Plain English, and short, because there genuinely is not much to tell you.
You can browse every part of this site without telling us anything. Saving an application to your tracker means signing in, with Google or with an email address and a password, and then we hold your email address and the list of intakes you chose to save. If you never sign in, we hold nothing about you at all, unless you type an address into the alerts box yourself.
We do not sell it, we do not share it for marketing, and there is no advertising on this site.
Your email address, the date you gave it to us, which page you gave it on, and a private code that powers your unsubscribe link.
The record additionally holds whether the weekly summary is switched on, and the date you last changed it. That is the whole record.
We use it for one thing: emailing you when an intake you care about changes, which means a deadline appearing or a role coming off an employer's board. Nothing else gets sent to that address.
Signing up starts the weekly summary and nothing else. If you ever unsubscribe and someone enters your address again, we ask you to confirm by email before anything resumes, so nobody can drag you back onto the list.
The legal basis is your consent, given by typing your address in yourself, whether into the alerts box or into the weekly summary panel on your tracker.
You can withdraw it whenever you like. Every email we send carries a one press unsubscribe, both as a link at the bottom and as your mail app’s own unsubscribe button, and it works without being asked why.
Your email address, and which way you signed in. With Google, Google tells us the address and nothing else: we do not ask for your name, your picture or your contacts. With a password, the password itself is stored scrambled by Supabase, the company that runs our database, and we never see it. A new password account gets one confirmation email before it can be used, so nobody can open an account in your name.
Against that account we keep the intakes you saved, the stage you marked each one at, and any application you typed in by hand. That is what makes your tracker follow you from your laptop to your phone, It is stored so that only your own sign-in can read it, and we never pass it to employers.
Reminder choices are kept against the same account, and we only ever email you about intakes you saved yourself. The weekly summary is separate: it goes to anyone who asked for it in the alerts box, account or not.
Signing in sets the cookies that keep you signed in for thirty days. They are the only cookies on this site that know who you are, they exist only because you asked to be signed in, and signing out deletes them.
To delete the account and everything held against it, reply to any email from us or write to the address at the bottom of this page, and it is gone within a week.
A copy of your tracker always lives in your own browser, so it keeps working offline and nothing about browsing ever leaves your device.
Signed out, that copy is the only one, and clearing your browser data deletes it for good. Signed in, the same list also lives in your account, which is what lets it survive a cleared browser and follow you to another device.
We count how many people open each page, and whether anyone presses Track, clicks Apply, gives us an email address, or signs in. Without those numbers we cannot tell which pages are worth writing or whether the site is any use, so we would be guessing.
It is counting, not tracking. Nothing is stored on your device to recognise you, so there is no cookie banner because there are no tracking cookies to ask you about. To tell one visitor from another, the server turns your address and browser into a scrambled label using a secret that never leaves the server. The label stays the same for as long as your network address and your browser stay the same, and changes when either does, so we can see that the same person came back on Thursday after pressing Apply on Monday, but never who they are. We never see your address alongside it, and for anyone who is not signed in none of it is ever connected to an email or to anything tracked.
If you are signed in, a press of Track, Apply or a sign-in step is also recorded against your account, so we can tell whether people come back and which parts of the site they use. It stays inside the same database, is never shared with or shown to employers, and deleting your account removes the link. The counting switch below turns this off too.
There is no advertising pixel and no third-party tracker. We do not build a profile of you, we do not try to work out who you are from what you browse, and we do not pass anything to employers. Applying happens on the employer's own site, and what you do there is between you and them.
You can turn the counting off, here, and it stops immediately. It is a setting on this device, because remembering it anywhere else would mean identifying the person who asked not to be identified.
Whether your account is a Premium member, from when until when, and how it was paid for. When payment opens it will be taken by a payment partner acting as the merchant of record, so your card details never reach us; we receive a customer reference and a subscription reference from them, which is what lets you cancel from your account page.
Your alert switches: whether you want an email the morning something opens, which sectors and intake types, and whether to limit that to employers on the sponsor register. They are used for exactly that email and nothing else.
Before Premium opened for payment, pressing Join recorded the press, the price on the button, and the address you gave or were signed in with, so we could tell whether anyone wanted it. That record is used to email you once, the day it opens, and to count interest. Ask and it is deleted.
Each time you set a stage on your tracker, or report one on an intake page, we keep the stage, the intake and the day you said it happened, against your account, so that the page can show how long the wait has been for everyone. It only ever leaves the database as a count, and no count is shown until at least three different people are behind that particular number, so nobody can be picked out from it.
It is yours: delete a report from your tracker and it is gone from the counts the next time they are computed, and deleting your account deletes all of it.
Two companies run the machines this site sits on. Vercel hosts the website and counts page views for us, and Supabase runs the database the email list, the accounts and the counted actions live in. They store the data on our behalf and are not permitted to use it for anything of their own. If you sign in with Google, Google also knows you signed in here, under its own privacy policy; we receive your email address from it and nothing more. Once Premium is open for payment, the partner named at checkout will handle your card and your receipt under its own privacy policy; we will never see the card.
Like every website, the servers keep short-lived technical logs of requests, which include IP addresses. We also count requests to the signup endpoint briefly in memory so one person cannot flood it. Neither of those is stored alongside your email or used to identify you.
Until you ask us to stop. When you unsubscribe we mark the record as withdrawn so we cannot email you again by mistake, and if you ask us to delete it outright we delete it.
You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or withdraw your consent. Since the whole record is an email address, a few dates, some switches and the stages you reported, all of those are quick.
Email jointheintake@gmail.com and we will do it. If you are not happy with how we handle it, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.
The Intake is an independent platform based in the United Kingdom, and is the data controller for the email list. Contact jointheintake@gmail.com for anything on this page.
More on how the site is put together in About, and the common questions in the FAQ.