Privacy Policy

refnation.uk is operated by Refnation Ltd (“refnation”, “we”), a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17472835, with its registered office at 13 West Marsh Close, Grimsby, England, DN31 2FF.

Refnation Ltd is the data controller for the personal data described here, and is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration number ZC254853. For anything in this policy, contact us at contact@refnation.uk.

When you create an account, we collect your email address and the username you choose. If you sign up with Google or X, we also receive the name and profile picture on that account. After that, you can optionally add details to your profile: your postcode (used to find your parliamentary constituency), date of birth, gender, who you would vote for, how you voted in the 2024 general election, and your highest qualification. None of these are required to use the site. Your 2024 vote and qualification are only ever used combined with other members’ answers, to balance results against the UK as a whole. Answering all six earns the refnation Complete seal beside your name (needed to ask a referendum); “Prefer not to say” counts as an answer, and the seal never shows what you said. (We no longer ask for employment status; if you gave it when we did, we still hold it, and it is deleted with your account.)

As you use refnation, we record your activity: the votes you cast, the referendums you submit, the opinions and replies you post, your reactions, and the timestamps of those actions. If you vote before creating an account, your votes are kept in your browser and added to your account if you later sign up; the political profile we write for you before then is also kept on our servers for a limited time (see “Data retention”). From 29 October to 2 November 2026, a ballot finished without an account was also kept as one anonymous record, with no account, IP address or browser identifier, to compare how visitors and members vote. We no longer keep these, and they were never counted in a result.

Our hosting provider measures how fast pages load, as aggregate, cookieless statistics. If you accept optional cookies, advertising tags measure whether one of our ads led to a visit or a sign-up, as described in our Cookie Policy.

If a page crashes in your browser, it sends us a short error report so we can fix it: the error message, where in our code it happened, the page address and your browser type. It carries no account, IP address or cookie, and stores nothing on your device.

If you become a founding supporter, Stripe takes the payment: your card details go straight to Stripe and never reach us. We keep a record of your membership — the amount, whether it is active, and when it renews or ends — so the supporter mark shows beside your name.

If you turn on notifications, we store a notification token issued by your browser or device so we can send them. It identifies that device’s notification channel, not you, and is deleted when your device reports it no longer works (for example after you turn notifications off) or when you delete your account.

Your votes, and the political profile built from them, reveal political opinions, as do who you would vote for and how you voted in 2024, if you tell us. Under UK GDPR this is “special category data” and gets extra protection. Recording and reflecting where you stand is the entire point of refnation: we process this data with your explicit consent, which you give by choosing to cast votes on the platform. Your votes are counted into each referendum’s result, and they are also public: each referendum lists who voted and how, and your votes appear on your profile and beside any opinion you post — see “What is public” below. Deleting your account removes them.

We use the information we collect to:

• Operate your account and authenticate your identity
• Build your personal political profile — your leaning, your matches, and your written summary — generated automatically from the votes you cast
• Apply the reply limits members choose — if someone limits which leans can reply to their opinions, we check the leaning worked out from your votes against that choice when you reply to them. The check only decides whether you can reply there, and the author is not told when someone is turned away. Any limit you set yourself is stored with your account until you change it
• Generate aggregated demographic analysis on referendum results — for example, showing how different age groups or genders voted, where people have chosen to share those details
• Surface constituency-level and national-level political trends across the platform
• Send you service emails — sign-in codes, confirmations, and reminders. Every non-essential email includes an unsubscribe link
• Send you notifications, if you have turned them on — the daily ballot and replies to you. Turned on in the refnation app, they replace the matching email rather than arriving alongside it
• Prevent duplicate votes and detect abuse
• Improve the platform and understand how it is being used

Your username, the referendums you submit, and the opinions you post are visible to other users, and so are your votes: each referendum lists who voted and how. Your profile page shows how you voted on each referendum, the leaning worked out from your votes, who you say you would vote for (if you have set it), and headline stats built from your activity (such as earned titles and how often you vote). When you post an opinion or a reply, how you voted on that referendum and your leaning are shown beside it. If you have added a postcode, your constituency appears on the preview image shown when someone shares a link to your profile, and you are listed as a member on your constituency’s page (with how you voted on the latest daily ballot) and on your region’s page. Your personal details (email, postcode, date of birth), how you voted in the 2024 general election and your highest qualification are never shown to other users.

