What leaves your machine

What is counted

Two numbers: how many people open a page, and how many briefings finish assembling. They are counted by Umami, which uses no cookies and stores nothing on your device. It records the page address with the query string stripped off, the site you arrived from, and your country, browser and screen size. A finished briefing carries two more facts, and both are about the search rather than about you: whether an asking price was typed in, and whether the postcode is in England or Wales. The price itself is not recorded, and neither is the postcode or any part of it — so none of this sees what you searched for, and none of it can recognise you on your next visit or on anybody else's site. If your browser asks not to be tracked, it counts nothing at all. The finished-briefing number exists because visits alone cannot tell someone using The Postcode Brief from someone glancing at it, and that difference is what decides which parts get built next.

What your postcode does

It goes from this server, not from your browser, to the sources a briefing is assembled from: postcodes.io, HM Land Registry, data.police.uk, the Environment Agency, the Mining Remediation Authority, planning.data.gov.uk, DataMapWales, PlanIt, the EPC register, Google Street View and OpenStreetMap. Each of them sees a postcode arriving from a server, with nothing attached about who asked for it. The street photograph and the map tiles are fetched the same way and passed through, so Google and OpenStreetMap do not see you either. The written briefing is assembled by a third-party service, which is sent the findings and the area they describe, and nothing about you.

What your browser loads from elsewhere

Two things: the photograph on the front page, which is hosted by Unsplash, and the counter above, which is served from Umami. Both see your IP address, the way any server does when your browser asks it for a file. Everything else — the typefaces, the maps, the street photography — comes from this domain.

PropertyScout

PropertyScout is a separate signed-in product at /propertyscout. If you create an account, it stores your email address, your saved property searches (“Scouts”), and listings matched to them in a PostgreSQL database (Neon Free tier when configured by the operator). Sign-in uses a magic link sent to your email — there is no password. PropertyScout sets one session cookie (ps_session) on the /propertyscout path only.

PropertyScout ingests property alert emails you forward to a dedicated mailbox (configured by the operator, not in this repo). It parses listing details from the email content only — it never visits Rightmove, Zoopla or other portal pages to scrape them. Email bodies are not stored; only message IDs, source type, and processing status are kept for up to 30 days. Matched listings may be shared across users when the same property appears in multiple alerts. Deleting your account removes your Scouts, matches, and saved actions but not canonical listing records other users may also have matched.

Alert emails (instant, daily digest, or high-match only) are sent via the same SMTP service as sign-in links. You can turn alerts off per Scout or for your whole account. PropertyScout does not automatically run a Postcode Brief for every listing — you choose when to run one from a property page.

Cookies

The main Postcode Brief search sets no cookies. PropertyScout sets one session cookie when you sign in, described above. Umami, the counter on the main site, is cookieless by design. There is no consent banner on the main search because it needs none; PropertyScout's session cookie is strictly necessary for the signed-in product you chose to use.

What is kept

Findings are held in memory for a few hours, so the second person to ask about a postcode does not send a volunteer-run planning register a second request — for weeks rather than hours where the answer does not meaningfully change, like where a postcode is and which way the camera should face in it. That store empties when the app restarts, and there is no database behind the main briefing search. PropertyScout data persists in PostgreSQL until you delete your account or the operator clears it. The server logs faults rather than searches, and a fault can name the place it happened on.