Privacy policy

The short version: everything you type stays in your own browser, your projections are calculated there too, and we never connect to your bank or sell your data. There is no account on our servers for you at all; the only two server accounts belong to the people who run the site. The site carries advertising to stay free, but the figures you enter play no part in it. You can export or permanently delete everything yourself at any time.

Who we are

The data controller for this site is BrightScale Labs Limited, registered in England and Wales, company number 16990009, registered office 8 Flay Field, Tithebarn, Exeter, England, EX1 3YA. We are registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office under reference ZC171322. For anything about your data, email hello@firemathlab.com.

Who can use the site

FireMathLab is intended for adults and is not directed at children. You must be 18 or over to create an account. We do not knowingly collect data from under-18s; if you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will delete it.

What we store

• Your plans, net worth and diary: kept in a database inside your own browser (IndexedDB), on your device, and never sent anywhere. We cannot see them, back them up or recover them; the export on your account page is the only copy outside your browser, and clearing your browsing data removes them. Projections are computed in the browser as well.
• Owner accounts: the two Google accounts that run the site keep their data with us instead, with the email and name Google supplies. No other Google account can sign in.
• Profile: optional birth month/year (to pre-fill your age), journey stage, and currency.
• Consent records: your cookie choices with a timestamp and anonymous consent ID, kept to meet our GDPR accountability duty. No IP address is stored with them.
• Accepting the terms: before the app opens you tick a box to accept the terms and the privacy policy. What that records is which versions you accepted and when, with no name and no signature; until September 2026 it also asked for a typed name and an optional drawing, and those older records are kept as they are. For a browser-kept account the record stays in your browser and never reaches us. For the owner accounts we also store, as proof it came from a real session, the time, the browser's user-agent string and the network (IP) address; that is the one place we keep an IP address.
• Usage counts: so we can see which tools are worth keeping and who they reach, we record that a tool page was opened. Each record holds the tool, the time, the country your network address resolves to (Cloudflare tells us the country; we never see or store the address itself), whether the device is a phone, tablet or desktop, and your browser's preferred language. It does not hold anything you typed: no figures, no results, no account or name attached. These records are deleted after 90 days. Alongside them we keep a count of how many browsers were on the site each day, which is a number and nothing else.

Emails we send

Two different things, and only one of them is optional:

• Service email: replies to your own support tickets, and anything we have to tell you about your account. These are part of running the account and cannot be switched off, because switching them off would mean you could not be reached about it. Sign-in is through Google, so there is no confirmation link and no password reset to send.
• Upkeep reminders (optional): an occasional note when your own data has fallen behind: a missed check-in, a diary gone quiet, bills waiting to be confirmed. Never more than one a week. It contains no advertising, no products and nothing from anyone else; only what is already on your dashboard.
• Reminders you asked for (optional): if you tick “email me” when adding a reminder, we send one message when the warning time you chose is reached. These are not capped at one a week, because a date is the entire point of them and holding one back until next Tuesday would defeat it. What is capped is how often they can arrive: everything falling due on the same day is gathered into a single message, so a busy week is still one email a morning at most, and never more than one about the same thing. They go only to the owner accounts, which are the only ones with an address on file; a browser-kept account shows its reminders in the app instead. The same one-click switch stops them.

Stopping the reminders takes one click on the link in any of them (no sign-in) or the switch on your account page, which also turns them back on if you change your mind. We record that choice, and it is checked before anything is sent. We also record when a reminder was last sent to you, so you cannot receive two in a week.

Cookies & local storage

• Session cookie (strictly necessary): keeps you signed in.
• Consent cookie (strictly necessary): remembers your cookie choices.
• Preferences (functional, optional): dark mode and the hide-numbers toggle, stored only in your browser.
• Tab identifier: a random number held in your browser for as long as the tab is open, so that one person reading three pages counts once rather than three times. It is not a cookie, it never leaves the tab it was made in, it is gone when you close the tab, and it is tied to nothing else about you.
• Analytics (optional): we use Microsoft Clarity to see which pages and calculators people actually use, and where they get stuck. It only loads after you consent; decline and no Clarity cookie is set and no request leaves your browser. Clarity records anonymised interaction data; your financial figures are never sent to it. Declining stops Clarity, and does not stop our own counting described under “Usage counts” above, which happens on our server, sets nothing on your device beyond the tab identifier, and records nothing you typed.
• Advertising (optional): ads keep the tools free and may appear anywhere on the site that ad policy permits, including signed-in pages. Consent is handled by a certified consent manager. What does not happen is the part that matters: the figures you enter are never sent to an advertiser, never used to target ads, and never sold.

What we deliberately don't do

• No bank connections; we never ask for financial credentials.
• No third parties beyond a short, named list: the consent manager (InMobi Choice), Google for analytics and advertising, and Microsoft Clarity for anonymised interaction data. Our own fonts and scripts are served from our own domain. There are no data brokers and no other trackers.
• No third-party tag loads or measures without consent in the UK, EEA and Switzerland. Consent defaults there are set to denied before any tag loads, so no analytics or advertising cookie is set and nothing is sent to Google or Microsoft until you allow it. Clarity is not even loaded until you do, and you can withdraw consent at any time from the Privacy link. Our own counting is the exception and we would rather say so plainly than let the sentence above imply otherwise: opening a tool is recorded on our server whatever you choose, because it holds nothing you typed and nothing that points back to you. It is described under “Usage counts”.
• No selling or sharing of personal data, and no profiling from your own figures. What you type into the calculators is never passed to an advertiser or an analytics provider and plays no part in the ads you are shown.

