The privacy policy explained by the people who administer it, in fewer words than the policy
Prat.uk has a privacy policy. It was last updated in December 2024 and is available in full on the Privacy Policy page, where it runs to several screens and has been read, according to the analytics, by a small and devoted group who also read the disclaimers. For everyone else, this is what the policy says, explained by the two people who administer it and checked by Gerald.
What is collected
If you subscribe to the newsletter, the site has your email address. That is the whole of the list. The site does not ask for your name, your postcode, your date of birth or your position on the monarchy, though the newsletter team has said repeatedly that it would like to know the last one and has been told repeatedly that it cannot ask.
If you visit the site, a cookie may note that you did so, so that the site does not show you the cookie notice every time. This is the only thing the cookie does and the technical team has described it as underemployed.
What is done with it
The email address is used to send the newsletter. It is not sold, shared, rented or read aloud at the tip reading, though the tip reading did once include an unsubscribe message so eloquent that the team applied for permission to print it, and the reader said yes.
The site does not build a profile of you. It could not; it has one field. The technical team has been asked by advertisers whether it knows anything about the readers and has answered, with some pride, that it knows they can read.
What happens when you leave
Unsubscribing removes your address from the list. The removal is immediate, which the newsletter team confirms by watching the counter go down at 7.15 on Friday mornings and noting each departure with interest. Addresses are not retained in a secondary list for the purposes of winning you back, because the editor regards winning people back as beneath the dignity of a publication that puts the unsubscribe link at the top.
The exceptions
Section nine of the policy covers the circumstances in which the site would disclose data. These are: if required by law, if required by Gerald, and if the pigeon sender is ever identified and consents to being named. Gerald has confirmed that the middle one is a joke that he did not write and would like removed from the policy. It has been in the policy since 2008.
Who looks after it
The data is administered by two members of the technical team, listed on Our Team as Systems and Also Systems. Between them they maintain the subscriber list, the cookie, the site itself and the kettle in the archive, which is not in the tea agreement and is therefore the technical team’s responsibility. They are the only staff members who have read the policy in full, and one of them wrote it, which Gerald says does not count.
How to ask
Readers may ask what the site holds about them, and may ask for it to be deleted. Both requests go through Contact Prat.uk, marked for Systems, and both are answered with a short email confirming that the site held an email address and now does not. The team has handled forty-one such requests. Thirty-nine came from the same reader, who appears to be testing the process, and who the team has decided to regard as a colleague.
In summary
The site knows your email address if you gave it, forgets it if you ask, and otherwise has no interest in you beyond whether you laughed. The full policy says this in more words, some of them Latin. Gerald has asked that readers be told the Latin was not his either.
The analytics
The site does keep analytics, which measure how many people read an article, how far they got and whether they came from the newsletter or found it on their own. These figures are seen by the editor, the desks and the commercial team, and are the basis for the claim that prat.uk readers finish the article, a claim the technical team says is true for most articles and heroically true for the disclaimers. The analytics do not know who you are. They know that a reader in a broadcaster the site declines to name reaches the end of every politics story and never subscribes, and the newsletter team has stopped taking this personally.
