Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

Emily Politics is operated by Sinatra AI Ltd (company number 16445668), registered in England and Wales with registered office at 66 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NA.

We take your privacy seriously. This policy explains what personal data we collect, why we collect it, and your rights under UK data protection law.

Contact us:

• Email: support@emilypolitics.com
• Data protection: Sinatra AI Ltd, hello@emilypolitics.com

2. What Data We Collect

2.1 Data You Provide

When you create an account, we collect:

• Email address (required for login and service delivery)
• Name (optional, used for personalisation)
• Password (hashed and encrypted, never stored in plain text)

When you subscribe, Stripe (our payment processor) collects:

• Payment details (card information, billing address)
• Transaction history

We do not see or store your full card details. Stripe handles all payment data in compliance with PCI-DSS standards.

If you choose to link WhatsApp to your account (an optional channel you switch on yourself and can unlink at any time), we also collect:

• Your phone number and WhatsApp profile name (to match messages to your account)
• The messages you send Emily over WhatsApp, including voice notes, images and documents, and her replies. Voice notes are transcribed so Emily can act on them; the audio and the transcript are both kept with your conversation history.
• Delivery metadata (when a message was sent, delivered and read, and the time of your last message, which sets the 24-hour window in which we may reply freely)

See Section 5.4 for how WhatsApp messaging works and who processes it.

2.2 Data We Generate

During your use of Emily Politics, we automatically collect:

• Usage data: searches performed, features used, session duration
• Technical data: IP address, browser type, device type
• Log data: error reports, performance metrics
• AI turn records: one record per question Emily answers for you (which surface it came from, which models and tools ran, tokens used, cost, latency, and whether any of her accuracy guards fired) and one record per individual model or tool call within it. These records let us meter your credits, investigate a wrong answer you report, and measure whether Emily is getting more accurate over time. They reference your conversation; they are not a second copy of it.
• Audit log: a record of every action Emily takes on your behalf (a stakeholder added, a follow-up created, a draft filed) and every action our administrators take on your account. Each entry carries a hash of the entry before it, so the log cannot be edited or trimmed after the fact without that showing.

All analytics are pseudonymised and stored in aggregate.

2.3 Parliamentary Data

Emily Politics analyses publicly available UK parliamentary data, including:

• Hansard debates, committee transcripts, written questions, voting records
• MPs’ names, constituencies, and public statements

This data is already in the public domain. We do not collect or process private information about MPs or other parliamentarians.

While a House is sitting we also run a live transcript of the public parliamentlive.tv broadcast. The audio is streamed through a speech recognition service and turned into text as it is spoken; we do not record or keep the audio itself. The speakers are members and witnesses acting in their public roles, and each live segment is replaced by the official Hansard text once that is published. This processing involves no data about you.

3. Legal Basis for Processing

We process your data under the following legal bases:

You can object to legitimate interest processing at any time by contacting us.

4. How We Use Your Data

We use your personal data to:

• Provide access to Emily Politics and deliver search results
• Process your subscription payments and send receipts
• Send transactional emails (password resets, service updates, billing notifications)
• Improve the service through aggregated analytics
• Respond to support requests
• Comply with legal obligations (e.g., tax reporting, fraud prevention)

We do not:

• Sell your data to third parties
• Use your data for behavioural advertising
• Profile you for automated decision-making
• Share your data with anyone except our trusted processors (see Section 5)

5. Who We Share Your Data With

5.1 Service Providers (Data Processors)

We share your data only with vetted providers who help us run Emily Politics:

All processors are bound by data processing agreements (DPAs) and cannot use your data for their own purposes. See our full sub-processor list for details.

5.2 Email Open Tracking

Emails we send you (your daily briefing, alerts and account notices) contain a small invisible image. When your email client loads that image, we record that the message was opened, and when. We do not record what you read, and we do not track the links you click.

We use this for one purpose: to tell an active reader apart from an unused account. If you read every briefing but never open the app, this is what stops us pausing your briefings for inactivity. It is processed by Resend under our data processing agreement and retained with the rest of your email log.

Most email clients let you block remote images, which prevents this entirely and has no effect on the emails you receive. Some clients (notably Apple Mail Privacy Protection) load the image automatically, so an open we record is not proof a person read the message.

5.3 Legal Disclosures

We may disclose your data if required by law (e.g., court order, tax authority request) or to protect our legal rights.

