What this site holds about you

legislativedata.org is run by Dr Steven MacGregor, who decides on applications and is the only person who sees the details given in them.

Nothing. There are no analytics and no cookies, and your IP address and browser are not recorded. The site's log records which pages were asked for and when, and nothing about who asked.

If you switch to light mode, that choice is kept in your own browser and is never sent to the site.

Asking for the data in another format, or reporting an error, is done by email, from your own account. The site sees nothing of it, and your message reaches us like any other email. A correction made on your report does not name you.

• Your email address, name, title and position, and the date you applied.
• Whether your application was approved, and when.

An approved application is kept while you have an account. A refused one is deleted once you have been told.

• A sign-in code. It works once, for 15 minutes, and is held only in a scrambled form that cannot be used to sign in. Its record is kept for an hour, so that no address is sent more than three codes an hour, and is then removed.
• One cookie, called signed_in, set only when you sign in. It keeps that device signed in for 30 days and does nothing else.
• For each device you are signed in on, when you signed in and when that ends. Not the device's address, its browser or where it is.

Signing out removes the cookie and the site's record of that device. Nothing is recorded about what you look at while signed in.

The bills data gives the party of each bill's member in charge, and its notes name members where the Parliament's record of a bill does: a member in charge, the mover of an amendment, a committee's convener. It is taken from the Parliament's own record, and it is public parliamentary activity.

The votes data names members and records how each voted in each division in the chamber, with their party and any government office on the day. It is taken from the Parliament's own open data, as the Parliament publishes it, and it is public parliamentary activity.

The questions data names members and the questions they asked and answered, with their party and any government post on the day, and the Lord Advocate and the Solicitor General for Scotland where they answered a question in their office. It is taken from the Parliament's own open data, and the law officers' posts from the Scottish Parliament Information Centre's lists, with two dates from Wikipedia. It is public parliamentary activity. The words of questions and answers can name other people, as the Parliament's own record does; they are published as the Parliament published them, and nothing about anyone is coded from them. The site holds nothing else about any member, and it is kept with the rest of the data.

If you think something about you is wrong, write to comparativelegislativedata@gmail.com. The data follows the Parliament's own record, so a correction made there reaches the site with the next update, and is listed under What has changed.

The accounts are copied each night into a backup of their own, encrypted and stored with a second company that cannot read it. Anything deleted from the site is gone from the backups within five weeks.

Resend sends the site's emails: your sign-in codes and the decision on your application. It sees your email address and keeps a copy of each email for 30 days, in the United States.

The site runs on a rented machine. The company it is rented from runs the machine and is given nothing about you.

No one else. The site uses no advertising, no analytics, and no fonts or scripts from anywhere else.

Write to comparativelegislativedata@gmail.com to ask for a copy of what is held about you, to have it corrected, or to have it deleted. Deleting an account removes your details, codes and signed-in devices together. That address is an ordinary Gmail account, so your message is held by Google like any other email.

If you are unhappy with how your details have been handled, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.