Policy

Privacy Policy

What this site collects, what it does not, and who else ever sees it.

Effective date: September 3, 2026
Last updated: September 3, 2026

Public Safety Technology Hub is read by fire chiefs deciding how to spend public money. Some of them are looking at a problem they would rather their council did not read about in the local paper yet. What they type here is their business, and this page says exactly what happens to it.

It describes what the site actually does, not what a template says a website usually does. Where something is unusual — that there are no cookies, that no advertiser ever receives anything — it is because that is how the site is built, and it is written down here so it can be checked.

1. You can read this whole site without telling it anything

Browsing the directory, reading a guide, following the Learning Lab, looking at Mutual Aid — none of it asks who you are, and none of it records who you are.

There is no account to create. There is no newsletter wall. Nothing is behind a form.

No cookies, and no tracking of any kind

This is worth being specific about, because almost every site says something softer.

There is no analytics package. No Google Analytics, no tag manager, no Plausible, no Vercel Analytics — none is installed, and none has ever been.
There are no advertising pixels, no conversion trackers, no session recorders and no heatmaps.
An ordinary visitor is given no cookies at all. The connection this site makes to its own database is deliberately configured not to create a session or set one.
The only cookies this site ever sets belong to a signed-in administrator: one for the login session, one remembering that the edit toolbar is switched on. A reader never receives either.
Because of all that, there is no cookie banner. There is nothing to consent to.

2. What is recorded, and only when you do something

Four things on this site accept information, and each is listed below with everything it keeps. Nothing else is collected anywhere.

Describing a problem in the search box

The words you type are recorded, so the Hub can see what departments are actually looking for and what the directory is missing. That is the single most useful thing anyone gives this site.

The text you typed.
Your browser's user-agent string, and the page you arrived from.
No IP address. The table that holds these searches has never had a column for one.
No email address, unless you choose to add one to be told if something matching turns up. That is optional, asked for after the search, and never required to use it.
The words you type are also sent to OpenAI, which is how the search understands that "wildland" and "wildfire" mean the same thing. Nothing identifying goes with them. This is also described on the Editorial Independence page.

Writing through the contact page

Everything you put in the form, and nothing you did not.

Your name, your email address, your department or organization if you gave one, and your message.
Your browser's user-agent string and the page you arrived from.
Your address is used to reply to you. It is not added to any list, and there is no list to add it to.

Posting in Mutual Aid

Mutual Aid is a public board, so part of what you give it is published on purpose. The split matters.

Your first name and your department appear publicly, on your post and on every answer. That is deliberate: it is how a chief can tell peer advice from a supplier's pitch.
Your surname and your email address are never shown to anybody.
Your email is used to tell you when somebody answers a thread you took part in, and to reach you about your own post if we have to. Nothing else.
Every one of those emails carries a link that stops them, and stopping them stops all of them for good.

Submitting a company to the directory

The vendor form, which is for companies rather than departments.

The company and product details you enter, and a contact name and email so the listing can be checked and questions asked.
A one-way hash of your network address, used to stop somebody running the form in a loop. The address itself is never stored. The hash is salted with a secret that only the server holds, so it cannot be reversed, and cannot be tested against a guessed address either.

3. Who else ever sees any of it

Four companies, each doing one job, none of them given anything beyond what that job needs.

Supabase hosts the database, so everything described above is stored on their infrastructure.
Vercel hosts the site itself and handles the requests.
Resend delivers the email — notifications, replies and confirmations.
OpenAI receives the text typed into the search box, and nothing else. Not your address, not your email, not what you looked at.

Nothing here is ever sold, rented, or shared for advertising. No advertiser, sponsor or listed company receives any information about visitors — not aggregated, not anonymised, not at any price. A company cannot buy a report of who searched for it.

4. How long it is kept

Honestly: until it is no longer useful, and there is no automatic deletion running today.

Searches are kept because the pattern over time is what shows the directory's gaps. Mutual Aid posts stay as long as the thread is useful to somebody reading it later. Contact messages are kept so a conversation can be picked up months afterwards.

If you want something removed, ask, and it will be. That is not conditional on anything.

5. What you can ask for

Write through the contact page, and any of these will be done without argument.

A copy of anything the site holds about you.
Correction of anything that is wrong.
Deletion of your messages, your posts, or your address.
An end to every notification, which the link at the bottom of any of them also does immediately.

6. Security

Access to anything that is not public is restricted at the database itself rather than only in the site's code, so a mistake in a page cannot expose a table it was never meant to read. Contact messages, for instance, can be written by anybody and read by nobody except a signed-in administrator.

That said, no site can promise perfect security, and this page will not pretend otherwise. What it can promise is that there is very little here to lose, because very little is collected.

7. Children

This site is for fire and emergency services professionals. It is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect anything from them.

Changes to this policy

This policy carries an effective date and a last-updated date at the top of the page. Where it changes materially, the last-updated date changes with it.

Questions about any of the above can be sent through the contact page.

Contact the Hub