Privacy
Informational, no account, and fail-closed.
This site is a research instrument, not a product account, credit file, or surveillance surface. It does not ask you to create a login, and it does not keep a household dossier. This page describes what the software actually does today.
What is collected, and why
Two forms on this site transmit something. Everything else is read-only.
| Where | What is collected | Purpose | Kept |
|---|---|---|---|
| Register interest | Your email address, the consent you gave and its version, and salted one-way digests of your IP address and browser user-agent string. | To contact you once when the household research panel opens. The digests exist only to limit automated abuse of the form. | Until you withdraw, or until the panel programme ends. |
| Briefing request | Your email address, your organization, the consent you gave and its version, and the same salted digests. | To respond to your briefing request. | Until you withdraw, or two years after the last contact. |
| Calculator | The scenario values you enter are sent to the calculation engine to compute a result, and are not written to any record. | To return the scenario you asked for. | Not stored. |
The IP and user-agent digests are salted with a server-side secret before storage. The raw address and the raw user-agent string are never written down and never leave the request that carried them. If the salt is not configured, no digest is stored at all rather than a reversible hash of your address.
Versioned consent
When you tick a consent box, the exact wording you agreed to is recorded by hash alongside your registration. A later edit to the wording cannot be mistaken for consent you gave to an earlier version. The current version is 2026-08-27:
- Register interest: “I am asking to be contacted when the household research panel opens. HSI stores my email address and this consent for that purpose only. No household, financial, or address data is collected by this form. I can withdraw at any time.”
- Briefing request: “I am requesting a research briefing. HSI stores my email address, my organization, and this consent for that purpose only. It is not used for advertising and is not sold. I can withdraw at any time.”
Who processes it
- Netlify hosts and serves this site, and processes the requests you make to it.
- Supabase hosts the research database, which is where a registration is stored. Registrations live in a private schema that the website cannot read back — the site can only write one record through a single narrow function.
- Cloudflare carries calculator requests between the site and the calculation engine.
- Sentry receives application error reports when error monitoring is enabled, under the scrubbing rules below.
The calculation engine runs on hardware operated by the project, not by a third party.
Error monitoring
When error monitoring is enabled, it is configured to send an error type, a stack trace, and the route that failed. It is configured never to send request bodies, query strings, cookies, headers, IP addresses, calculator values, contribution contents, or any household data. Anything that does not match a small allowlist is dropped before it leaves the server.
Cookies and analytics
This interface does not set cookies for a session and does not run product analytics. If the hosting platform sets a strictly necessary cookie for routing or security, it is not used to identify a household. If analytics are ever added, they will record coarse page and button events only — never a value you typed — and this page will say so before they are switched on.
What this site does not do
- It does not sell data, build advertising profiles, or score people.
- It does not use calculator inputs as credit, underwriting, or eligibility evidence.
- It does not claim that a modeled HSI-C envelope is your observed income.
- It does not substitute example data when a published snapshot is missing.
- It does not ship a privileged database key to your browser. The public pages read the published index with a publishable, read-only key.
Withdrawing, correcting, or deleting
Ask through the contact page from the address you registered, and the registration will be withdrawn and removed. Registering interest is not a subscription and there is nothing else attached to it to unwind. You can also ask what is held about your address, and it will be sent back to you.
The household research panel
HSI-R is built from what real households actually produce. That dataset does not exist yet, and the rules below are published before any of it is collected rather than after. Registering interest is not joining the panel and does not consent to any of it.
- Joining will require a login, so that a contributor can see and withdraw their own records. The contact identity is stored separately from the analytical observations and is joined to them only through a private mapping that research queries never see.
- Household records are pseudonymous. Geography is coarse — state, and at finest a public-use microdata area. We do not ask for an exact street address.
- We never ask for a Social Security number, bank credentials, or account numbers, and we do not ask for anything that is not required to compute HSI.
- Participation is explicit and revocable. A contributor can withdraw and have their records deleted.
- Self-reported data is recorded as self-reported. It never silently becomes a verified observation; every change in verification level is an auditable event.
What gets published
Research output is aggregate. Published figures are weighted distributions across many households, and no published statistic is derived from a small enough group to identify a contributor. The full data model is published on the contribute page, and the method on the methodology and sources pages.
Questions
Reach the research team through the contact page.
Last updated 27 August 2026. Consent version 2026-08-27.