Privacy Policy – Fathers' Inquiry

Last updated: 26 September 2026

This explains what Fathers' Inquiry collects, why, and what it does with it. It is written to be read, not to be survived.

Fathers' Inquiry is published by a small group of fathers, working independently. There is no company, no charity and no organisation behind it – none of those exist yet, and nothing on this site should be read as suggesting otherwise.

The people who run it are not named here, and that is deliberate. This site removes identifying detail about every witness and about everyone a witness describes. Applying a weaker standard to the people doing the removing would be inconsistent, and the reasons a witness needs protection – a live matter, children, people who would act on the information – are not unique to witnesses. Several of them apply to the people running this as much as to the people testifying.

This is not a claim that anyone here is beyond identification. It is a decision not to publish names.

What does not change: there is a contact route that a person reads, corrections are made and shown, and the whole process this site runs on is published so that it can be checked without knowing who wrote it.

1. If You Only Read One Section

Reading this site is not tracked to you personally. No cookies are set for analytics, no advertising network is present, and your browser makes no request to any third party while you read.
If you apply to testify, what you write is sealed so that the website itself cannot read it.
If your application is declined, it is deleted.
You can ask for a copy of what is held about you, or ask for it to be erased, at any time.

2. Reading This Site

What is collected

The server keeps a short-lived web log of requests, as every web server does: the page requested, the time, the browser type, and the network address it came from. This is what makes it possible to notice an attack or a broken page.

Analytics are handled by Matomo, installed on the same server as this site. It records which pages are visited and roughly where in the world visitors come from, so that it is possible to know whether anything on this site is reaching anyone.

What is deliberately not done

No third-party requests. Fonts, images and scripts are served from this site. Reading a page here does not cause your browser to contact Google, a font service, a content network or an advertising network. Nobody else learns that you read it. (Must stay true: adding an embedded video, a map, a web font from a CDN, or a social widget breaks this sentence. Check before adding anything to a page.)
No analytics cookies, and no cookie banner, because there is nothing to consent to. Matomo is configured not to set cookies.
Your network address is shortened before it is stored, so that analytics cannot be tied back to a single connection.
Do Not Track is honoured. If your browser sends that signal, nothing is recorded at all.
No advertising, no advertising identifiers, no data sold or shared with anyone.
No account. There is nothing to sign up for and no login for readers.

How long

Web server logs: 14 days, then deleted. Analytics: 6 months, then deleted.

3. If You Apply to Testify

This is the most sensitive information on this site, and it is handled differently from everything else.

What you send

The application asks about your proceedings, what happened, your contact details, whether it is safe to contact you, and whether documents support your account. You may attach documents.

What happens to it the moment you press send

No automatic email is sent to you. Nothing arrives in your inbox in the following minutes, and nothing has gone wrong. A person reads your application and writes to you themselves.
Your application is sealed with a key the website does not hold. The half of the key that could open it exists only on a reviewer's own computer, which is not this server.
What remains readable on the server is a reference number, the time, whether the application is still being considered, and whether it is safe to contact you. Not your name, not your account, not your documents.

What that means in practice. If this website were broken into, what the intruder would find is unreadable. There is no screen anywhere in the website's administration that displays applications, because there is nothing readable for it to display.

Who reads it

A very small number of people, each of whom decrypts it on their own machine. Every access is logged.

Email, and why there is none of it here

This site sends you nothing automatically. No confirmation, no receipt, no follow-up. The only message you will ever receive is one a person wrote, in reply to your application or to something you sent us.

That is a deliberate choice and not a limitation we are working around. An automatic message is one more thing arriving in an inbox you may not control, at a moment you did not choose, saying that you applied to a fathers' inquiry. For some people reading this, that message is the risk.

If you tell us it is not safe to email you, we write nothing at all, and the person screening your application sees that you chose it. It is a supported answer rather than a failure.

When a person does write to you, that message never quotes your application back to you, carries no tracking of any kind – no pixel, no open tracking, no click tracking – and comes from an address a person reads rather than a no-reply.

If your application is declined

What you sent is deleted. This is a commitment, it is stated before you apply, and it is the reason nothing is kept "just in case".

If your application is accepted

What you sent is kept while your testimony is being prepared, and the Witness Agreement sets out what happens to it afterwards.

The recording

The un-edited recording is the most dangerous file this project holds. It is encrypted, kept off this server, and is never published. Only the edited version is ever released.

Fathers' Inquiry does not hold your legal name. An independent verifier confirms who you are; what reaches Fathers' Inquiry is a confirmation that the check happened, a reference, and the pseudonym you will be published under.

4. No Mailing List

Fathers' Inquiry sends no bulk email of any kind (decided 2026-09-26). There is no newsletter, no mailing list, and no way to subscribe to anything. Nothing on this site collects an email address in order to send you something later.

The only email this site sends is written by a person, in reply to someone who wrote first or who applied. There is no automatic message of any kind, not even a confirmation – see §3 – and if you tell us it is not safe to email you, there is not even that.

5. Contacting Us

If you email Fathers' Inquiry, that email is stored in its mailbox. It is not added to any list.

6. Children

Nothing on this site is directed at children, and no information about a child is knowingly collected.

Witnesses are asked not to name their children or give details that identify them, and the editing process removes such material where it appears. This is the most important rule in the entire project and it holds regardless of what any parent consents to.

7. Your Rights

Whoever you are and wherever you are, you can:

Ask what is held about you.
Ask for it to be corrected.
Ask for it to be deleted.
Withdraw consent you previously gave.
Ask how a decision about your application was made.

Ask by writing to contact@fathersinquiry.com. You will get an answer from a person.

One honest limit. Once a recording has been published and copied elsewhere, Fathers' Inquiry can remove its own copy and ask each platform holding a copy to remove theirs. It cannot retrieve what people have already downloaded or quoted. This is explained before anyone records, and it is set out in the Witness Agreement.

8. Where Information Is Held

This site and its analytics run on a server rented from Amazon Web Services, in its us-east-1 region, in the United States. Mail written to you by a person is sent through the mailbox provider that hosts our own address, which holds it on its own systems under its own policy. There is no newsletter provider, because there is no newsletter, and no automatic mail provider, because there is no automatic mail.

Fathers' Inquiry shares no accounts, no user records, no analytics and no infrastructure with any other project, of any kind, anywhere. Where this site links out, that link is a link and nothing more: nothing about you travels with it.

9. Security, Described Honestly

Applications are sealed so that this server cannot read them.
Administration requires two-factor authentication.
The connection to this site is encrypted.
Access to sensitive material is logged.
The un-edited recordings are encrypted and kept off this server.

What cannot be promised. No system is beyond compromise, and this one is run by a small number of people without a security team. What has been done instead is to reduce what a successful attack would obtain: the most sensitive material is not readable on the server at all, so breaking into the website does not produce it.

10. Changes

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes and a note at the foot says what changed. Where a change materially affects people who have already applied or testified, they are told directly rather than left to notice.