Privacy Policy

Who we are

EvidenceGather (evidencegather.com) is operated by Steleo Publishing Limited, a company incorporated in England and Wales (Company Number 11891029), registered at 167-169 Great Portland Street, London W1W 5PF. Steleo Publishing Limited is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy and is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration ZB969283. We are not a passive storage utility: we decide how the service works, how long data is kept, how it is secured and sealed, and when the law requires us to act — so the law treats us as a controller, with the responsibilities that brings. Because you decide what to send and why, you are also a controller of the content you upload, including any information about other people.

Questions about this policy or your data: privacy@evidencegather.com.

What EvidenceGather does

EvidenceGather gives you a private email address. Anything you send to it is timestamped on arrival, given a digital fingerprint, stored, and filed on a calendar only you can see.

The data we hold

Account data: your email address, your timezone, and your plan.

Your record: the emails, photos, and files you choose to send to your private address, together with the arrival details we seal for you (time received, sender, message headers, per-file digital fingerprints) and any notes or categories you add.

Because you decide what to send, your record may include information that the law treats with extra care — for example material about health, relationships, or allegations about another person's conduct. We treat your entire record as highly sensitive regardless of its content.

Payments: handled by Stripe. We receive confirmation of your plan and a customer reference; we never see or store your card details.

Public pages only: a cookie-free count of visits (via Plausible). Inside the app there is no tracking of any kind.

Why we process it, and on what basis

We process your account data and your record to provide the service you signed up for (performance of a contract), and to keep the service secure and honest — for example the tamper-evident seals and the audit history (legitimate interests that protect you).

Your record may include information the law treats with extra care — about health, relationships, or allegations about another person's conduct. For your own special category information, we rely on your explicit consent, given by your deliberate act of sending each item to your private address, solely so we can store it and show it back to you. For special category and allegation information about other people, we rely on the condition in data protection law that allows processing necessary for the establishment, exercise, or defence of legal claims, and on the substantial-public-interest conditions in Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 2018, for which we maintain an Appropriate Policy Document available on request. We never analyse, profile, or use your record for any purpose of our own.

How long we keep it

While your account is active, we keep your record so it is there when you need it.

If your paid subscription ends, nothing vanishes overnight: your account keeps read access to everything already filed for four months, and we send clear reminder emails during that time so you can export your record or resubscribe. After the four-month grace period ends, your record is permanently deleted. We do not keep sensitive data longer than the service needs it.

You can delete individual items or your entire account at any time, and if you ask us to erase your data we will honour it — permanently. We retain only the minimal billing records the law requires us to keep. These deletion and erasure rights apply to lawful records; where we reasonably believe material is unlawful we may preserve it as our Terms of Service describe, and to the extent United Kingdom data protection law permits us to retain it to comply with a legal obligation or in connection with legal claims. When we erase your data we destroy everything that forms your record or identifies you; the only thing that remains is the anonymous fingerprint list described in "The one thing that outlives deletion", which cannot identify you or reconstruct anything you sent.

If you are on the free plan and stop using your account, we will remind you and then delete the record after a period of inactivity, so that we do not hold sensitive data longer than it is wanted. Apart from that anonymous fingerprint list, which identifies no one, we never keep personal data with no defined end point.

The one thing that outlives deletion

When you delete an item, close your account, or reach the end of a grace or inactivity period, we permanently erase the readable parts of your record — the files, emails, attachments, notes, arrival details, and everything that identifies you — from our live systems, and from our backups as they cycle out.

Disputes can take months, or years. If you have exported your files and still hold them, you may later want to check that a file is the very one you sent, unchanged. So that this stays possible, the single thing we keep is a plain list entry for each file: its digital fingerprint — a short code calculated from the file's contents — and the time it first reached us.

This list is built so that it can identify no one. A digital fingerprint holds none of the file's contents; it cannot be turned back into the file, the message, or anything within it — not by us, our providers, or anyone else. Kept apart from your deleted account, the entries are anonymous strings that point to no person, including you.

We keep this list for one reason, and it is one that helps you: if in future you still hold a file, you can bring it to us and we can confirm whether its fingerprint matches an entry from the time you say — without our having kept any of your material in between. Because these entries identify no one, they are not personal data, and keeping them does not undo the deletion of your record. If you would still rather we did not keep even this, tell us and we will remove your entries.

Who helps us run the service

We use a small number of service providers to operate EvidenceGather, each bound by contract: Supabase (database and sign-in, hosted in the UK — AWS London region), Cloudflare (email receiving and file storage), Vercel (website hosting), Stripe (payments), Plausible (cookie-free visit counts on public pages, EU-hosted), and a transactional email provider for sign-in links and receipts.

We do not sell, share, or advertise against your data. Nobody sees your record but you, with two exceptions: where the law compels us, and where we reasonably believe an account is being used unlawfully — in which case we may examine, preserve, and disclose the relevant material to United Kingdom authorities, as our Terms of Service describe. When we do, we rely on our legal obligation to disclose or, where disclosure is not compelled, on the substantial public interest in preventing or detecting unlawful acts, and we disclose no more than is necessary. Where disclosure happens, we will tell you unless we are legally required not to.

How we protect it

Every file is fingerprinted and its arrival time sealed the moment it reaches us; neither can be changed afterwards, by anyone, including you and us. Later edits you make to your own notes are recorded alongside the original.

Data is protected with AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit, database-level access controls ensure each account can only ever read its own records, and every change is written to an append-only audit history. We are continuing to deepen these protections, including per-account encryption of stored files. Because the service involves sensitive information at scale, we assess and keep under review the data-protection risks it raises.

Other people in your record

Evidence often involves other people. When you record information about someone else, you are acting as a controller of that information in your own right, and you are responsible for having a proper reason to hold it and for using it lawfully and fairly. We store it on your instruction, keep it private to you, and never use it for any purpose of our own. If someone asks us about data you hold, we will normally direct them to you, as the person who decided to record it, and cooperate as the law requires.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct or erase it, object to or restrict processing, and take your data elsewhere. Write to privacy@evidencegather.com and we will respond within one month.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

Age

EvidenceGather is for adults. The service is not directed at anyone under 18.

Changes and governing law

If we change this policy we will post the new version here with a new date, and for meaningful changes we will tell you by email. This policy is governed by the laws of England and Wales.