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.

Cookies

There are none. Nothing is written to your device — no cookie, no local storage — which is why there is no banner asking you about any of it. Umami, the counter above, is cookieless by design and was chosen for that reason. There is no account and no password, and there never was a user table, so there is nothing at this end of it to lose.

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 it. The server logs faults rather than searches, and a fault can name the place it happened on.