Privacy
AdvocacyLab is run by Data Activists C.I.C. (company number 17082883), Suite Ra01, 195-197 Wood Street, London E17 3NU, which is responsible for your data under the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR. If you have a question about your data, or want to use any of the rights below, write to advocacylab@dataactivists.org.
What we hold
- Your account: your email address, and the name and organisation if you add them to your profile.
- Your reports: the files you upload and the text read out of them, the table of quotes, addresses and results, and any notes you add.
- CiteCollect reports: what your team writes there, including any case background.
- Report reviews: who you said would answer the report, what the models said about it, and which points you kept.
- CiteFind searches: your question, the queries written from it, and the sources and passages found.
- Signing in: when you signed in and out, and your network address and browser, for each sign-in and failed attempt.
- Using the tools: when you ran a check, and which results you changed by hand.
- Asking for an account or a new password: a scrambled form of your email and network address, used to count requests. We can't read them back.
- Free plan: how many free reports you've used, against a scrambled form of your email address, so that deleting an account doesn't restart the count. We can't read it back, and no other person's free reports count against yours.
- A guest account: what you do in it, the email address you give us, and the sign-in record of your network address and browser.
- Payments: your plan and Stripe's reference for you. We never see your card.
- Use of models: which model was asked, when, how much text it was sent, and any error it gave. We don't record the text itself.
A report can hold personal data about other people, such as someone's asylum case. You decide whether it belongs here, and it's best to remove names you don't need before uploading. We use your reports only to give you the service.
If you upload for an organisation, that organisation decides what goes in a report and we process it on the organisation's behalf. Write to us if it needs a data processing agreement.
Who else receives what
- AI models. For CiteCheck, the text of your report goes to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Providers with Zero-Data Retention contracts on OpenRouter). The upload page names it before you upload. The passages kept as quotes also go to Jev 1.13 (TypeSafe, via OpenRouter). For a second opinion on a row, the quote and the closest passages from its source go to that model, or to the one you chose on your profile. The providers we work with do not store your data or use it for training their models.
- CiteCollect sends a model only a quote and passages from its public source, and an organisation can turn that off. A report's title, questions and case text stay here.
- ReportReview sends the whole text of a report you upload to it, and who you said would answer it, to the models named on its page. Those providers do not store your data or use it for training their models either.
- CiteFind sends your question to the models named on its page, which write search queries from it. Only those queries go to a search service, never your question. The text of each source found, with your question, goes to the same models to choose passages.
- The cited websites receive a request from our server for the address your report cites. They don't learn who asked. The Internet Archive is asked about an address when the live page can't be read. We also use services that retrieve web pages when a site refuses us, and they receive only the cited address.
- Hetzner hosts our server.
- A mail service delivers our messages. A message about a check carries your address, the upload date, a count and a link, and never a file name, a title or a quotation.
- Stripe takes payments if you choose a paid plan, and receives your email address, billing address and card. It keeps its own payment records, under its own privacy policy.
We are in the UK, and some of these companies are elsewhere, including in the US. Where a country has no adequacy decision under the UK GDPR or the EU GDPR, the transfer relies on standard contractual clauses. Write to us for a copy.
How long we keep it
| An uploaded file and its text | 30 days, or until you delete the report |
| A table of checked quotes, with the file's name | Until you delete the report or your account |
| A CiteCollect report's title and case text | 90 days after someone last worked on it, or 90 days after it is finished |
| A CiteCollect report's reference, question wording, quotes and sources | Kept after that deadline |
| A report review, and the file it came from | 30 days, or until you delete it. We keep how many points were kept or marked not useful, and nothing from the report. |
| A CiteFind search and what it found | 30 days, or until you delete it. We keep how many sources and passages it found, and nothing of the question. |
| A copy of a public source a quote was found in | 7 days |
| When you signed in and how you've used the tools | Until you delete your account |
| The network address and browser you signed in from | 365 days |
| Failed attempts to sign in | A day at most |
| Counts of requests for an account or a new password | 2 days |
| The count of free reports, once you've deleted your account | 730 days |
| A guest account | After 7 days it switches to the free plan; the work stays, or you can end and delete it before then |
| An account nobody finished creating | Removed once its link has expired |
| Your account | Until you delete it |
| Database backups | 10 days, so anything deleted can stay in a backup that long. Uploaded files aren't backed up. |
Why we use it
- To give you the service you signed up for (performance of a contract).
- To keep the service secure and stop abuse, which is what the sign-in records and the counts of requests and free reports are for (our legitimate interest).
- To see how the tools are used and improve them, for example how often people sign in, how many checks they run and how often they change a result (our legitimate interest). We count from the records listed here, not from the words of your reports, and you can object by writing to us.
- To keep the billing records the law asks of us (legal obligation).
We need your email address to give you an account, and everything else on your profile is optional. Nothing we do makes a decision about you by automated means alone.
Cookies
We use the cookies that keep you signed in and protect our forms. We use no outside analytics, advertising or tracking.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of your data, have it corrected or deleted, restrict or object to how we use it, and take it elsewhere. We answer within a month. You can delete your reports and your account yourself at any time. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK, or in the EU to the data protection authority where you live or work.
Last changed 5 November 2026.