5.4 WhatsApp Messaging (optional)

You can message Emily over WhatsApp instead of, or as well as, the website. Nothing happens until you link your number yourself from Settings or the onboarding conversation, and you can unlink from Settings or by replying STOP at any time. Linking is not required to use Emily Politics.

WhatsApp is Meta’s service. Messages between you and Emily travel through the WhatsApp Business Platform, where Meta Platforms Ireland Limited acts as our processor under the WhatsApp Business data processing terms. Meta decrypts each message at its endpoint to deliver it to us, so the content of what you send, and of Emily’s replies, passes through Meta’s systems and is held there for the period those terms allow. If we choose UK storage for this channel, Meta keeps the data at rest in the UK on Amazon Web Services; we will record that choice on the sub-processor list once made.

Your WhatsApp conversation with Emily is stored with your other conversation history and is deleted with your account. Two things sit outside our control and you should know about them: WhatsApp backups on your own phone (iCloud or Google Drive) may hold copies of the conversation unless you have turned encrypted backups on, and messages we send you outside the 24-hour reply window use templates that Meta has approved in advance.

6. Data Retention

We keep your data only as long as necessary:

After these periods, data is permanently deleted from our systems.

7. Data Security

We protect your data with:

• Encryption in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest (AES-256)
• Secure authentication (bcrypt password hashing, optional MFA)
• EU-only hosting (no data stored outside UK/EU)
• Access controls (role-based permissions, and a hash-chained audit log of what Emily and our administrators do, which cannot be edited after the fact without that showing)
• Regular security reviews including penetration testing

No system is 100% secure. If a breach occurs, we will notify you and the ICO within 72 hours as required by law.

8. Your Rights

Under UK GDPR, you have the right to:

1. Access your data: Request a copy of everything we hold about you
2. Rectify your data: Correct inaccurate information via your account settings
3. Erase your data: Delete your account and all associated data (except where we have a legal obligation to retain it)
4. Restrict processing: Pause processing in certain circumstances
5. Data portability: Receive your data in a machine-readable format
6. Object to processing: Stop processing based on legitimate interest
7. Withdraw consent, For any consent-based processing (e.g., marketing emails)

To exercise these rights, email support@emilypolitics.com. We will respond within 30 days.

9. Cookies

Emily Politics uses essential cookies, plus optional analytics and performance cookies (PostHog, Sentry) that only run if you consent. See our Cookie Policy for the full breakdown.

• Authentication cookies (to keep you logged in)
• Session cookies (to maintain your search context)

You can disable cookies in your browser, but this will prevent you from using Emily Politics.

10. International Transfers

All your data stays in the UK and EU, except for the processors listed in Section 5 that operate outside the UK/EU, each covered by Standard Contractual Clauses, UK adequacy regulations, or the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

One exception is recorded rather than implied. Two Google Cloud services, the Check Grounding scorer and Gemini live transcription, are served only from Google’s “global” multi-region location, with no UK or EU regional endpoint at the time of writing. What reaches them is narrow (a draft answer and the public source passages retrieved for it; the public parliamentary broadcast), never your account details, stakeholder records or documents. We will move to a UK or EU endpoint, and update this policy and the sub-processor list, as soon as Google offers one for these services.

11. Children’s Privacy

Emily Politics is a professional service for political professionals, journalists, and researchers. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us immediately.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. If we make significant changes, we will:

• Update the “Last updated” date at the top
• Email you at your registered address
• Post a notice on the website

Continued use of Emily Politics after changes means you accept the updated policy.

13. Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we handle your personal data, you have the right to complain to us and we have a duty, under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, to make that easy and to deal with it properly. This is how it works:

1. Tell us. Email support@emilypolitics.com with the subject “Data protection complaint”, or write to Sinatra AI Ltd at hello@emilypolitics.com. Say what happened and what you would like us to do. You do not need to use any particular form or cite any law.
2. We acknowledge within 30 days of receiving your complaint, tell you who is handling it, and give you a reference.
3. We investigate and reply without undue delay. Our reply sets out what we found, what we have done or will do about it, and why. If we need longer than 30 days to reach a decision we will tell you when to expect it.
4. If you are not satisfied, or you would rather not raise it with us first, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK regulator:
   • Website: ico.org.uk
   • Phone: 0303 123 1113
   • Address: Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF

Complaining costs nothing and will never affect the service you receive. We keep a record of every complaint and what we did about it, and we review them to fix the cause, not only the case.

14. ICO Registration

Sinatra AI Ltd is registered with the ICO (registration reference ZC234623). Our registration covers:

• Processing staff and customer data
• Providing subscription-based intelligence services