Privacy & Cookie Policy

Last Updated: January 2025

1. Introduction

DU1AQ ("we", "our") is a student-led project designed to report and display crowd levels at venues in Durham. We are committed to protecting your privacy. This policy explains what data we collect and how we use it.

2. Data We Collect

We adhere to a principle of Data Minimization. We do not require you to create an account, and we do not collect your name, email address, or phone number.

We collect the following anonymized data:

Crowd Reports: When you submit a report, we store the selected venue, the crowd level, the open status, and the timestamp.
Location Data (Transient): Our "Map" feature uses your device's geolocation to show your position relative to venues. This location data is processed locally on your device and is never sent to our servers or stored in our database.

3. How We Use Data

To calculate live averages of venue busyness.
To generate historical estimates of venue popularity.
To prevent spam/abuse (System logs, such as IP addresses, may be processed by our infrastructure providers, Cloudflare and Google Firebase, for security purposes only).

4. Third-Party Services

We use the following third-party services which may process data on our behalf:

Cloudflare: For hosting and secure API functions.
Google Firebase: For database storage.
Open-Meteo: For fetching weather data (no personal data is sent to them).

5. Cookie Policy

DU1AQ uses Strictly Necessary mechanisms to function. We do not use tracking cookies, advertising cookies, or analytics pixels.

Local Storage/Session: We may store small amounts of data on your device to remember your "University/Non-University" toggle preference.
Third-Party Technical Cookies: Our hosting provider (Cloudflare) may place a technical cookie (e.g., __cf_bm) to distinguish between humans and bots. This is essential for security and cannot be disabled.

6. Contact

For questions regarding this project, please contact the DU1AQ team.