Privacy policy
What StreetOwl collects about you, why, how long it is kept, and how to make it go away.
Last updated 29 August 2026 · This is version 1.0
The short version. If you don't sign in, StreetOwl holds nothing about you. There are no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels and no third-party cookies anywhere on this site. If you do sign in, we hold your email address, your display name, which provider you used and any postcodes you chose to save — and you can delete all of it yourself, instantly, from the account panel.
Who is responsible for your data
StreetOwl is run by Michael Rossi, an individual in the United Kingdom. It is a free, non-commercial site built and run in his own time: there is no company behind it, no staff, and nothing on it is for sale. For the purposes of the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, Michael Rossi is the data controller for this site.
For anything to do with your data — a question, a correction, a request to see or delete what we hold, or a complaint — write to privacy@streetowl.co.uk. There is no department and no ticketing system; it reaches the person who built the site.
If you don't have an account
You can use every part of StreetOwl without signing in, and if you don't sign in we hold nothing that identifies you. Specifically:
- No analytics. There is no Google Analytics, Plausible, Matomo, Facebook pixel or equivalent on this site. Nobody is counting you.
- No advertising and no ad networks. StreetOwl carries no advertising, and no third party pays to appear on it.
- No tracking cookies. The only cookie this site ever sets is the sign-in cookie described below, and it is only set if you sign in.
Postcodes you look up
When you type a postcode, it is sent to our server so we can fetch the data for that area, and it is passed on to the relevant public data services — for example the Environment Agency for flood warnings, police.uk for crime, or the Food Standards Agency for recalls. Those services see a request for a postcode. They do not see who asked.
Our application keeps a technical log of the requests it serves, which records the postcode that was looked up and when. Because our web server sits behind a proxy that does not forward visitor IP addresses to the application, that log does not contain your IP address — it records that a postcode was looked up, not who looked it up. Our front-end web server does not keep an access log at all.
Results for a postcode are cached on our server against the postcode itself, so that the next person to look at the same area gets a fast page. That cache is keyed on the place, never on a person.
Failure reports
Some tiles fetch data directly from a third party in your browser. When one of those fails, your browser tells us so that we can fix it. That report contains only the host and path of the service that failed — deliberately never the query string, which is where a postcode would be — and carries no cookie, no IP address and no identifier of any kind. It is telemetry about our data feeds, not about people.
If you create an account
Accounts are optional and exist so that your saved postcodes and card layout follow you between devices. You sign in with Google or Microsoft; StreetOwl never sees, receives or stores a password.
| What we hold | Why |
|---|---|
| Your email address | It is how your account is identified, and the only way to recognise you when you sign in again. |
| Your display name, as Google or Microsoft report it | Shown on the games scoreboard, so that your email address isn't. You can change it in the account panel, and once you do we stop overwriting it at each sign-in. |
| An identifier from your sign-in provider | A meaningless reference number that lets us match you to the right account. |
| Postcodes you chose to save, with any label you gave them | So they are there on your next visit and on your other devices. |
| Which cards you have hidden | So your page looks the same everywhere. This is the only preference we store on our server. |
| The date you created the account | Housekeeping. |
That is the entire list. We do not ask for, and have nowhere to put, your real name, your address, your date of birth, your phone number or any payment details — StreetOwl is free and takes no payments.
The sign-in cookie
Signing in sets one cookie, so_session. It contains your account number and
the time it was issued, signed so it cannot be altered. It is marked HttpOnly (so
scripts cannot read it), Secure (so it only travels over HTTPS) and
SameSite=Lax. It is a strictly necessary cookie for a service you asked for, and it
is deleted when you sign out.
Things your browser stores, that we never see
StreetOwl keeps some settings in your own browser using local storage. These stay on your device and are never transmitted to us: the order of your cards, which are collapsed, which tab you were last on, any events you added yourself, and your Striker Force team if you play signed out. Clearing your browser data removes them.
Your location
If you tap "use my current location", your device asks your permission and then gives the coordinates to the page running in your browser. The page uses them once to find the nearest postcode, and then that postcode is what is looked up. Your coordinates are not sent to us, not logged and not stored. Typing a postcode does exactly the same job.
When your data goes anywhere else
We do not sell your data. We do not share it for advertising. We have never done either and the site has no mechanism for doing so. There are three narrow exceptions, all of them necessary to run the service:
1. Striker Force
If you play Striker Force Express while signed in, your email address is sent to strikerforce.co.uk so your team can be saved to you and follow you between devices. Striker Force is run by the same person as StreetOwl. This happens only when you play signed in; play signed out and nothing is shared — your team simply stays in your browser.
2. Your sign-in provider
When you choose to sign in, you are sent to Google or Microsoft to authenticate. Their handling of that is governed by their own privacy policies, not this one. They tell us your email address, your name and an identifier; we tell them nothing about you.
3. The people who host and run the site
| Who | What they do | Where |
|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean | Hosts the server and the database | London, United Kingdom |
| Google / Microsoft | Sign-in, if you use it | May process outside the UK under their own safeguards |
| Anthropic | Drafts some written explainer articles in advance. No personal data is ever sent — these are batch jobs about public statistics, run nowhere near your account. | Outside the UK |
We will also disclose information if we are legally required to. If that ever happens we will tell the person affected unless we are prohibited from doing so.
Why we are allowed to hold it
- Consent — for creating an account at all, and for sharing your email with Striker Force when you choose to play signed in. You can withdraw it at any time by deleting your account.
- Legitimate interests — for keeping the site working: caching results by postcode, recording that a feed has failed, and keeping the technical logs that let us find a fault. We have considered whether this is fair to you, and the answer rests on the fact that none of it identifies you.
How long we keep it
- Your account and everything attached to it — until you delete it. There is no inactivity sweep and no archive; delete means delete.
- Cached data for a postcode — minutes to a day, depending on the feed, and then it is overwritten. It contains no personal data.
- Failure reports — kept while they are useful for diagnosing a broken feed. They contain no personal data.
- Technical request logs — kept on the server for operational purposes. They contain postcodes and timestamps but not IP addresses.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you have the right to ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to restrict or object to what we do with it, and to receive it in a portable form. You also have the right to withdraw consent at any time.
For most of this you don't need to ask us at all: the account panel shows you everything we hold and deletes all of it immediately, with no email and no waiting. If you would rather we did it, or you want something the panel doesn't cover, write to privacy@streetowl.co.uk and we will respond within one month.
If you are not happy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, or by calling 0303 123 1113. We would much rather you told us first so we can put it right, but you do not have to.
Information about other people
StreetOwl republishes public registers, and some of those name businesses, properties and the people who run companies. That information is published by government under the Open Government Licence and is not collected from you or about you. We apply our own limits to it — for example we publish corporate insolvency notices but deliberately leave out personal insolvency notices, which name private individuals. If you believe something on this site about you or your business is wrong, write to privacy@streetowl.co.uk and we will look at it properly.
Children
StreetOwl is a general information service about places, intended for adults. It is not aimed at children and we do not knowingly hold data about them.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes we will update the date at the top and raise the version number. If a change is significant — if we start collecting something new, or share something with someone new — we will say so on the site rather than quietly editing this page.
See also our terms of use and the About page, which explains in plainer English who runs StreetOwl and where the data comes from.
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