Legal
Privacy notice
- Who is responsible
- What data we hold and why
- Who processes it for us
- How long we keep it
- Marketing emails
- Cookies and storage
- Where data is stored
- Your rights
- Complaints
- Changes
1. Who is responsible
The data controller is GastroQBank, a business based in the United Kingdom.
Email: hello@gastroqbank.com
2. What data we hold and why
We collect only what the service needs. We do not collect health data about you, and we do not profile you.
| Data | Where it comes from | Why we use it | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email address and login details (a password hash or a sign-in link token) | You, when you create an account | To create your account, sign you in, send service emails (receipts, security, important changes) | Contract: necessary to provide the pass you bought |
| Purchase record: what you bought, when, how much, the last four digits and type of card, Stripe's transaction reference | Stripe, when you pay. We never see your full card number. | To give you access, handle refunds, and keep accounts | Contract; and legal obligation (tax and accounting records) |
| Question progress: which questions you have answered, your answers, flags, scores and timing | Generated as you use the bank | To save your place, show your performance, and build your Anki export | Contract: this is the service |
| Feedback and error reports you send from inside a question, and any emails you send us | You | To fix the problem you reported and reply to you | Legitimate interests: maintaining the accuracy of the bank and answering you |
| Free-questions sign-up: your email address and the date | You, when you ask for the free questions | To give you the free questions, and to email you when full access opens and about GastroQBank. We tell you this where you enter your email. | Legitimate interests: you asked for the free questions and we offer you the full product. You can unsubscribe at any time. |
| Aggregate website analytics: page views, referrer, country, device type | Cloudflare Web Analytics, from your browser | To see which pages are used. This is not linked to you: no cookies, no persistent identifier, no cross-site tracking. | Legitimate interests: running the site |
| Technical logs: IP address, time, pages requested | Our hosting providers, automatically | Security, abuse prevention and fault diagnosis | Legitimate interests: keeping the service secure |
We do not sell your data and we do not share it with anyone for their own marketing.
3. Who processes it for us
We use a small number of companies to run the service. They act on our instructions under data-processing terms and may not use your data for their own purposes.
- Stripe (Stripe Payments UK Ltd / Stripe, Inc.): takes payments and holds the card and purchase record. Stripe is also a controller of some payment data for fraud prevention and legal compliance under its own privacy policy. If you live outside the UK, Stripe is the seller of your pass (Managed Payments) and processes your name, billing address and tax details as a controller for that sale.
- Supabase: hosts the account database, authentication and your question progress.
- Netlify: hosts the website and the app, and receives free-questions sign-ups (Netlify Forms).
- Cloudflare: runs the domain and provides cookieless, aggregate website statistics (Cloudflare Web Analytics).
- Email provider Resend: sends service emails and the marketing emails described in section 5.
We may also disclose data if the law requires it, or to a professional adviser (for example an accountant) under a duty of confidence.
4. How long we keep it
- Account data and question progress: kept while your pass is active and for 12 months after the pass expires, so you can retrieve your Anki export or query your record, then deleted. You can ask us to delete it sooner at any time.
- Purchase records: kept for 6 years after the end of the tax year of purchase, as HMRC requires. These are kept in minimal form (name, email, amount, date, Stripe reference).
- Free-questions sign-ups: kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove you, or until 31 July 2027, whichever is sooner.
- Feedback and error reports: kept for as long as they are useful for maintaining the bank. The report is kept with the question; your email address is removed from it after the correction is made the name you give with feedback is removed once the correction is published.
- Technical logs: retained by our hosting providers for a short period under their standard terms, typically 30 days or less.
5. Marketing emails
We keep marketing separate from service emails.
- Service emails (receipt, sign-in link, security notice, change to the terms, extension of your pass if the exam moves) are sent to all account holders. You cannot opt out of these while you hold a pass, because they are part of providing it.
- Marketing emails (full access opening, new features, reminders before the exam) are sent to people who gave us their email for the free questions, where we say so at the point you enter it, and to account holders who have not opted out. Every marketing email has an unsubscribe link, and you can also opt out at any time by emailing us.
- We will send at most a few marketing emails before the exam. We do not send marketing on behalf of anyone else.
6. Cookies and storage
- Website (gastroqbank.com): no cookies. Analytics are provided by Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookieless and does not store anything on your device. Fonts are served from our own site, not from a third party.
- Free questions (/free/): use local storage on your device to remember your email address and your answers. Your answers are not sent to us.
- App (/app/): uses essential storage only: a login session so you stay signed in, and local storage of the question bank and your progress so the app works offline. This storage is necessary for the service and is not used for tracking or advertising. No consent banner is needed for strictly necessary storage, so you will not see one.
7. Where data is stored
Our processors host data in the UK, the EU and the United States. Supabase is hosted in the EU (London region); Netlify serves the site from a global content network with functions hosted in the EU where available. Where data leaves the UK, it is protected by the UK's adequacy regulations or by the International Data Transfer Agreement / UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, as appropriate.
8. Your rights
Under UK GDPR you have the right to:
- access the personal data we hold about you;
- correct it if it is wrong;
- erase it, where we no longer need it (we must keep purchase records for tax, but can delete everything else on request);
- restrict or object to processing based on legitimate interests;
- withdraw consent to marketing at any time;
- receive a copy of the data you gave us in a portable format;
- not be subject to automated decision-making with legal or similar effect. We do none.
To exercise any of these, email hello@gastroqbank.com. We will respond within one month. We may need to confirm it is you, usually by replying from your account email. There is no charge unless a request is clearly unfounded or excessive.
9. Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, please tell us first and we will try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO): ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, or by telephone on 0303 123 1113.
10. Changes
We will update this notice if what we collect or who processes it changes. The date at the top shows the current version. If a change is material, we will email account holders.