Why we are allowed to process it

Under UK GDPR we must name a lawful basis for each purpose:

• Contract: your account, your saved figures, and the features you signed up to use. Without this data there is no service to provide.
• Consent: third-party analytics, advertising cookies, and any optional email. You can withdraw consent at any time from the Privacy link, and withdrawing is as easy as giving it.
• Legitimate interests: keeping the service secure and available, preventing abuse, moderating the community board, counting which tools get used, and sending the optional reminders. On the reminders specifically: they are about your own data and nothing else, upkeep notes are capped at one a week and the dated ones you asked for at one message a day, and you can stop either in one click from any of them. We think that is a fair balance, and if you disagree the switch is the answer; you do not need to give a reason. We have balanced these against your rights and they do not override them.
• Legitimate interests, and why we think counting tool use is fair: the law lets us rely on our own legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) only after weighing them against your rights, so here is that reasoning in full rather than the usual one-line assertion.
  The purpose: thirty-odd calculators exist and our time does not stretch to all of them. Knowing which ones people open is what tells us where to spend it, and which to retire.
  Why nothing lighter would do: server logs alone would not separate a person from a crawler, and asking people would tell us about the ones who answer. We considered making it consent-only and concluded the result would be a biased sample of the readers who click yes, which is worse than not measuring at all.
  The balance: a record here says a calculator was opened from a country, on a class of device, in a language, at a time. It holds none of your figures, no name, no account, and no network address, so it cannot be traced to you, combined with anything else about you, or used to advertise to you. Nobody outside our company sees it, and it is deleted after 90 days. Set against a genuine need to know which tools earn their keep, we judge that a fair trade, and we would rather show the reasoning and be argued with than ask you to take it on trust. You can object at any time under Article 21 by emailing us, and you do not need to give a reason.
• Legal obligation: keeping consent records to meet our own accountability duty.
• Legitimate interests: keeping a record of the terms you accepted, so what was agreed can be established later. We have weighed this against your privacy: it is a single record per person, never used to profile or track anyone.

How long we keep it

• Browser-kept data: for as long as your browser keeps it. We never hold it, so there is nothing for us to delete; you can clear it from your account page or by clearing site data, and both are immediate and permanent.
• Owner account data: until deleted. Deleting the account removes it immediately and permanently; there is no soft-delete and no grace period.
• Community posts: kept while published. Deleting your account removes your posts with it.
• Consent records: kept for up to 12 months as evidence that consent was given.
• Your acceptance of the terms: kept while it can still matter, which is as long as the terms it accepted could be relied on. A browser-kept account carries its own copy and can delete it with the rest of its data.
• Support messages: kept up to 24 months so we can follow up on an ongoing issue.
• Reminder preferences: your choice, when you made it, and when a reminder was last sent. Kept while you have an account and deleted with it. A record that you opted out is the only way we can keep honouring it, so it stays for as long as the account does.

Where data lives, and transfers abroad

Your plans, net worth and diary are stored on your own device, in your browser, and do not leave it. What we do hold (the owner accounts, support and contact messages, consent records and the visitor counts above) is stored with Cloudflare (our hosting and database provider) in the Western Europe region, protected in transit by TLS. Cloudflare acts as our processor under its standard data processing terms.

The optional analytics and advertising services are provided by Google and Microsoft, who may process data outside the UK, including in the United States. Those transfers rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, and on the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified under it. These services only run if you consent to them, and the financial figures you enter are never sent to either.

No automated decisions

We do not carry out automated decision-making or profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects. The calculators do arithmetic on numbers you supply and show you the result; they make no decision about you, and nothing you enter is used to build a profile.

Your rights (UK GDPR)

You have the right to access your data, correct it, delete it, take it elsewhere, restrict or object to how we use it, and withdraw consent at any time. Most of these you can exercise yourself, immediately:

• Access and portability: Account → Export all my data gives a complete JSON copy, and Load a backup on the same page puts one back.
• Erasure: Account → Delete account & all data. Immediate and permanent.
• Rectification: edit anything in-app.
• Withdraw consent: the Privacy link, any page.

For restriction, objection, or anything the app does not cover, email us and we will respond within one month, as UK GDPR requires. We do not charge for this.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office: Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF, 0303 123 1113, ico.org.uk. We would rather you came to us first so we can put it right.

Security breaches

If a breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights, we will report it to the ICO within 72 hours and tell you directly where the risk is high.

Contact

BrightScale Labs Limited, 8 Flay Field, Tithebarn, Exeter, England, EX1 3YA · hello@firemathlab.com · ICO registration ZC171322

FireMathLab is an educational tool, not financial advice. If this policy changes materially, the cookie banner will re-appear and ask again.