Privacy Notice

This notice explains how Perfect Scale collects, uses, and protects personal data under the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018. If anything is unclear, or you would prefer a conversation about how we handle your data, write to abre@perfect-scale.co.uk.

1. Who we are

The data controller is Perfect Scale Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales.

• Company number: 17062596
• Registered office: 195 Wood Street, London E17 3NU
• Contact: abre@perfect-scale.co.uk
• ICO registration: pending (application submitted May 2026)

We are not required to appoint a Data Protection Officer under UK GDPR. Abre Etteh, as director, is the responsible person for any data-protection matter.

2. What personal data we hold, and where it comes from

Personal data drawn from public planning records

Perfect Scale builds and maintains an analytical dataset of small-site (1-9 unit) planning applications determined by London borough councils. The dataset is assembled from public sources: the Greater London Authority Planning London Datahub, individual London borough planning portals, Transport for London PTAL data, HM Land Registry, EPC Open Data (until 30 May 2026, then the successor Get Energy Performance Data service), and Planning Inspectorate appeal decisions.

The structured analytical dataset is organised around schemes, not people. Most of the fields are not personal data: site addresses, scheme types, decision outcomes, density figures, refusal reasons in coded form. Two categories of identifying data are held, both in pseudonymised or redacted form following the data-minimisation pass on 12 May 2026:

• Case officer pseudonyms replace the original officer names that were held in the structured dataset. Each name was hashed with a per-borough salt and stored as a fixed-length pseudonym of the form officer-{8‑hex}. The mapping from name to pseudonym is consistent within a borough (which preserves officer-level approval-rate statistics) but cannot be reversed without the per-borough salt, which is held offline and never published or shared with third parties.
• Structured refusal-reason records with free-text content reproduced from public officer reports. On 12 May 2026 the free-text was scrubbed of name patterns ("Mr X", "Mrs Y", "Dr Z" and their variants) which were replaced with the neutralised token [redacted-name]. Role labels ("the applicant", "the agent") remain because they do not identify specific individuals. Primary and secondary refusal codes, which feed all downstream analytics, are unchanged by this scrubbing.

The raw source documents from which the structured dataset is built — Decision Notices and Officer Reports in their original PDF form — are retained alongside the analytical layer in encrypted storage. These documents are public records published by the council. They contain applicant names, agent names, and case officer names as shown on the original document, together with site addresses and narrative officer commentary. On 12 May 2026 the source document store was pruned to retain only documents for applications determined within the most recent twelve months (a rolling window). Documents for older applications were deleted from local storage; the originals remain hosted by the relevant council planning portals and can be re-fetched there if needed for re-extraction or audit traceability.

Applicant and agent names are not extracted into the structured analytical dataset. They sit only inside the retained source documents (twelve-month rolling window).

Planning records are public information by statutory design. The data subjects are typically developers, householders, architects, and planning consultants who appear on planning records in their professional or quasi-professional capacity, plus council case officers acting in their public-sector employment capacity.

Personal data you give us directly

If you buy a Sample Site Assessment (£125), a Site Assessment (£1,250), a Borough Intelligence Report (£1,500), a Three-Borough Bundle (£3,500), or a bespoke Pre-Submission Engineering engagement, Stripe (our payment processor) shares your name, email address, billing address, and partial payment-card details with us. We use this to deliver the report you bought, to manage the customer relationship, and to send a small number of post-purchase emails described in the next section.

Website analytics

The Perfect Scale website uses Vercel Web Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights. Neither uses cookies. No cross-site tracking takes place. Aggregated traffic information (page views, country at country level, anonymised performance metrics) is processed by Vercel in the EU and the US.

3. Why we use your personal data, and on what lawful basis

What we do	Lawful basis (UK GDPR)
Build analytical planning intelligence from public planning records (some of which contain personal data)	Legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)). A Legitimate Interests Assessment is held on file and reviewed quarterly. The interests pursued are commercial (running a planning intelligence service) and public (transparent independent analysis of the planning system).
Deliver reports you have purchased and respond to your communications	Contract performance (Article 6(1)(b))
Send the post-purchase nurture sequences (D+0 to D+25 after a £125 Sample, D+7 and D+35 after a £1,250 Site Assessment)	Legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)). The relationship is initiated by your purchase; nurture communications are limited in number and tightly thematically related to what you bought; you can opt out at any time by replying to any email or writing to us.
Meet our tax, accounting, and other statutory record-keeping obligations	Legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c))

We do not carry out profiling or automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects on you.

