Privacy

Display preferences (like the theme) are stored only on your device. Compass counts how often parts of the site are used, so we can see which parts actually help people. We never record your name, your email address, anything you type, or anything from your profile or your plan. We also get a rough count of how many different browsers used a feature on a given day. Our hosting provider works that number out for us. We never receive the code it uses, we cannot recognise you from it, and we only ever ask for and keep single-day figures. You can turn this counting off at any time using the button below, and Compass works exactly the same either way.

If you send us something

Feedback, a message through the contact form, and lived experience are all voluntary, and Compass receives whatever you put in them. That can include health information, because there is no way to tell us about your experience without telling us about your experience. We also keep the email address you give us, if you give one, and a note of which card or question it was about. Your email is never shown publicly.

You can see everything you have sent, withdraw an item, or have your details deleted, at Review activity. Deleting erases the text of what you sent, not only your name against it.

A fuller notice covering contributions is being prepared with legal review. This page describes what actually happens today.

If you sign up for emails

We keep your email address, which of the two kinds of update you asked for, the date, and which page you signed up from. That is the whole record. There is no name field, no account, and nothing from your profile or your plan is attached to it. Your address is never joined to anything else you send us, and it is never shown publicly or shared.

Signing up is a request, not a subscription. We send one email asking you to confirm the address, and until you do we send you nothing else. If you do not confirm, we send one reminder after 5 days, and after 12 days we delete the request and your address with it. We do not keep unconfirmed addresses, not even to count them — what survives is a number in our own records saying how many requests lapsed, with nothing in it that could identify anybody.

Once you have confirmed, every email we send you says who it is from, why it arrived, and carries a link to change what you receive or to stop entirely. Stopping takes one click and needs no reply from us. You can change your mind at any time, and we keep a record that you unsubscribed so that we do not contact you again by mistake.

How we measure what is useful

Compass is small. We cannot ask everyone what helps, so we count what gets used. This section explains exactly what that means, because we think you should be able to check our promises rather than take them on trust.

What we count

We count actions. A card was opened. A resource link was followed. Something was added to My Plan. A plan was printed. The Equipment Planner was opened. Each of these is recorded as a single number going up, with a small label saying which part of the site it happened in. We use these numbers to decide what to write next and what to fix.

What we never record

We never record anything you type. That means your notes, your searches, your feedback, your messages to us, and the names of anything you create. We never record anything from your profile: not your symptoms, not your scores, not your diagnosis or when it started, not your treatment or support choices. Nothing you keep in My Plan is ever sent to us. Your email address never appears in these numbers. Neither does your name.

Counting browsers, and why it is only approximate

We would like to know the difference between one person opening My Plan sixty times and forty people opening it once. So alongside the totals, we get an approximate count of how many different browsers used a feature on a given day. To do this, our hosting provider works out a code for each browser, which their documentation says is reset each day. We are responsible for that processing. We never receive the code, and we have no way to recognise you from it.

We only ever ask for and keep single-day figures. We do not request, calculate or store any count that spans more than one day, so nothing in our own records connects what a browser did on one day with what it did on another. We cannot make that promise on our provider’s behalf, because we cannot inspect their systems. What we can tell you is exactly what we ask them for and exactly what we keep, and that is it.

This number is genuinely rough, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. If several people share one internet connection, they can be counted as one browser. If you use a phone and a laptop, you are counted twice. If you use private browsing, each visit counts as new. We treat these numbers as a rough sense of scale, never as a fact about any person.

What we deliberately do not know

We do not record which specific question you read. We do not use cookies for any of this. We do not share it with advertisers, and none of it is ever connected to anything you send us.

Turning it off

The button below switches the counting off for this browser. Nothing on Compass changes or stops working, and we do not ask why. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat that as switching it off too. If you would rather write to us, our address is on the contact page.

Turning this off stops Compass from counting anything you do here, on this browser. Nothing else changes. Every part of the site keeps working the same way, nothing is hidden from you, and we are not told that you opted out or why. Your choice is remembered on this device only, so if you clear your browser data or use another device you will need to set it again. We are sorry that is clumsy, but the alternative would mean giving you an identifier to remember you by, and not doing that is the point.

One honest caveat

Some browsers and privacy tools block this counting entirely, and we have chosen not to work around that. It means our numbers undercount real use, probably by a noticeable margin. We would rather have smaller numbers we can explain than larger numbers we obtained by getting past a tool you installed on purpose.