GUARDIANVIGIL // PRIVACY
What We Collect, and What We Do With It
This site collects very little, and this page says exactly what. GuardianVigil is the data controller; contact@guardianvigil.io reaches us for anything on this page.
1. What this website collects
Only what you type into a form, plus the minimum needed to stop the forms being abused. There is no analytics, no advertising, and no third-party tracking on this site.
- Contact and beta forms. Your name, email address, and whatever you write in the message — plus, on the beta form, your job role and the optional company, team size and current tooling fields. Used to reply to you, and for nothing else.
- Newsletter. Your email address, the date you subscribed, and a record that you consented. Used to send research updates you asked for.
- Anti-abuse data. A truncated SHA-256 hash of your IP address. We store the hash, not the address, because the only thing we need is to recognise repeat submissions. It cannot be turned back into your IP.
2. Cookies
One cookie, set only when you submit a form. It holds a random token used to confirm the submission came from this site and not from another page acting on your behalf. It is a session cookie, marked HttpOnly and SameSite=Strict, contains nothing about you, and is gone when you close the browser.
It is strictly necessary for the form to work, so it does not require consent — and there is nothing else to consent to, because we set no analytics or advertising cookies at all.
3. Legal basis, and who else sees it
- Form submissions — legitimate interest in responding to an enquiry you chose to send us.
- Newsletter — your consent, given by ticking the box. You can withdraw it at any time using the unsubscribe link in every email, and withdrawing is as easy as giving it.
- Anti-abuse hashes — legitimate interest in keeping the forms usable.
We do not sell, rent or share this data. The only third party involved is Hostinger, who host the site and carry our email; they process it on our behalf. Nothing is sent to an analytics or marketing service, because we do not use one.
Fonts on this site are loaded from Google Fonts, which means your browser requests them from Google and Google therefore sees your IP address. We are working on serving them ourselves to remove that.
4. How long we keep it
- Form submissions — up to 24 months, then deleted. The log they are written to also rotates, so older entries age out sooner as newer ones arrive.
- Newsletter subscriptions — until you unsubscribe, at which point the entry is deleted rather than flagged.
- Anti-abuse hashes — one hour.
- Domain-deliverability cache — 24 hours. This records whether a domain can receive mail, not who wrote to us.
5. Your rights, and how to use them
Under the UK GDPR, the EU GDPR and the CCPA you can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to us holding it at all.
Email contact@guardianvigil.io and say which of those you want. We will reply within 30 days. We will not charge you, and we will not make you create an account to ask.
To leave the newsletter, the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any dispatch is faster than emailing us — it removes the entry immediately.
If you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to your data protection authority — in the UK, the ICO.