4. How long we keep personal data

Data	Retention period
Structured analytical dataset (case officer pseudonyms alongside scheme metadata)	Rolling three-year analysis window per borough. Records that fall outside the window are anonymised or deleted on the next quarterly refresh. Original officer names were replaced with per-borough pseudonyms on 12 May 2026.
Raw source documents (Decision Notices, Officer Reports in PDF form)	Retained only for applications that are (i) within the borough's small-site analytical scope (1-9 residential units) AND (ii) decided within the most recent twelve months, on a rolling basis. Documents for applications outside the analytical scope, or older than the twelve-month cutoff, are deleted by automated prune scripts. Originals remain hosted by the council planning portals and can be re-fetched if ever required. Encrypted storage; access restricted to the director.
Structured refusal-reason records (free-text reproduced from officer reports)	Same rolling three-year window as the analytical dataset. Name patterns ("Mr X", "Mrs Y", etc.) in the free-text were redacted on 12 May 2026 and will continue to be redacted at extraction time on each quarterly refresh. Aggregate primary and secondary refusal codes are unaffected by the redaction.
Customer purchase data (name, email, billing address, order history)	Seven years from the date of the last transaction, to satisfy UK tax and accounting record-keeping obligations.
Post-purchase nurture queue (Sample, Site Assessment)	Six months from the date the final scheduled email is sent.
Website analytics (aggregated, non-identifying)	Twelve months.
Email correspondence	Three years from the last message in a thread, unless the thread relates to a transaction (in which case the seven-year customer-purchase period applies).

5. Who we share data with

We do not sell personal data to anyone. We share it only with the service providers we rely on to deliver the service:

• Stripe Payments Europe Ltd (Ireland) — payment processing
• Render Services Inc. (United States) — webhook hosting
• Cloudflare Inc. (United States) — encrypted report file storage (Cloudflare R2)
• Google Ireland Ltd (Ireland) — email delivery via the Gmail API
• Vercel Inc. (United States) — website hosting and privacy-friendly analytics

These are processors acting on our written instructions and bound by appropriate data-protection terms. Several of them process data outside the UK. Transfers outside the UK rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or on the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework where the recipient is certified under it.

6. Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you (Article 15)
• Rectify any inaccurate or incomplete data (Article 16)
• Erase your personal data (Article 17), subject to limited statutory exceptions such as tax record-keeping
• Restrict our processing in certain circumstances (Article 18)
• Object to processing carried out on the legitimate-interests basis, including the planning-dataset processing (Article 21). On a valid objection we will cease processing your personal data, or anonymise it, unless we can demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds that override your rights.
• Data portability for personal data you provided to us under a contract (Article 20)
• Lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/ or 0303 123 1113

To exercise any of these rights, write to abre@perfect-scale.co.uk. We aim to respond within one calendar month. There is no fee for a standard request.

7. Cookies and similar technologies

The Perfect Scale website does not set tracking cookies. Vercel Web Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights are cookie-free. We do not run third-party advertising tags. Strictly necessary cookies that the browser sets for the operation of the site itself (for example, a session cookie if you are logged in to a future authenticated area) are not in use at present.

8. Security

Personal data is held on encrypted storage. Access to production systems is restricted to the director and a small number of authorised service providers identified in section 5. Stripe and the other payment-processing flows use TLS in transit and at rest. We do not store full payment-card numbers at any point; only Stripe holds them.

9. Changes to this notice

We may update this notice from time to time. Changes will be posted on this page with an updated date. Where the change is material (for example, a new processor or a new purpose of processing) we will use reasonable efforts to inform you directly if we hold your contact details.

10. Contact

Perfect Scale Ltd
Company number: 17062596
Registered office: 195 Wood Street, London E17 3NU
Email: abre@perfect-scale.co.uk