What we will never do
These commitments also appear on the about page, and they are permanent:
- There will never be advertising on this site.
- Your data will never be sold or shared with third parties.
- There is no third-party tracking. No advertising pixels, no external trackers, no cross-site profiling.
- Analytics never use cookies and never store your IP address.
- You never need an account or a subscription to use the site.
Browsing the site
You can use every dashboard, map, and article without telling us anything about yourself. We measure site usage with a self-hosted, cookie-free analytics tool (Umami) running on our own server. It records aggregate information such as pages viewed, referring sites, browser type, and country. It does not use cookies, does not store your IP address, and does not build a profile of you. No analytics data is shared with or sent to any third party.
If you order a neighbourhood report
Ordering a report is the only part of the service where we store information you give us. For each report request we store:
- the optional email address, if you provided one (used to send a ready notice and so you can match a request later)
- the postcode searched, plus an anonymised version for display
- the latitude and longitude derived from geocoding the postcode
- the report status, generated file path, and timestamps
- a report reference code (for example
SSUK-…) used to reopen the status and download pages
That information is used only to generate the requested PDF, let you reopen the request later, and deliver access to the file. It is never included in analytics: report references, emails, and postcodes stay out of usage measurement entirely.
How report access is protected
Single-report status and download pages are opened with your report reference on Find a report. Anyone who has that reference can reopen and download the report, so keep it private. There is no separate magic download link in the ready email — the reference is the access key. Status pages show an anonymised postcode to reduce unnecessary exposure.
Prepaid report packs work differently: the pack confirmation email includes a private pack-page link (with an access token in the URL) that lists your voucher codes. Each voucher is then redeemed for a normal report that gets its own report reference.
Help and feedback form
If you use the help and feedback form, we receive the message contents, and optional name and email address you provide so we can read and reply. Those details are not used for marketing and are not sent to analytics.
Questions
If anything on this page is unclear, or you want data connected to a report request removed, use the help and feedback form. For how the crime data itself is processed, see the methodology page.