Privacy Policy

House of The People ("HoTP", "we", "us") is the data controller for the personal information collected through this platform. For any privacy query, contact charlie@houseofthepeople.com.

• Email address, to sign you in, to contact you about your account, and to tell you when a new bill enters Parliament. You can stop those emails from the link at the foot of any of them, or from Settings, without affecting the ones about your account.
• Mobile phone number, to confirm your account with a code sent by text message when you sign up, so that each person has one account. It is not shown to anyone and is not used for marketing.
• Postcode, and the areas we derive from it: your constituency, ward and council, with the people who represent each.
• Your profile, which identifies you by constituency rather than by name.
• Your votes on bills, and the alignment figures calculated from them.
• What you post: comments, forum posts, polls and petitions.
• Other actions: likes, and the bills you follow.
• Citizenship status and document type, to establish voting eligibility.
• Device tokens, if you turn on push notifications.
• Subscription state, if you buy Pro. We never see or store your card details.
• Page views and performance data, described under Cookies and analytics.

We do not collect your device location. The app never asks for location permission, and your postcode is only what you type in.

How you vote on legislation says what you think about it, so your voting record on HoTP is information about your political opinions. Under UK GDPR that is special category data and gets stronger protection than ordinary personal data.

We rely on your consent to hold it, given when you accept this policy on signing up. You can withdraw it at any time by deleting your votes or your account, and your votes are private by default: showing them on your public profile is a setting you have to turn on yourself.

We never sell this data, never share it with a political party or campaign, and never use it to target advertising. Aggregate figures we publish, such as how a constituency voted, contain no individual record.

You are identified by your constituency, never by your name. A comment appears as "Islington South and Finsbury constituent", and your profile shows the same. We do not ask for your real name, there are no usernames, and nothing you post carries one.

What is public: comments, forum posts, polls and petitions you create, and the constituency attached to them. Anyone using the platform can see these, and so can search engines where the page is public.

What is never shown to anyone: your email address, your postcode, and your citizenship details. Your voting record is also hidden unless you turn it on in Settings.

• To sign you in and keep your account working.
• To match you to your constituency, ward and council, and to the people who represent them.
• To record your votes and show you how they compare with your MP, your area and the country.
• To publish, under your constituency rather than your name, the parts of your activity you have chosen to make public.
• To send notifications about the bills you follow, if you turn them on.
• To produce anonymous aggregate statistics.
• To establish UK voting eligibility.
• To take payment for Pro and to keep your subscription in the right state.
• To keep the platform safe: moderating content, and handling reports and blocks.

Only what each one needs to do its job.

• Supabase: our database and sign-in. Holds your account, profile, votes and posts, and sends the sign-up code to your mobile through its text message provider. Your number is sent for that, nothing else.
• Vercel: hosting, plus the cookieless analytics described below.
• Amazon Web Services: storage for the parliamentary and local government data the site is built on. No personal data.
• Stripe: card payments made on the website.
• Apple and Google: in-app purchases made in the iOS and Android apps.
• RevenueCat: checks those in-app purchase receipts and tells us whether a subscription is active.
• Apple Push Notification service and Firebase Cloud Messaging: delivering notifications to iOS and Android devices respectively.
• MySociety MapIt: turns your postcode into a constituency. Your postcode is sent, nothing else.
• Anthropic and OpenAI: plain-English bill summaries. No personal data is sent.

We do not sell your data. We do not run advertising and we do not use advertising or cross-site tracking pixels.

For most of your data we rely on consent, given when you create an account. For your voting record we rely on explicit consent, as described above. For taking payment we rely on performance of a contract, and for keeping the platform safe from abuse we rely on our legitimate interests.

You can withdraw consent at any time by deleting your account in Settings, Account, Delete Account.

Under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 you have the right to:

• Access: request a copy of your personal data. Settings, Privacy, Export my data.
• Rectification: correct anything inaccurate by editing your profile.
• Erasure: delete your account and everything attached to it. Settings, Account, Delete Account.
• Portability: export your data as JSON, from the same place.
• Objection: object to a particular use of your data.
• Withdraw consent: at any time, without giving a reason.

Use the tools in Settings or email charlie@houseofthepeople.com. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

We use essential cookies to keep you signed in. Without them the platform cannot work.

We use Vercel Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights to count page views and measure how quickly pages load. Both are cookieless: they set nothing on your device, do not fingerprint you, do not build a profile of you, and cannot follow you to other websites. We use them to see which parts of the platform get used and which are slow.

We run no advertising cookies, no advertising pixels, and no cross-site tracking of any kind.

We keep your data for as long as your account exists. When you delete your account we permanently remove your profile, votes, notification subscriptions, device tokens and authentication record.

Posts and comments you made in public discussions are deleted with your account. Where a reply of somebody else's depends on one of your posts to make sense, we may keep the post with your name removed.

All data is sent over HTTPS, in the apps as well as on the web. Passwords are hashed and never stored in plain text. We use Supabase Row Level Security so an account can only read its own records, and administrative operations use a separate service role key that the app itself never holds.

HoTP is intended for adults and is not directed at children. You must be 18 or over to create an account, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger. If you believe a child has given us personal data, email charlie@houseofthepeople.com and we will delete it.

We may update this policy. Material changes will be notified by email, and the date at the top of this page always says when it last changed.

For any privacy question, or to exercise any of the rights above, contact charlie@houseofthepeople.com.