Privacy

The short version

No account, no email address, no name, no password. You are never asked who you are and there is no way to tell the site.

Two things identify your browser rather than you: a random identifier generated on your device, and a one-way hash of your IP address kept for 48 hours. Both exist so the site can work at all. Details below.

What is stored

A random identifier for your browser

When you first log a status, your browser generates a random identifier — the kind of value that looks like 3e624d7e-6d66-4eec-a1f0-b56b61498bb3 — and stores it locally. It is not derived from anything about you or your device; it is random.

It does three jobs: it lets you update an entry you made earlier, it stops one person being counted as several (which would make every percentage on the site wrong), and it caps submissions at 40 a day.

It is never shown to anyone. No page displays it, and nothing links your entries together publicly.

The same value is also written to a cookie named sw_uid. That is not tracking — the server needs to know whether you have logged a status on the role you are looking at, in order to decide what to show you, and it cannot read your browser's local storage. No other cookie is set. There is no analytics, no advertising, and no third-party script on this site.

A hash of your IP address

When you submit something, your IP address is combined with a secret value and put through a one-way hash. The result is stored; your actual IP address is not, at any point.

It exists only to cap submissions at 60 a day from one network, so a single person cannot manufacture a consensus. It is deleted after 48 hours, which is longer than the limit it enforces and no longer than that.

What you tell us

The role, the stage, whether you are waiting or progressed or rejected, and the dates. Optionally a description of what an assessment consisted of. That is the entire dataset.

You are never asked for an opinion. Whether something was selective is worked out from the ratio of people who reached each stage — it is never a question on a form, because a guess presented as data is worse than no data.

What is shown to other people

Only aggregates. Individual entries are never displayed, and three rules protect that:

• Percentages and breakdowns appear only once at least ten people have logged a role. Below that the site says it does not have enough data, and the underlying numbers are discarded on the server before the page is built.
• Offers are never shown as a count, only ever as a rate, and only above that same threshold. A role where one person has an offer shows nothing about it anywhere on the site.
• Where a single person has reported something, the site says so rather than presenting it as established.

Deleting your data

Clearing your browser storage for this site removes the identifier, after which nothing connects you to what you submitted — including for us.

That also means we cannot then find your entries to remove them. If you want them deleted, ask before clearing your browser, and include the identifier so the right rows can be found. Because there is no account system, that identifier is the only handle that exists.

Being straight about the legal position

A random identifier that persists and is tied to behaviour is probably pseudonymous rather than anonymous under UK GDPR, and pseudonymous data is still personal data. A hashed IP address is arguably the same. This site is run by one student and is not backed by a legal review — that assessment could be wrong in either direction, and it is stated plainly rather than glossed over.

What follows from it is the design above: collect the least that makes the thing work, never display an individual, delete the IP hash quickly, and add no analytics or third-party scripts.

Where the data lives

A Postgres database hosted by Supabase in the EU (eu-west-1), and the site itself on Vercel. The source code is public at github.com/Aanu30/stagewatch, so every claim on this page can be checked against the code rather than taken on trust.

Where job openings come from

Some entries are not submitted by anyone. The site checks the firms' own public job boards on a schedule and records when a posting appears. That involves no personal data — it reads public listings, the same ones anyone can see on a careers page.