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 (or, if you used the box at the top of the page inside another app’s own browser such as TikTok’s, which app), 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. If you used a box that says “Get an email when…” on a role or an employer’s page, it also holds which employer and which kind of role you asked about, and which page you asked on. That is the whole record.
We use it for one thing: emailing you when an intake you care about changes, which means a role opening at an employer you asked about, a deadline appearing, or a role coming off an employer's board. The only other thing that ever reaches that address is a rare notice about the service itself, such as the day a new part of the site opens, and no more than a few times a year. Nothing else is sent, and every one of those carries the same one press unsubscribe.
Signing up starts the weekly summary and nothing else. A “Get an email when…” box also starts the one email it names: a message on the morning that employer opens a role of the kind you asked about, and never on a morning when nothing did. The box says both before you press it. 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, into a “Get an email when…” 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.
Every account gets Premium for seven days, free, with no card: a new account from the day it is made, an existing one from its next signed-in visit. During that week you get a morning email when a role opens in the sectors on your switches, one note the evening before the week ends, and one note after it saying what opened since. Each carries a one press stop, and the switches on your account page turn the mornings off. Reminder choices are kept against the same account, and the only mail that comes from them is about intakes you saved yourself. Having an account also means we may write to you a few times a year about the service itself, such as the day a new part of the site opens, with a one press unsubscribe on every one. 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.
We also record which filter you moved on the tracker, for example the sector, the intake type or the sort order, and the words you type into the search box once you have stopped typing. The words are what tell us which jobs people are looking for and cannot find, which is the only way we learn what to add next. A search is only kept if it reads like a job search: at most forty characters of ordinary letters, numbers and punctuation. Anything longer, or anything containing an address or a web link, is recorded as a search having happened with the words thrown away. It is stored the same way as every other count, against the scrambled label described below and never against your name.
Once per visit we also record which site sent you here, for example google, tiktok or chatgpt.com, or “direct” when your browser does not say. It is the site, never you: everyone arriving from the same place is recorded identically, and it is what lets us tell whether anything we write or post is read. When your browser puts a page back on screen by itself, for example reopening your last tab when you open the browser again, that is noted as a reopen rather than a visit. Each count also notes the kind of device, a phone, a tablet or a computer, read from what your browser says about itself, so we can tell which screen the site has to work best on. It is the kind of device only, never which one. It also notes the country your internet connection is in, for example the UK, which our host reads from the connection, so we can tell real visitors apart from automated ones that arrive from dozens of countries at once. It is the country only, never a town or your address.
It is counting, not tracking, and there are no advertising or third-party cookies here, which is why there is no cookie banner. Four things are kept in your own browser and nowhere else: the first time you came, the last page you opened, the roles you pressed Apply on in the last two weeks, and, if you first came through one of our own shared links (for example the one on our Instagram), which link that was, for ninety days. The dates are so the site can tell whether you have been here before and offer you a free week of Premium once, rather than asking a stranger or asking you twice. The roles are so it can ask whether you want to keep them in your applications list, and so Remi does not suggest them to you again. The link is so we can tell which of our posts brought people who came back later, and it is only ever the name of our link, never anything about you. If you then make an account, the name of that link is noted on the account, so we can tell which post brought you. None of it is a name, and apart from that link's name none of it leaves your device unless you choose to save those roles to an account, or Remi sends those roles with a quick question so it can leave them out of its answer, and the switch at the bottom of this section turns all of it off along with everything else on this page. 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 about you to employers. Applying happens on the employer's own site, and what you do there is between you and them. Their site can see that the visit came from The Intake, because the Apply link says so, and that is all it can see: every Apply link carries the same label, and it says nothing about who you are or what you looked at here.
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.
Payments are taken by Stripe, which handles your card; we never see or store your card details. Against your account we keep what Stripe sends us so you can be recognised as a member and so you can cancel: your Stripe customer ID, your subscription ID, which plan you are on, and its start and end dates. Stripe's own privacy policy (stripe.com/privacy) covers what it collects to take the payment.
The legal basis for holding that is the contract: we need it to give you the access you paid for and to let you cancel or be refunded.
Your alert switches: whether you want an email the morning something opens, which sectors and intake types, and whether to limit that to the roles still open to you if you need visa sponsorship. Those alerts go out from the same mail system as the weekly digest, to members while their switches are on, and only for that. A new account's free week starts with the switches on, set from what you have already looked at on the site, and the account page turns them off in one press.
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.
When you type a question to Remi, the assistant, the words are sent to Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, to write the answer from the roles we track. Anthropic handles it under its commercial terms (anthropic.com/legal/commercial-terms), which do not let it train its models on what we send. We keep a record of each conversation with Remi: the questions you type, the answers Remi gives, the quick questions and buttons you press in it and the links you open from it, with the time, the page and the same label as the rest of the site, or your account when you are signed in. Email addresses and phone numbers are taken out before anything is kept, and it is deleted after 12 months. We use it to see how conversations go and to make Remi better. We never show it to anyone else or use it for advertising, and if you ask us we delete yours. If you have turned counting off below, none of your conversations is kept. Separately, we count how many questions were asked from an account or a browser each day, so the daily limit works; that count is kept even if counting is off, because without it the limit cannot work, and it holds the day and the kind of account, never the question. The conversation on screen stays in that browser tab only, so it is still there when you move between pages, and it goes when you close the tab. If you answer Remi's questions about your year, the grade you are predicted or whether you need a visa, those answers are kept in the record of the conversation like the rest, saved on this device so Remi does not ask for them again, and sent with your questions and with the lines on our pages that ask Remi about a role, a list or an employer. A typed question also says which page you asked it on, so Remi can answer about that role or employer: what we hold about it is looked up on our side and sent to Anthropic with your question. So that Remi does not suggest a role you have already applied to, its quick questions and those lines also carry the roles you pressed Apply on in the last two weeks and the ones in your list at applied or a later stage; they are used for that one answer and not kept, and the record of the conversation notes only how many were left out. Turning counting off below stops the record and stops those roles being sent, and the answers on this device can be cleared with your browser data.
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. Stripe handles Premium payments and receipts under its own privacy policy; we never see the card. Anthropic writes Remi's answers to typed questions, as described above.
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.