Privacy

Who we are

Pragma is a project operated by Smart Associates Ltd, which is the data controller for this website. That means Smart Associates Ltd decides what personal data this site collects and what happens to it, and is legally responsible for protecting it. When the Pragma institute is set up as its own organisation, it will take over this role.

If you have a question about your data, or you want to use one of your rights, write to us at privacy@smart.associates.

You can complain to us directly about how we handle your personal data, and we have to deal with your complaint. The easiest way is through our data protection page. You can also complain to the regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office, at ico.org.uk.

What we collect today

Right now the site collects very little, and only when you choose to take part.

• Things you choose to send us: a contribution, a comment, or your email address if you write to us. We keep what you send so we can read it, consider it, and reply.
• A scrambled record of your network address. When you send something, we turn the address your device is using into a one-way scrambled value that cannot be turned back into the original. We keep this only to stop abuse, such as one person flooding the site with submissions.

We do not track you around the web. We do not show advertising. We do not use cookies for analytics or marketing. We are not building a profile of you.

What we will collect when voting opens

Not yet live. This describes what will happen once the voting feature is switched on. None of it is collected today.

When you can vote on a choice, we will record which option you picked, any reason you choose to write, and an optional description of your situation if you decide to share one. You will sign in first. Before we record a vote we will ask for your clear permission, because how you vote tells us something sensitive about you, and the law treats that information with extra care.

How we use your data, and our legal basis

The law says we must have a proper reason, called a legal basis, for every use of your data. Here is what we do and the reason we rely on.

Purpose	What we rely on
Running public participation, so you can contribute and we can respond	Our legitimate interest in running an open, evidence-led institute
Checking submissions for abuse before they go further	Your text is sent to Anthropic, an artificial-intelligence service that screens it for abuse. Anthropic looks only at the words, does not keep the text and does not use it to train its systems. We rely on our legitimate interest in keeping the site safe
Recording how you vote, and any description of your situation (future feature)	Only with your explicit permission, which you can withdraw
Keeping scrambled records that help prevent abuse	Our legitimate interest in the security of the site

The shared sign-in

Future feature, not yet live. When sign-in arrives, one account will work across both Pragma and our sister project, auto-wonk, and the two will be run jointly. You will not have to work out which one holds your data: whoever you ask, your request will reach the right place and be dealt with.

How long we keep things

• Contributions we publish are kept for as long as the Register they belong to is live.
• Submissions we are still reviewing, or that we decide not to use, are kept only briefly and then removed.
• The scrambled records that help us prevent abuse are short-lived.

If you want the precise periods, ask us and we will share our retention schedule.

Your rights

The law gives you rights over your own data. In plain words, you can:

• see the data we hold about you;
• ask us to correct it if it is wrong;
• ask us to delete it;
• get a copy in a form you can reuse elsewhere;
• ask us to pause our use of it;
• object to our use of it;
• withdraw any permission you gave us, at any time;
• ask not to be subject to a decision made only by a machine.

To use any of these, go to our data protection page. It is free of charge, and we respond within one calendar month.

Keeping your data safe

We protect your data with encrypted connections, locked-down servers, scrambled network records, and encrypted backups. We keep what we hold to a minimum, which is itself a protection. If a breach ever put your rights at risk, we would tell the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours, and tell you too if you needed to know.

Children

This site is not aimed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If we find that we have, we delete it.

A note on anonymous contributions

Until sign-in exists, contributions carry no name and no email address. That means that if you later ask us to find or delete a past contribution, we usually cannot connect it to you, because nothing in it identifies you. We would rather say this plainly than pretend we can do something we cannot.

Your data is never sold

We never sell or rent your personal data to anyone. If a public vote is ever reported, the results are only ever shown anonymised and grouped together, never tied to your name.

Changes to this notice

We date this notice and post any changes here. If we make an important change, we will make that clear rather than slip it in quietly.