Privacy

Draft: this is a plain-English summary of how the site works, not a full legal privacy notice. It should be reviewed before the site is promoted widely.

“Use my location”

• Your browser only shares your location if you press Use my location, or if you have already allowed this site to use it (then the page uses it automatically on your next visit). You can turn that off in your browser’s site settings at any time.
• Before your position leaves your device it is rounded to about 100 metres. It is sent to our server (not in the page address) and passed on to postcodes.io to find the nearest postcode. Only that postcode is used to show crime figures, news and the local board.
• We don’t save your location with your account or IP address, and we don’t write it to our logs. To save repeat lookups we keep a short-lived (24 hour) note of “rounded point → nearest postcode”, filed under a scrambled code that can’t be turned back into the location and isn’t linked to you.

Postcodes you look up

• The last postcode you looked up is remembered in your own browser (local storage) so it loads next time. Use Forget this area on the home page, or clear your browser’s site data, to remove it.
• A postcode you search for appears in the page address and is sent to postcodes.io, data.police.uk and news sources to fetch results. Results for each area are cached on our server.

Accounts, cookies and posts

• We use one cookie, ukcrime_sid, to keep you signed in and protect forms. It ends when you close your browser.
• If you register we store your username, email address and a hashed (unreadable) password. Your posts are public under your username.
• To stop abuse we keep scrambled (one-way hashed) versions of IP addresses for rate limits (normally for up to a day) and with reports of posts.
• Our web host may keep standard server logs (such as IP address, page address and time).

Questions: esmith@eddiebase.com