Privacy

Who we are

Please Help is a product of ScanTags. ScanTags is a trading name of Mr Dominic Vitzthum, a sole trader based at Work Hub, Market Square, Tiverton, Devon, EX16 6FZ, United Kingdom, who also trades as CREATE. VAT registration number 415 297 688. There is no Companies House registration, because a sole trader does not have one.

The data controller is Mr Dominic Vitzthum, registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under reference ZC184196. You can check that entry on the ICO's public register. Reach us about anything on this page at hello@pleasehelp.uk or through our contact form.

What we hold, and why

Your account

Your email address, so you can sign in and so we can alert you when a tag is scanned. That is all your account holds. We are not taking payments yet, so there is no order, no delivery address and no card data anywhere in our systems. Before we start taking payments we will update this page to name the payment processor and say what it holds.

The page you write for someone

Whatever you choose to put on it. That commonly includes their first name, the condition a stranger should know about, medication, allergies, a doctor's details and a contact number. Some of that is health information, which UK data protection law treats as needing extra care.

Our lawful basis for holding health information is your explicit consent, given when you type it in and leave it visible. Fields start out visible, so as you fill the page in, switch anything you want held back. You can withdraw consent at any moment by editing the fields, hiding them, removing the photograph, or deleting the page outright.

What happens when a tag is scanned

We record the date and time, the tag, the IP address of the device that opened the page, and the browser identification (the “user agent”) it sent, so you can see when it happened, tell a real visitor from an automatic one, and so we can block abuse. A page being opened does not always mean a person opened it: security software checks links in email automatically, and chat apps fetch pages to build a preview card, so we label each opening with what it appears to have been. If the finder chooses to share their location, we pass it to you. If they leave a message, we pass that to you. The finder does not have to give us anything to view the page.

Who can see it

• Anyone who has the page's web address. There is no public directory, search engines are told not to index the page, and it cannot be found by searching for anybody's name. But there is no password on it, so a finder who writes the address down can open it again later. If you want that access to end, release the tag from your dashboard.
• Only the fields you chose. Every detail field can be set to always visible, visible only when you mark the person as lost, or hidden entirely. The photograph is the exception: if you upload one it is shown to anyone who opens the page, and the way to stop that is to remove it.
• Anyone you add as a contact, who will receive the same alerts you do.

We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not profile anybody. Our suppliers — hosting and email delivery — handle data only on our instructions.

How long we keep it

The page exists for as long as you want it to. Wipe a tag and its details, photo and finder messages are deleted at once, and anyone scanning it afterwards sees a blank tag. Copies remain in our routine backups for a few months before rolling off, and alerts already emailed to you cannot be recalled. There is no self-service account deletion yet: email hello@pleasehelp.uk and we will close the account and delete what it holds. Scan records are kept for a limited period so you can look back at what happened, and IP addresses are discarded on a shorter cycle than the rest of the record.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to how we are using it. Email hello@pleasehelp.uk and we will deal with it. If you are not happy with how we have handled something you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. We are on their register under reference ZC184196.

Cookies

Covered separately on the cookie policy. In short: the only cookies we set without asking are the ones that keep you signed in. Analytics is off unless you say yes.

Changes

If we change anything that matters, we will say so on this page and update the date at the top.