Privacy statement

The deal

GridWitness measures the GB electricity grid using sensors you already own. We ask for the least revealing thing that is useful — grid frequency — and every step beyond that is an explicit, revocable choice you make. We will never ask for data we cannot justify to you.

It's your data. We will never sell it — there is no money in this for us, we're interested in the readings themselves. We use them, and we make them available to the grid's system and network operators (NESO, the DNOs) so the whole system understands itself better. You can withdraw at any time and take a copy of your data with you.

Contributing a survey

If you're an electrician or engineer already running power-quality surveys, you can upload your analyser exports (CSV or PQDIF) and we keep only the frequency and voltage from them. Current, power, harmonics and everything else in the file are discarded before anything is stored — the extraction is a strict allow-list, not a promise. Because a voltage reading is only useful pinned to a place, surveys carry at least a region (a postcode, if you give one, stays private and is only turned into a coarse grid area). Every survey is yours: withdraw it or download it whenever you like.

What each thing tells us

Grid frequency is the same for everyone connected to the GB grid at a given instant. Sharing it tells us nothing about your household. It's the default, and on its own it's genuinely useful.

Voltage is a reading about the feeder your house sits on, not about you. It helps map where the grid is strong or weak. Low sensitivity.

Current, power and power factor are the sensitive ones. Your load reveals when you're home, sleep, cook or charge a car. We ask only if you actively choose to share it, never bundled with anything else. The reason it's worth asking: a node sharing its own power becomes self-calibrating, letting us recover local grid strength and correct the sensor. If that trade isn't worth it to you, don't share it — frequency alone still helps.

Weather is outdoor ambient conditions, not your behaviour. It helps model how weather drives demand and generation. Low sensitivity; the main consideration is that it implies your rough location.

Location, and how precise you want to be

• Anonymous (default): we derive only a rough grid supply area from your connection. No address.
• Region: you pick your DNO or grid region from a list. No address.
• Data-share: you enter your postcode so we can place your readings more precisely. Your postcode never leaves our server and is never published — only a derived area code (a grid supply point or primary substation) is attached to the data.

We're honest about the ceiling: even in data-share mode we pin to a grid supply point or primary substation, not your individual street cable. We don't have the data to do that, and we won't claim to.

What we keep private and never publish

Your postcode and precise location, the link between a node and you, and your access token (kept hashed). Published data carries only a random node id and derived area codes.

Your rights — and why a confirmed email matters

Anyone can register and start contributing without confirming their email. But changing what a node shares, or deleting your data, requires a confirmed email address. That confirmation is how we prove the account is really yours before acting on your data — GDPR requires us to be sure. Every node you create is always linked to your account, so once your identity is confirmed we can always honour:

• Rectification — change or withdraw any consent at any time from your dashboard.
• Erasure — "erase this node" or "withdraw this survey" removes your server record and raw files, and drops your already-contributed data from the research lake on the next cycle. The one thing that can't be un-made is analysis already built while your data was live — aggregate maps, trained models, fused datasets — and none of it identifies you or your site.
• Portability — "download my data" gives you a zip of your uploaded files and the frequency and voltage we extracted from them, at any time. This is not the same as withdrawing; it's simply a copy.
• Access — ask us what we hold about you.

We collect the bare minimum personal data needed to enforce these rights: a confirmable email address and the link between your account and your nodes. Nothing more.

Legal basis and controller

The server operator is the data controller. Processing rests on explicit consent for the sensitive and location channels, and legitimate interest for the non-identifying grid-frequency research. Data is retained under a stated retention policy, and the private database is encrypted at rest.

This statement is being finalised and legally reviewed ahead of public onboarding.