Your profile has a card. Anyone who taps your picture, or opens a card you share, sees it, with the lines you choose. By default it shows when you joined, your lean this week, the topic you’re most split on, the topic you’ve moved furthest on since your first 100 votes, and the one-line summary of your profile, which you can switch off. Your closest-party match only shows if you add it.

If you use the refnation app for Android, it shows this same website: the same account, the same data and this same policy. The differences are that advertising measurement tags do not run inside the app, and that if you turn on notifications there, they replace the daily email rather than arriving alongside it.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information, and we show no third-party advertising on refnation. Your data is shared only with providers who run parts of the service on our behalf, under agreements that limit them to processing on our instructions:

• Hosting and database — Vercel (site hosting) and Supabase (our database, hosted in Europe)
• Email delivery — Resend, to send the service emails described above
• Payments — Stripe, to take founding-supporter payments and send receipts. Stripe also keeps some payment data itself, to prevent fraud and meet its legal duties, as set out in Stripe’s own privacy policy
• Profile generation — to produce your written political profile and analyse referendum questions, your votes and posted opinions (never your email address) are processed by large-language-model providers acting on our instructions, who do not use this data to train their models
• Constituency lookup — your postcode is checked against Postcodes.io to find your constituency
• Advertising measurement — we advertise refnation on X (Twitter), Google Search, Facebook and Instagram. If you accept advertising cookies, X, Google and Meta receive conversion signals (that an ad led to a visit, a finished ballot or a sign-up). If you don’t, nothing is sent to any of them. These tags never run inside the refnation Android app
• Notification delivery — notifications travel through your browser’s or device’s push service (Google, Apple or Mozilla), which carries the notification text to your device

Our database is hosted in Europe. Some providers (email delivery, payments, profile generation, advertising measurement) process data in the United States; where personal data leaves the UK, we rely on UK adequacy decisions and the standard international transfer safeguards (the UK Addendum / IDTA) those providers offer.

We retain your personal data for as long as your account is active. If you close your account, your personal details are deleted. Anonymised vote data may be retained to preserve the integrity of historical referendum results. Records of supporter payments are kept for six years, as UK tax law requires, even after you close your account.

If you vote before creating an account, the political profile we write for you is kept on our servers under a random identifier from your browser — not your name — so it can become your first profile when you sign up. If you haven’t signed up within 30 days, we delete it. To stop the feature being abused, we also keep a record of which browser and IP address a profile was written for; that record is deleted after two days.

The anonymous record of a ballot finished without an account is deleted after 12 months.

When you delete your account we keep an anonymous note of it: how long you were a member, how many votes you cast and any reason you chose to give, with no name, email or account attached. It is deleted after 12 months.

We take the security of your data seriously. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access to personal data is strictly limited to authorised personnel. We regularly review our security practices to protect against unauthorised access, disclosure, or loss.

We use strictly necessary cookies to keep you signed in, and — only with your consent — optional advertising cookies. Nothing optional runs until you accept it, and you can change your choice at any time on the Cookie Policy page.

As a UK resident, you have the following rights over your personal data:

• Right of access — you can request a copy of the personal data we hold about you (a Subject Access Request).
• Right to rectification — you can ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data.
• Right to erasure — you can ask us to delete your personal data. We will do so unless we are required to retain it by law.
• Right to restrict processing — you can ask us to pause the use of your data in certain circumstances.
• Right to data portability — you can request your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
• Right to object — you can object to our processing of your data where we rely on legitimate interests as our lawful basis.
• Right to withdraw consent — at any time: for cookies, on the Cookie Policy page; for anything else (including your votes, by deleting your account), by contacting us.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at contact@refnation.uk. We will respond within one month.

If you are not satisfied with how we handle your data, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) — the UK's independent data protection authority — at ico.org.uk or by calling 0303 123 1113.

We process your personal data under the following lawful bases as defined by UK GDPR:

• Contract — processing necessary to provide the service you have signed up for.
• Explicit consent — for the political opinions your votes and profile answers express (special category data), given by choosing to vote or to answer, and withdrawable by deleting your account.
• Consent — for optional profile details and optional cookies, withdrawable at any time.
• Legitimate interests — generating anonymised demographic analysis, improving the platform, preventing abuse, and telling journalists about our work (see Journalists and press contacts), where these interests are not overridden by your rights.

refnation is for people aged 16 or over. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone younger; if you believe we have, contact us and we will delete it.

We may update this policy from time to time. When we make material changes, we will notify you by email or by a notice on the platform. Your continued use of refnation after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

If you have questions about this policy or how we handle your data, contact us at contact@refnation.uk.