Privacy – FOI Forest

I care a lot about privacy and using data ethically, so I want to be transparent about how this site handles data and show you how to verify it yourself where possible. The short version: I deliberately collect very little, and what I do collect is aggregate and anonymous.

Analytics

This site uses Plausible Analytics to understand things like whether anyone visits the site, which pages are most used, and where traffic comes from. I chose Plausible specifically over tools such as Google Analytics because it’s designed to give that kind of aggregate picture without collecting personal information.

What Plausible does and doesn’t do:

No cookies, no persistent identifiers. Your IP address and browser information are used to produce an anonymised daily count, then immediately discarded.
What is collected is aggregate only: pages visited, referral sources, visit duration, and general device information (device type, operating system, city, country, browser).
Data is isolated to a single day, so there’s no way to track whether the same person returns on another day or visits from a different device.
Plausible is open source, which means anyone can read the code to verify these claims.
All data is processed and stored in the EU, under EU data protection law.

If you’d prefer not to be counted at all, Plausible respects the Do Not Track browser setting and is blocked by most ad blockers and privacy-respecting browsers.

You can read Plausible’s full data policy directly. If you want to verify my analytics setup specifically, I’ve made the FOI Forest dashboard public so you can see exactly the same aggregate data I see.

Search

What you search for is none of my business.

When you open the Search page, your browser downloads a dataset containing all disclosure log entries as a single file from Netlify’s CDN, where this site is hosted. Every search, filter, and sort operation then runs entirely within your browser using that local copy. This means that nothing you type into the search box is sent anywhere. There are no server-side search requests, no logs of your queries, and no way for me to see what you searched for. You can confirm this yourself by opening your browser’s developer tools (Network tab) while searching. You’ll see the data file load once on page arrival, and nothing sent when you type.

As the dataset grows, this approach may eventually become impractical as downloading and searching the full dataset becomes slower. At that point I may need to switch to server-side search instead. I expect that to be roughly two years away, and if I make that change I’ll communicate it clearly with a prominent notice. I’ll do my best to avoid logging search queries in that scenario, though I can’t make a firm guarantee about that until I know what infrastructure I’m working with.

Whatever search approach is in use, you’ll always have the option of downloading the full dataset from the Data page and doing whatever you want with it locally.

Alerts and RSS

There are no email alerts or notification signups on this site, as those would require me to collect your email address which I’d rather not do. Instead, FOI Forest publishes an RSS feed, which you can subscribe to using any feed reader. Your feed reader then periodically checks for new entries, and I never know who’s subscribed or what you’re interested in. Most feed readers also let you filter by keyword or other criteria, so you can limit what you see to entries relevant to you. Since those filters are in your feed reader, I have no visibility of those.