Privacy policy

Who is responsible

Local Past is operated by Local Past Ltd, a limited company registered in England and Wales.

Local Past Ltd is the data controller for personal data processed through Local Past.

Company number 17445372.

Registered office: 8 Overton Lane, Northampton, NN5 7FL.

If you have a question about your information, or want to make a data-protection request, use the contact page. Signed-in members can also use the account data page.

The information we hold

• Account information: your email address, the display name you choose, and your sign-in credentials. Passwords are handled by our sign-in provider and are stored in a form we cannot read.
• Contributions: the entries, people, places, relationships, photographs, transcriptions, archive references, comments, and research notes you add.
• Security records: a short record of actions such as sign-in attempts and form submissions, identified by your account where you are signed in, or by your IP address where you are not.

Why we use it, and our lawful basis

• To create your account, sign you in, and let you add and manage your own records. This is necessary to provide the service you asked us for (Article 6(1)(b), contract).
• To publish the entries you choose to make public and show them on place and person pages. This is necessary to provide the service, and is in our legitimate interests in maintaining a shared community archive (Article 6(1)(b) and 6(1)(f)).
• To review reports, moderate content, and protect people named in records. This is in our legitimate interests in keeping the archive accurate, lawful, and safe (Article 6(1)(f)).
• To limit abuse of forms and sign-in, and to protect the service from misuse. This is in our legitimate interests in security (Article 6(1)(f)).
• To meet obligations that apply to us, and to respond to lawful requests (Article 6(1)(c), legal obligation).

What stays private and what is shared

Your account information is private. We never publish your email address, and other members cannot see it.

Only entries you publish are shared with other members. Drafts, records you keep private, and records about living people stay restricted to you.

When you publish an entry, the display name you have chosen appears alongside it. Nothing else about your account is shown.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with anyone for advertising or marketing.

Living people and historical records

Data protection law protects living people. Most material on Local Past concerns people who died long ago, and that material falls outside the scope of this notice.

Records that identify a living person are private, and this is enforced by the service rather than left to good intentions. A person marked as living is forced to private visibility, private people are left out of the sitemap and search engines, their pages are not served to the public, and an entry that tags a private person is hidden along with them. Where a family tree file is imported, anyone born in the last hundred years without a recorded death is treated as living and kept private automatically.

We do not publish information about living people at all, even with their permission. Local Past is a space for remembering people who have died, and the form for adding a person says so. The database supports an opt-in route for publishing a living person with a recorded basis for their consent, but that route is deliberately switched off and no member can use it. If we ever turn it on, we will change this notice before we do.

Please do not add health, religious, ethnic, or other sensitive details about a living person. We have no lawful basis to hold that kind of information about someone who has not given it to us, and we will remove it.

Because members research their own families, someone may add a living relative to a private record without asking them first. We do not write to every living person named in a member's private research, because tracing and contacting them would take effort out of all proportion to a record that is never published; instead we keep those records private, explain the position here, and act on any objection. If you believe information about you, or about a living person you are responsible for, is held or published on Local Past, use Report on the page or the contact page. We will review it and remove or restrict it. You can object to our holding it at all, and unless we have a compelling reason to continue, we will stop.

Who can see your information

Your information is held privately by Local Past Ltd. Within Local Past it can be seen only by people employed or contracted to work on the service, and only where doing so falls within their role.

We do not export member information to other systems, and we do not sell it or share it for advertising or marketing.

We use these providers to run the service: Supabase (database, sign-in, and file storage) and Vercel (website hosting and delivery). They process information on our instructions under a written agreement and may not use it for their own purposes. Running the site necessarily means they handle your IP address.

Viewing a map or searching for an address makes your browser contact MapTiler (map tiles and address search) and OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service (address search) directly, so those services receive your IP address. They are independent of us and apply their own privacy terms.

We also look up place names with Logainm (Irish place-name lookup). We make those requests from our own servers, so that service does not receive your IP address.

Where your information is stored

Member information is stored on Supabase infrastructure in London, United Kingdom (AWS region eu-west-2).

We do not copy it to another country. Supabase and Vercel are international companies, so their staff may need access from outside the United Kingdom to support the service or fix a fault. Where that happens, it is covered by the International Data Transfer Addendum in our agreements with them, which is the safeguard approved for UK transfers.

How long we keep it

We do not delete your work on a schedule. The entries, people, and places you add stay on Local Past until you remove them.

Closing your account is not the same as deleting your contributions. Closing signs you out and removes your display name from everywhere you appear, but your entries, comments, and the threads they belong to stay on the site as the work of a former user, so that other members' research is not broken. If you want your contributions removed as well, delete them before closing your account, or ask us to remove them.

Closing is reversible, so we keep enough to reverse it: your account record, the date you closed, and any private note you gave us when closing. Signing in again offers you the choice to re-open. Your old display name stays reserved to you rather than being freed for someone else, and you can take it back when you return. The data retention page explains this in full.

Security records are kept only as long as they are useful: rate-limiting records are cleared automatically within hours, and reports and moderation decisions are kept while they remain relevant to protecting people.

Your rights

• Ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Ask us to correct information that is wrong or incomplete.
• Ask us to delete your information, where we are not required to keep it.
• Ask us to restrict how we use your information while a concern is looked into.
• Ask for a copy of the information you gave us in a portable format.
• Object to our use of your information where we rely on legitimate interests.

Making a request or a complaint

To exercise any of these rights, use the account data page when signed in, or the contact page. We will respond within one month.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first so that we have a chance to put it right.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

Changes to this notice

We update this notice when what we do with information changes. The version on this page is always the current one, and it shows the date it was last updated.

If a change materially affects you, for example a new purpose or a new organisation receiving your information, we will tell members directly rather than relying on you to re-read this page.

If Local Past Ltd is sold, merged, or transferred, or if the service is taken over by another organisation, information held on Local Past may transfer to the new owner so that the archive and your account can continue. The new owner would become the data controller and would be bound by a notice at least as protective as this one. We will say so on this page, and tell members whose accounts are affected, before any transfer takes effect.