Privacy notice

How this site handles your data

government.london is a plain, static website. Every page is a fixed HTML file served to your browser — there is no server-side application behind it, no database of visitors, no user accounts and no log-in. We do not run analytics, we do not carry advertising, and we do not build a profile of you or sell anything to anyone. The site does not ask you to identify yourself, and there is nowhere on it to create an account or submit personal details to us. Its only job is to signpost: to send you onward to the official service that actually does the work.

Because there is no back end that belongs to us, the great majority of what you do here never leaves your own device. When you use the search box or the council finder, the form simply points your browser at an official service — GOV.UK's council finder, for example — and that service takes over under its own privacy notice. We do not see, store or process what you type.

Information we collect

We collect essentially no personal information ourselves, because there is no server of ours receiving it. To deliver a few features, however, your browser makes requests directly to a small number of third parties. When it does, those third parties necessarily receive your device's IP address and standard request details, as any web request involves. We name them here honestly so you can see exactly who is contacted and why:

• Open-Meteo — powers the live weather readings on the weather page. It needs no API key and we send it no personal data; the request carries only the location shown and the standard details of any web request.
• Google Fonts — serves the typefaces the site is set in. Loading a font causes your browser to fetch it from Google's font servers.
• A public feed proxy — fetches city news headlines so the news feed can display them. Your browser requests the feed through this proxy; we pass no personal data to it.
• An embedded live-lightning map — shown on the weather page. It is an embedded map from a third-party lightning-tracking service, and like any embed it loads content directly into your browser from that provider.

These are third-party services with their own privacy practices. We do not control what they log, and their use of any request data is governed by their own privacy notices, not ours. We have kept the list deliberately short and use each one only for the single feature described above.

Separately, the company that hosts this website may keep standard web-server logs — typically the requesting IP address, the date and time, the page requested and the browser's user-agent string. Logs of this kind are ordinary and are kept for security, troubleshooting and to keep the service running reliably. We do not use them to identify or track individual visitors.

Cookies & local storage

We set no advertising cookies and no analytics cookies. The site does not drop tracking cookies to follow you around the web. Any storage the site itself uses is limited to making the pages work in your browser, not to identifying you. The embedded third-party features above may set their own cookies or storage when they load; those belong to the providers concerned. For the full detail of what is and is not stored, and how to control it in your browser, see our cookies page.

Your rights

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018, you have rights over any personal data that is held about you. Because this site holds no personal records of its own, there is in practice very little for us to hold, correct or erase — but your rights still stand, and they include:

• Access — the right to ask what personal data is held about you and to be given a copy of it.
• Rectification — the right to have inaccurate personal data corrected.
• Erasure — the right to ask for personal data to be deleted, where the law allows.
• Objection and restriction — the right to object to certain processing, or to ask that it be limited.

If you are unhappy with how personal data about you has been handled, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the United Kingdom's independent data-protection regulator. You can raise a concern with the ICO directly.

Note: Once you leave this site for an official service — GOV.UK, london.gov.uk, tfl.gov.uk, the NHS or your borough — that service's own privacy notice applies to whatever you do there. This notice covers only government.london.

Contact

For any question about privacy or about this notice, please use the contact page. We will answer privacy questions there and help with any request about your data.