Privacy Policy: No Accounts, No Analytics, No Visit Logs, and What Cloudflare and YouTube Can See
Published
The site asks for nothing about you and keeps almost nothing. This page says what it does handle, and what Cloudflare, which delivers the site, and YouTube, whose videos some pages embed, receive when you visit.
Piyush Choudhary publishes this site and is responsible for it, and for what it does with personal data under UK data protection law (the UK GDPR).
What you type
Nothing you type leaves your browser. The calculators run the rules on your own device and send nothing anywhere. After a page has loaded, their one request is for the site’s rules file, which comes from this site and is fetched without cookies. There are no accounts, no sign-up or contact forms and no comments. The site never asks for your National Insurance number, Unique Taxpayer Reference, Government Gateway sign-in, bank details or documents.
What the server keeps about visits
The server keeps no log of visits, and the site has no analytics of any kind. Cloudflare’s Web Analytics is switched off. The site’s fonts and scripts are served by the site itself, so loading a page tells no other company about your visit, apart from Cloudflare and, where a guide has a video, YouTube.
When something on the server goes wrong, its error message is kept for up to two weeks so it can be fixed. An error message can include the address of the page and the IP address of the visitor who met the error.
The server itself is rented from OrangeVPS. It holds the site, its database and those error messages, and nothing else about visitors.
If someone tries to sign in to the editors’ dashboard and gets it wrong, the site counts the failed tries from that connection for 15 minutes, to slow down password guessing. The count is kept under a code made from the IP address with the site’s own secret key, not under the address itself, and it is deleted within a day. The copies of the site’s database made each night, kept for 14 nights, can hold a count until they are replaced.
Cloudflare
Every request to the site passes through Cloudflare, a US company that delivers the site and protects it from attacks. To do that, Cloudflare handles your IP address and your browser’s details, such as its make and version, and it may do so outside the UK. Cloudflare also asks your browser to tell it when a page fails to load, which it calls Network Error Logging. Cloudflare’s privacy policy says what it does with this.
YouTube videos
Some pages embed videos from YouTube: HMRC’s own, and others from the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group and the National Residential Landlords Association. They load from youtube-nocookie.com, YouTube’s privacy-enhanced address, by themselves as you scroll near them. Loading one sends YouTube, which is part of Google, your IP address and your browser’s details, whether or not you play the video. As soon as a video loads, before you play it, YouTube stores information in your browser’s storage, and it may store more when you play it.
Each video has our own caption, saying who made it and what it shows, and a link to watch it on YouTube instead. Google’s privacy policy says what Google does with what it receives. These are the videos, and the pages that show them.
- Who Does Making Tax Digital apply to?, by the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group (LITRG), on Making Tax Digital Qualifying Income Calculator
- Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRCgovuk), on Making Tax Digital Deadlines
- Making Tax Digital penalties sound scary: here’s the truth, by the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group (LITRG), on Making Tax Digital Penalties Calculator
- Making Tax Digital for Landlords – Everything You Need to Know | MTD for Landlords Guide, by National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA), on Making Tax Digital for Landlords
- How do I choose software for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax?, by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRCgovuk), on Making Tax Digital for Landlords and Making Tax Digital Software
- How do I sign up for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax?, by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRCgovuk), on Register for MTD for Income Tax
- How do I sign up my client to Making Tax Digital for Income Tax?, by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRCgovuk), on Register for MTD for Income Tax
If you email us
If you write to contact@
Your rights
We handle the little personal data described here because we have a legitimate interest in keeping the site working and safe, and in answering you. Under the UK GDPR you can ask what personal data we hold about you, and ask us to correct it, delete it or stop using it. In practice that can only be an email you’ve sent, or an error message from the last two weeks. Write to contact@
If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Changes to this page
If the site starts doing anything else with personal data, this page changes first. That includes advertising, which the site may carry in future. Before any advertising appears, this page and the cookie page will say what it collects.