Privacy policy

Further information about National Highways’ treatment of personal data, and your privacy rights, is available in our main Privacy Notice.

Who runs this service?

This site is a service provided to National Highways by SocietyWorks Ltd, a limited company (05798215). SocietyWorks is a trading subsidiary of mySociety, a registered charity in England and Wales (1076346), who also run the national fixmystreet.com website with which this site is linked. Henceforth this privacy policy will refer to mySociety.

Reports made on this site also appear on fixmystreet.com, and vice versa. These reports and the associated user data are stored in a single database which is hosted by mySociety. They are accessible to mySociety and National Highways administrators.

What information we collect and how we use it

When you make a report or update

Details of the issue are routed directly to the contact or contacts responsible for fixing it, based on its location. Your report or update appears publicly on both this site and on fixmystreet.com.

FixMyStreet provides RSS/JSON feeds, accessible from both fixmystreet.com and this site, which allow anyone to publish reports on their own website or page. Typically these feeds consist of reports made within a specific local area, and are published on community or local interest sites.

Note that anything you include in the body of your report will be published in one or all of the places listed above, so please take care to keep personal information such as your contact details to the correct fields.

Data are accessible only to mySociety’s administrators, who adhere to strict data-handling policies, and to National Highways staff, who abide by their own data-handling and security policies.

When you contact the support team

Your message will be accessible to National Highways’s support staff, who adhere to our data-handling and security policies. If your issue is about the use or functions of FixMyStreet, it may be passed to mySociety’s support staff (including personal details, such as name and email address, in order to help troubleshoot issues), whose privacy policy can be seen here.

Your personal information is never shared, or used for purposes other than those listed above, unless we are obliged to by law.

Research

mySociety sometimes use report data, or share it with trusted third parties, for research. This data is completely anonymised and contains no identifying details such as names, email addresses or the content of reports. mySociety’s Research Data Release policy may be seen on request to them.

Legal basis for processing

In using FixMyStreet for any of the functions listed above (sending a report, leaving an update, email alerts or site registration), your data is processed by both National Highways and mySociety.

National Highways is the data controller and mySociety is a data processor.

Your data is processed by National Highways under the legal basis 6(1)(e) – public task. National Highways asserts that the processing of users’ personal information is necessary for us to perform a task in the public interest or for our official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law. Our obligation to keep highways in good order and to keep public areas safe and functional are set in law.

mySociety also runs a service called FixMyStreet. If you report a problem that National Highways is responsible for directly on FixMyStreet, rather than this site, mySociety will share your report (and personal details if provided) with us.

This sharing is in accordance with the FixMyStreet terms of service and their privacy statement. When National Highways receives this information we will hold it as explained on this page.

Retention periods and your right to removal

Reports and updates

Except in exceptional circumstances, reports or updates made through this site or FixMyStreet are not deleted. Historic reports provide an invaluable resource for researchers into the quantity and type of street problems made across the UK during the years the site has been running. This research can help inform civic planners, developers, coders, historians and social scientists, among others.

Therefore, if you ask for a report to be removed, in most cases you will instead be invited to anonymise it, so that there is no public connection between the content and your name. You can anonymise reports singly, or in bulk, by logging in to your account on either this site or on fixmystreet.com and clicking on the ‘“Hide your name” link beside the time and date of your report. From here you may anonymise this report or all reports you have made.

If you do not already have an account, it is simple to register, and once you have done so you will have access to all the reports you have made under that email address.

Changes you make to your reports will apply immediately on this site, on fixmystreet.com and will also be reflected, sometimes with a delay, anywhere else they appear (see “What information we collect and how we use it”, above, for more details about where reports are published). If you do not see the changes, please ‘hard refresh’ your browser by eg pressing the Ctrl and F5 keys simultaneously.

Search engines such as Google often take a little time to reflect changes to content, but anonymising your report should also remove your name from their search results once the pages have been recrawled by their robots.

Your right to object

The General Data Protection Regulation gives you the right to object to our processing of your personal information and to ask us to stop processing it. However, it also gives us the right to continue to process it if we can demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds for the processing that override your interests, rights and freedoms. To exercise your right to object, you can contact us, giving specific reasons why you are objecting to the processing of your personal data. These reasons should be based upon your particular situation.

Your right to access

You may contact us at any time to ask to see what personal data we hold about you.

Your right to complain

If you believe that we have mishandled your data, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office. You can report a concern here (but do contact us first, so that we can try and help).

Cookies

To make our service easier or more useful, we sometimes place small data files on your computer or mobile phone, known as cookies; many websites do this. We use this information to, for example, remember you have logged in so you don’t need to do that on every page, or to measure how people use the website so we can improve it and make sure it works properly. Below, we list the cookies and services that this site can use.

Name Typical Content Expires
fixmystreet_app_session A random unique identifier When browser is closed