Privacy and corrections

Who operates this site

State of Record is a trading name of Intent Forge Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, number 16707657. Registered office: 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ. Intent Forge Ltd is the data controller for anything you send us.

What we collect, and why

Nothing, unless you write to us or use the Observatory sign-in. The site carries no enquiry form; the way to reach us is the email address below, and what you send is whatever you choose to put in that email.

Anything you send by email is used for one purpose: to read it personally and reply. It is not added to a marketing list, profiled, or shared with anyone else. If you would like it deleted, say so in the same email and it will be.

These public pages set no cookies and run no analytics. The two main pages load their typefaces from Google Fonts, which means your browser requests files from Google when they load; this page does not.

Like any website, these pages reach you through a hosting provider, Cloudflare, which handles each request, including your IP address, in order to deliver the page and protect the site. We do not use that information to identify or follow anyone.

The North East Observatory is on this same domain, behind a sign-in, and is not a public page. It is a working tool rather than a published one, so it does use your browser's own storage: to keep you signed in, to remember which council you last opened, and to know that its opening sequence has already played. None of that is analytics, none of it is shared, and none of it leaves your browser except the sign-in itself. If you have not signed in, nothing here has stored anything.

When you sign in, your email address and password are checked against the list of people given access; neither is stored or logged. Your email address is then carried in a signed cookie that keeps you signed in for up to eight hours, after which it expires.

What the record itself contains

The record is built from published material: the papers, plans, budgets, minutes and notices that public institutions publish; the national statistics published about them; and published news headlines about the same institutions. Nothing in it is obtained from any other source.

Those documents name people acting in a public capacity, so the record does contain personal data of that kind: the names and roles of elected members and senior officers, what was said or decided in public, and, where a council publishes it, the pay band of a senior post. We hold it because it is part of the published record of public administration, on the basis of our legitimate interest in keeping that record accurate, which the people named in it can reasonably expect given the capacity in which they acted. We do not add to it from anywhere else, and we do not use it to profile anyone.

You can ask what the record holds about you, and ask for a correction, at the address below. Where a correction is made, the earlier reading stays visible as an earlier state, for the reason given in the next section.

Corrections and challenge

Any reading we publish can be challenged, by the institution it concerns or by any reader.

• Raise a dispute by email, identifying the reading and the ground.
• It is reviewed against the source documents it rests on.
• If a correction is made, the earlier reading remains visible as an earlier state, because retention is how this record works. Corrections are recorded, not overwritten.

Contact

alexander@intentforge.co.uk, for enquiries, for corrections, and to ask what we hold about you.