Privacy Policy

Broxtowe+ is a community service directory created and operated by Nottingham West Primary Care Network (“Nottingham West PCN”, “we”, “us”). For the personal data described in this policy, Nottingham West Primary Care Network is the data controller.

You can contact us about this policy or your personal data by email at pics.nwpcn@nhs.net or via nottinghamwestpcn.co.uk.

You can browse the public directory and search for services without creating an account or giving us personal details. We collect personal data when you choose to keep in touch by email or push notification, register for a portal account (for example as a service owner or booker), submit a service listing, send feedback, suggest a service, or request ownership of a service.

Depending on how you use Broxtowe+, we may collect:

• Citizen update preferences — if you opt in without an account, we collect your email address, optional postcode and approximate postcode coordinates, chosen radius, categories and tags, selected updates and delivery methods, confirmation and consent records, and any browser push token needed to deliver a notification. We do not ask for your name.
• Feedback and service suggestions — what you write, and your name and email address if you choose to give them so we can reply.
• Your location, only if you ask — if you press “Use my location”, your browser sends your device's location to postcodes.io to find your nearest postcode. We use that postcode for the search; we do not store your location.
• Abuse-prevention records — to stop automated misuse of our public forms and uploads, we count recent submissions against a scrambled (keyed hash) form of your IP address or email address. The original address cannot be read back from it, and these records are deleted within two days.
• Account and registration details — your full name, email address, organisation, job title, the access level you request, and your account status (pending, approved, or rejected).
• Sign-in information — authentication is handled by our identity provider (Auth0 by Okta). They process your email address and password on our behalf; we do not store your password. We store an identifier that links your sign-in to your Broxtowe+ profile.
• Service and space listings — if you are a service owner or administrator, the information you add about services or spaces, which may include names, descriptions, addresses, postcodes, public contact details (phone, email, website), and booking or referral information.
• Ownership requests — when you ask to manage an existing service, we record your name, email, the service requested, and any message you include.
• Activity records — we keep audit logs of key actions (such as approvals, edits, and ownership decisions), including who performed them and when, to keep the directory secure and accountable.
• Technical information — basic information needed to operate the service, such as cookies and server logs (see “Cookies” below).

We use personal data to:

• create and manage portal accounts and review registrations;
• publish and maintain the community service directory;
• process and review ownership requests and send related notifications by email;
• keep the service secure, prevent automated abuse, and investigate misuse;
• communicate with you about your account or listings;
• send new-service alerts, service news and the monthly Broxtowe+ roundup that you specifically ask to receive, matched to your postcode area or interests where you choose those options; and
• record and respect confirmations, preferences, withdrawals and unsubscribes.

For citizen email and push updates, our lawful basis under the UK GDPR is your consent. We also apply the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) to electronic messages. Signing up is optional, the consent box is not pre-selected, and we send a welcome email as soon as a subscription starts. If an address is already subscribed, any change to its preferences only takes effect once someone confirms it from that inbox. You can withdraw consent at any time using the unsubscribe link in every email; withdrawal does not affect processing that was lawful before it.

For our other activities, our lawful bases under the UK GDPR are our legitimate interests in running a useful and secure community directory and, where relevant, the performance of a task carried out in the public interest as part of our work supporting local health and wellbeing. Where we ask for your consent (for example to publish optional details), you may withdraw it at any time.

We do not sell your personal data. We share it only with service providers who process data on our behalf, under appropriate contracts, including:

• Vercel — hosting the website and privacy-friendly, cookieless web analytics.
• Auth0 by Okta — secure sign-in and authentication.
• Google Firebase — database, email-triggering functions, and Firebase Cloud Messaging for browser push notifications.
• Resend — sending transactional emails, subscription confirmation messages, service alerts, campaigns, and monthly roundups.
• ImgBB — hosting images uploaded for service listings.
• postcodes.io and OpenStreetMap — converting postcodes to map locations and displaying maps. Approximate location data is sent to these services to show services on a map, and your device's location is sent to postcodes.io if you choose “Use my location”.

We may also disclose information where we are required to do so by law, or to protect the rights, safety, and security of our users and the service.

Your data is stored using the providers above. Some of these providers may process data outside the UK. Where that happens, we rely on appropriate safeguards (such as UK adequacy regulations or standard contractual clauses) to protect your information.

