Privacy policy
Last updated 3 November 2026.
This policy explains what thegridscout.com collects about you, why, and what we do with it. We collect as little as we can: you can read every story, watch every video and check every result without telling us anything about yourself.
Who we are
The Grid Scout is run by Grant Dinkele. We run thegridscout.com and decide how the personal data it collects is used, which makes us the "controller" of that data under UK data protection law (the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018).
For anything about your data, email hello@thegridscout.com.
The short version
- Reading the site needs no account and sets no cookies.
- An account holds your email address and, only if you add them, a display name and your favourite driver and team.
- We send you emails you asked for, nothing else. We never sell your data or use it for advertising.
- You can download or delete everything we hold about you yourself, from your account page, at any time.
What we collect, and why
| What | When | Why | Our lawful basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your email address | When you sign in | To send your sign-in codes and run your account | Contract: the account you asked for |
| Your Google account's name, email address and identifier | Only if you sign in with Google | The same | Contract |
| That you confirmed you are 16 or over, and when | When you create an account | To keep accounts to people aged 16 and over | Legitimate interests |
| A display name, favourite driver and favourite team | Only if you add them | To personalise your account | Contract |
| Your newsletter and race-alert choices, with the date of each change | When you switch them on or off | To send only what you asked for, and to show that you asked | Consent |
| Sign-in session details | While you are signed in | To keep you signed in | Contract |
| The questions you ask Ask the Scout, and its answers | When you use it | To answer you, and to check and improve its answers | Legitimate interests |
| A count of your Ask the Scout questions for the day | When you use it | To keep the daily allowance fair | Legitimate interests |
| Pages viewed, the type of device and the country, without cookies or anything that identifies you | Every visit | To understand which pages are useful | Legitimate interests |
| Error reports: what went wrong, the page and the browser | When something breaks | To fix the site | Legitimate interests |
| Your email and what you write | When you email us | To answer you | Legitimate interests |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed them against your rights and kept what we collect to the minimum: no names, addresses or identifiers where we don't need them. You can object at any time (see "Your rights").
We don't collect your date of birth, postal address, phone number or payment details, and we make no automated decisions about you that have legal or similarly significant effects.
Ask the Scout
Ask the Scout is the site's question box, answered by an AI model (Anthropic's Claude). It is given your question, the page you asked it on, and the site's own articles and race data. It is never given your email address, your account or anything else about you.
Please don't type personal details into a question. Questions and answers are kept for 30 days without your identity, to check the answers' quality, and then deleted. The daily count is kept for 7 days under a scrambled code (a keyed hash) of your account or, if you aren't signed in, of a random browser number and your network address; neither is stored in a form that can be read back.
Emails
- Sign-in codes are sent when you ask for one. They are part of having an account.
- The newsletter and race alerts are sent only if you switch them on. Race alerts include one email when the race hub opens. Every one has a link to stop them, and you can switch them off on your account page at any time.
We send no other marketing, and we never pass your email address to anyone to market to you.
Who else handles your data
These companies run parts of the site for us. Each handles your data only on our instructions, under a contract that requires them to keep it safe:
| Service | What it does | What it handles | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supabase | The database and sign-in | Your account, profile and choices | London, UK |
| Vercel | Hosting the site; cookieless visit counts | Pages you ask for (with your network address, in its technical logs), visit counts | The site runs in London, UK; Vercel is a US company |
| Resend | Sending emails | Your email address and the email | Ireland, EU |
| Anthropic | Answering Ask the Scout | Your question and the page it was asked on, never who asked | United States |
| Sentry | Error reports | The error, the page and the browser; no cookies, typed content or network addresses | Sentry is a US company |
| Sign-in with Google, only if you choose it | What Google needs to sign you in | Google is a US company |
Some of these services may handle data outside the UK. Where they do, the transfer is protected by the UK's adequacy regulations (for the European Economic Area, and for US companies certified under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework) or by the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum in the service's data processing terms. Email us for details.
Services you choose to use
These have their own privacy policies, and they, not we, decide what they collect:
- YouTube. Videos on the site load only when you press play, from youtube-nocookie.com, YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode. Google's privacy policy applies from then. Before that, a video's picture is fetched from YouTube by our server and shown from our own site, so nothing about you reaches YouTube.
- Our social profiles. The follow and share buttons are plain links; nothing loads from a social network until you click one, and then that network's policy applies.
- The shop. Grid Scout streetwear is sold at shop.thegridscout.com, run by Fourthwall. Orders, payments and deliveries are handled by Fourthwall under its own privacy policy.
How long we keep it
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account, profile and choices | Until you delete your account |
| Sign-in sessions | 30 days from your last visit |
| Ask the Scout questions and answers | 30 days |
| Ask the Scout's daily count | 7 days |
| Error reports | Up to 90 days |
| Visit counts | Kept only as totals, with nothing that identifies you |
| Emails you send us | As long as we need them to deal with what you asked |
When you delete your account, your account, profile and choices are deleted at once.
How we protect it
- The database checks every request, so a signed-in person can only ever read their own account.
- There are no passwords to steal: you sign in with a code sent to your email, or with Google.
- Everything travels encrypted (HTTPS), and the keys that unlock the database stay on our servers.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you have the right to:
- see the personal data we hold about you, and get a copy of it;
- correct it if it is wrong;
- delete it;
- restrict how we use it, or object to our using it;
- take it with you in a format a computer can read;
- withdraw your consent at any time, where we rely on it (the newsletter and race alerts). This doesn't affect what we did before.
You can do most of this yourself on your account page: Download my data gives you everything we hold about you, and Delete my account removes it at once. For anything else, email hello@thegridscout.com. We answer within one month and don't charge.
Complaints
If you're unhappy with how we have handled your data, please tell us first so we can put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK's data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113.
Children
Accounts are for people aged 16 or over. Anyone can read the site without one. If you're under 16, please don't create an account; if you have, delete it from your account page or email us and we will.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy, we update it here with its new date. If a change matters to how we use your data, we tell account holders by email before it takes effect.