Social Things

Privacy

Social Things is run by two people. This page says what the site collects about you, what it is for, where it goes and how long we keep it. You can use the directory without giving us your name or anything else about you.

When you look for help

  • To show what is near you, the site needs to know roughly where you are. When you type a postcode or a place, or let the site use your location, your browser sends it to postcodes.io, a free UK postcode service, to find the area. Your location is only used if your browser allows it, and the site only asks for it when you choose to.
  • When you search, our server looks the postcode up the same way. To show how long a journey would take, it sends the centre of your postcode area, not your exact location, to a route-planning service, openrouteservice.
  • The site remembers the place you chose, in your own browser, so you do not have to type it again. It forgets it after 30 days, or straight away when you press “Change”. Your accessibility settings are kept in your browser too. Neither is sent to us.
  • We do not set cookies for people using the directory.

Counting visits

We use Vercel Web Analytics to count which pages are used and which phone numbers and websites are followed, so we can tell what helps. Before anything is counted, the site removes any postcode or search from the page address, and does not count some pages at all, such as pages about mental health.

When you tell us about a place

  • The form asks for your name and email address, as well as the place's details. We use your name and email to send you an acknowledgement and to contact you if we have a question about the place. We do not publish them.
  • Your details, with the place's, are stored in our database and emailed to us. Your email address is sent through Resend, the service we use to send email.
  • To check the place before anybody sees it, its name, description and website (not your name or email) are read by an AI model, Google's Gemini, through Vercel. The place's website is read by a web-reading service, Firecrawl.
  • We keep your name and email until a year after we have decided about the place, then delete them. The listing itself stays.

When you tell us something is wrong

The feedback form asks for your name, email address and what is wrong. It is stored in our database and emailed to us, so we can put it right and reply to you. It is not read by any AI model. We delete each report a year after we have dealt with it.

When you tell us a door was open or shut

On a listing's page you can tell us whether the place was open. We do not store your IP address. We store a one-way code made from it and the day, so the same person cannot report twice in a day, and we delete every report after 30 days.

Stopping misuse

To stop the forms being used to send us floods of messages, we record the IP address of each form sent, and delete it after a day.

Who can see it, and where it is kept

  • Only the two of us, through a password-protected part of the site.
  • The site is hosted by Vercel and the database by Neon. Both run in the United States, in the Washington DC area. Email to us arrives in a mailbox hosted by Namecheap.

Asking us about your information

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, by emailing help@socialthings.org. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

This notice was last updated on 3 November 2026.