Broxtowe+ stores data in Google Firebase (Firestore). We keep information only for as long as it is needed, and a scheduled job deletes records every day once these periods have passed:

• Citizen update subscriptions — active preferences and consent records are kept while you remain subscribed. If you unsubscribe, we stop sending immediately and keep only the minimum suppression record needed to respect your choice, demonstrate compliance, and handle a later opt-in. You can ask us to erase that record where we no longer need it.
• Account details — kept for as long as your account exists. If an administrator deletes your account, or you ask us to delete your data, we permanently remove your profile, your ownership requests and any outstanding registration links, take you off the listings you managed, and delete your sign-in with our identity provider.
• Service and space listings — kept while they are part of the directory. Listings can be archived (hidden from the public) and are permanently deleted when an administrator removes them.
• Ownership requests — kept as a record of the request and its outcome, and removed when the related account is deleted or on request.
• Audit logs — kept to maintain security and accountability for as long as we consider necessary for those purposes.
• Search logs — anonymous records of search terms (not linked to any person), deleted after 14 months.
• Feedback — deleted after 14 months.
• Service suggestions — the suggestion is kept as a record of what local people asked for; your name and email address are removed after 14 months.
• Listing view counts — daily totals per listing, with nothing about who viewed it, deleted after 25 months.
• Eligibility checker records — the age band, result and feedback from the flu & COVID checker, with nothing about who used it, deleted after 25 months.
• Email records — the queue records behind the emails we send are deleted after 3 months; invitations sent to services, and records of citizen updates we have sent, after 24 months.
• Registration links — deleted 7 days after they expire.

If you use the keep-in-touch feature, Broxtowe+ may also store a push notification token and your prompt choice in your browser's local storage. This is not an advertising cookie. The push token identifies this browser installation so Firebase Cloud Messaging can deliver an alert. Your browser or device controls notification permission, which you can revoke in its settings.

You can also ask us at any time to delete personal data we no longer need (see “Your rights”). When we delete data from Firebase, residual copies may remain in routine backups for a short period before they are overwritten.

We use Vercel Web Analytics to understand how the directory is used — for example how many people visit, which pages and services are popular, and how visitors arrive. This helps us improve the service and report on its use.

This analytics is privacy-friendly and does not use cookies or track you across other websites. It collects aggregate, anonymised information only — we cannot use it to identify you, and we never send the words you type into the search box to Vercel or any other third party.

To understand what local people are looking for — and to spot services that may be missing — we keep an anonymous log of search terms entered into Broxtowe+ in our own database. These records contain only the words searched and whether any results were found. They are not linked to your identity, account, or device, and are never shared outside our team. Because these records are anonymous, no consent banner is required.

We also keep a daily count of how many times each service listing is opened, so we can see which support residents are actually reaching and report on it. A record is only ever a service, a date and a number — it contains nothing about the person viewing: no identity, account, device, IP address or browsing history, and no way to connect one view to another. Your browser remembers which listings you have already opened during a visit, purely so a page refresh is not counted twice; that stays on your device and is never sent to us.

The flu & COVID eligibility checker on the home page works out your result on your device — your date of birth is never sent to us or stored. We record only an age band (for example “65–74”), whether the result was eligible, and any answers you choose to give to “Was this useful?” and whether you booked, along with a daily count of how often the checker is opened. These records are not linked to your identity, account, or device.

We use a small number of cookies, only where needed to run the service:

• Sign-in cookies set by our authentication provider to keep you logged in securely.
• Registration cookies — short-lived cookies that temporarily remember the details you enter on the registration page (such as your name, organisation, job title, and requested access level) so your account can be set up correctly after sign-up. These expire within an hour.

We do not use advertising or third-party tracking cookies. Browsing the public directory does not require you to accept any non-essential cookies.

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
• ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data;
• ask us to delete your data (the “right to erasure”);
• ask us to restrict or object to how we use your data;
• ask for your data in a portable format; and
• withdraw consent where we rely on it.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at pics.nwpcn@nhs.net.

We take appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal data, including secure authentication, role-based access controls so people only see what they need to, and restricting sensitive listing details to approved staff.

The public directory can be browsed by people of all ages. Portal accounts and the email/push keep-in-touch feature are intended for people aged 16 or over. We do not knowingly collect subscription or account data from children under 16; a parent, carer, or trusted adult can subscribe on their behalf using the adult's own details.

If you have a concern about how we handle your personal data, please contact us first so we can try to help. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority, at ico.org.uk.

We may update this policy from time to time. When we make significant changes, we will update the “last updated” date at the top of this page.