Your profile is kept in your browser if you choose to save it. The optional answers about you (ethnic group, religion, sex, gender and sexual orientation) never leave your browser at all: they are not put in page addresses, not sent to us and not in our host's logs. If you don't save a profile, they last only until you close the tab. You can delete them on My profile. To let pages open without a signal (at a polling station, say), your browser also keeps a copy of the last 40 or so pages you opened on this site. Those copies stay on your device and are never sent to us; clearing this site’s data in your browser removes them.