Behind Flood Monitor
Privacy Policy
Last updated 28 July 2026
1. Who is responsible for your data
The data controller is Kevin Austin, a sole trader trading as Flood Monitor. You can reach us about anything in this policy at [email protected].
We intend to transfer this service to a UK limited company, which would then become the controller. We will update this policy and notify account holders before that happens.
2. The short version
We collect as little as we can get away with. There is no advertising, no tracking pixels, no Google Analytics and nothing that follows you from this site to another one. We do not sell your data or share it for marketing, and we do not build a profile of your behaviour.
We do measure how the site is used, with Cloudflare Web Analytics. It counts page views and little else. It is cookieless: it sets no identifier, stores nothing on your device, and cannot recognise you between visits or recognise you anywhere else on the web. We rely on our legitimate interests to understand which pages people actually use, so that we can run and improve the service.
The one thing worth understanding is this: the locations you choose to monitor, combined with your email address, can imply where you live or work. We treat that as the most sensitive information we hold, and it is why the retention and deletion sections below are specific.
3. What we collect, and why
You can browse the map, view river levels and read warnings without an account. If you create one, we hold:
| What | Why we need it | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Email address | To sign you in and to send the alerts you asked for | Performance of a contract |
| Phone number (optional) | For SMS alerts on paid plans. We do not currently send SMS; if you have given us a number, it is stored and unused until we do. | Performance of a contract |
| Sign-in sessions and single-use link tokens | To keep you signed in and to make sign-in links safe | Performance of a contract |
| The stations you monitor, your thresholds and channels | To know what to alert you about, and how | Performance of a contract |
| Web push subscription (a device address and encryption keys) | To deliver push notifications to a device you enabled | Performance of a contract |
| Your plan, and Stripe customer and subscription identifiers | To know what you are entitled to and to manage billing | Contract; legal obligation for tax records |
| A record of alerts we sent you | To avoid sending you the same alert repeatedly, and to answer questions about what was sent | Contract; our legitimate interests |
We do not log your IP address or browser user-agent in our application database, and we do not build any profile of your behaviour.
4. Cookies
We use one cookie, called fm_session. It is set only when you sign in, contains nothing but an opaque session identifier, and lasts 30 days or until you sign out. It is strictly necessary to operate a signed-in account, so we do not ask for consent for it. Because we use nothing else, there is no cookie banner to click.
You may notice a Cloudflare analytics script in this page’s source. It is not a tracker: it stores nothing on your device and reads nothing from it, so it does not require your consent and does not change the answer above.
We also store your light/dark theme choice in your browser’s local storage. It never leaves your device and is not personal data.
5. Who else sees your data
We use the following providers. Each processes data on our instructions under a data processing agreement, except Stripe, which is also a controller in its own right for payment and fraud prevention.
| Provider | What they handle | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Civo | Hosting of the application and database | United Kingdom (London) |
| Lettermint | Sending sign-in links and alert emails | European Union |
| Stripe | Payments, subscriptions and invoices | United States and Ireland |
| Cloudflare | Encrypted database backups; DNS; site analytics; and, as a content delivery network, serving this site. As the CDN it terminates the HTTPS connection, so it receives your IP address and the pages you request. | May be outside the UK (see below) |
| CARTO | Map background tiles. Your browser requests these directly, so CARTO receives your IP address whenever you view the map, including before you sign in. | Outside the UK |
We will also disclose data where we are legally required to, or to establish or defend legal claims.
6. Transfers outside the UK
Some of the providers above process data outside the UK. Where they do, transfers are covered by the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or by another safeguard permitted under UK GDPR Article 46.
We should be specific about one case: our database backups are stored with Cloudflare R2, and the storage location is assigned automatically rather than pinned to the UK or EU. Those backups contain the account data described above.
Cloudflare also sits in front of this site as a content delivery network, which means your request reaches Cloudflare before it reaches our servers, and Cloudflare sees your IP address and which pages you visit. Cloudflare was already our DNS provider; what changed is that web traffic now passes through it as well.
7. How long we keep things
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Account details, monitored locations, push subscriptions | While your account is open, then deleted within 30 days of closure |
| Sign-in link tokens | 15 minutes, and single-use |
| Sign-in sessions | 30 days, or until you sign out |
| Record of alerts sent | 12 months |
| Billing and payment records | 6 years after the end of the tax year, as UK tax law requires |
| Backups | Daily backups for 8 days; weekly backups for 32 days |
One honest detail about deletion. When we delete your data from the live database, copies remain in our backups until those backups expire. That means a deletion can take up to 32 days to disappear completely. We do not restore deleted accounts from backups except when recovering from a genuine failure.
River level, rainfall and flood warning measurements are not personal data and we keep them indefinitely. The historical record is what makes the service useful.
8. Your rights
Under UK GDPR you have the right to:
- ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
- have inaccurate data corrected;
- have your data deleted;
- ask us to restrict how we use it, or object to our use of it;
- receive your data in a portable format;
- withdraw consent where we rely on it, though for the most part we rely on our contract with you rather than consent.
To exercise any of these, email [email protected]. We handle these requests manually and will respond within one month. There is no charge. We may ask you to confirm you control the email address on the account, so that we do not disclose your data to someone else.
Deleting your account deletes your monitored locations and notification history. We keep billing records for the 6 years tax law requires, even after deletion.
9. Security
Data is encrypted in transit. We store no passwords at all. Sign-in uses single-use emailed links, and we store only a hash of each link, so reading our database cannot get someone into your account. Backups are encrypted at rest and access to them is restricted to a credential scoped to that storage alone.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your rights and freedoms, we will notify the Information Commissioner’s Office within 72 hours and tell you without undue delay where required.
10. Children
This service is not intended for children, and you must be at least 16 to create an account. We do not knowingly collect data about children. If you believe we have, contact us and we will delete it.
11. Complaints
Please raise concerns with us first. We would rather fix a problem than have it escalated. You also have the right to complain to the UK regulator:
Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF. ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint
12. Changes to this policy
We will update this page when our processing changes, and change the date at the top. For changes that materially affect your rights, we will email account holders.