Privacy notice
The short version: no registration numbers are stored anywhere, plates and faces are blurred on your phone before anything is uploaded, this website sets no cookies and runs no analytics, and councils reply to you rather than to us.
Current status
This service is not yet open to the public. At the time of writing it has one user, who is also the person who built it. No other person’s data has been collected. Registration with the Information Commissioner’s Office and a completed data protection impact assessment will both be in place before anyone else can sign up. This notice will be updated and dated when that happens.
Who is responsible
Usama, operating independently in London. Contact: hello@tellthecouncil.uk.
This is not a council service. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by any local authority, Transport for London, or any government body.
What is never collected
Registration numbers. There is no field for one. A plate you type is passed to the authority with your report and then discarded — not hashed, not encrypted, not archived. This is a deliberate design decision that gives up the ability to spot the same vehicle twice, in exchange for holding nothing.
Unblurred photographs. Blurring is applied destructively on your device before upload. The original is never transmitted, so there is no copy anywhere to be leaked, subpoenaed or lost.
Your location. A report’s location is the location of the problem, read from the photograph’s own EXIF data. Where the photo has none, you are asked to place it on a map or give a postcode. Your device’s live GPS is used only if you explicitly choose it for a particular report, and it is never tracked in the background.
What is collected
- Your name and email address, so the authority knows who is reporting and can reply to you.
- The report itself — category, location, description, and the redacted photograph.
- What happened to it — when it was sent, any reference number you paste in, and whether you told us it was acknowledged or fixed.
The lawful basis is the performance of a task you have asked for: sending a report you wrote to an authority you chose. Nothing is used for marketing, profiling or advertising, and nothing is sold or shared with anyone other than the authority you are reporting to.
How long it is kept
Photographs expire automatically on a storage lifecycle rule, so deletion is enforced by the infrastructure rather than depending on anyone remembering to run something. Reports and their history are kept while your account exists so you can see what you sent, chase a response, and export an evidence pack if a problem is ignored.
The Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman will normally only look at a complaint within twelve months of the problem arising, which is why report history is kept at least that long — a deleted history is a lost route to escalation.
Who it is shared with
The authority responsible for the road: one of the 32 London boroughs, the City of London Corporation, Transport for London, or the relevant landowner where a path is not a public highway. Your report and your email address go to them, and their reply comes back to you directly. We are not copied in unless you choose otherwise.
Data is stored in the United Kingdom and is not transferred outside it.
Cookies and analytics
This website sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads no third-party scripts. The app stores your unsent reports in your own browser’s storage on your own device, which is not a cookie and is never transmitted anywhere except when you send a report.
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted, by emailing hello@tellthecouncil.uk. If you are unhappy with how a request is handled you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Note that once a report has been sent to an authority, that authority holds its own copy under its own retention rules. Deleting a report here does not delete theirs, and you would need to contact them directly.