Privacy

Who is responsible

Rota Monster is not a company. It is run and paid for by an individual in the UK, who is the data controller for everything described here. Writing to [email protected] reaches them.

What is stored

The person who sets a house up is the admin. Everybody else in the house is a housemate. About the admin, Rota Monster stores:

• Their name and email address, which come from the sign-in provider.
• Which house they look after.

About each housemate:

• Their name.
• Their mobile number.
• A private token, which is what the link in their text points to.
• Their turns, and any turn they have handed on to somebody else.

About the house:

• The house name, its web address and its time zone.
• The chores, who takes turns at them, and when the reminders go out.
• Every reminder sent, including the wording of the message, whether the network accepted it, and when.

If the house connects a calendar, Rota Monster also stores:

• The calendar’s secret link.
• For events from a week ago to ninety days ahead: the title, the dates and times, whether it runs all day, and the calendar’s own identifier for it.
• Whether Rota Monster read that title as somebody being away, and a one-line reason.

Event descriptions, guest lists and locations are never read out of the calendar, so they are never stored. There is no advertising and no profiling. Nothing here is sold, and nothing is shared for marketing.

Counting visits

Rota Monster keeps a count of how many visits the site gets, how many different browsers they came from, and how many get through each step of setting a house up. The counting sets no cookie of its own (the one cookie a visit can pick up is described under Cookies below). It keeps only counts, plus, for a day, the scrambled code described below, so it can say how many visits there were and never who made one. About each visit, and stored with it, Rota Monster records the following and nothing else:

• Which page was opened.
• Which site linked to it, if any. The site’s address only, never the page on it and never anything after the question mark.
• The campaign labels on the link that brought them, when the link carried any.
• The country, as reported by the network in front of the site. Never the address the visit came from.
• The city, when the network in front of the site reports one. Never the street, the postcode or a map position.
• Whether it was a phone, a tablet or a computer.
• Which browser and operating system, by name only, such as Safari on iOS. Never the version, which is the part that would narrow a visit down to a person.

Rota Monster can tell whether two visits on the same day came from the same browser, and nothing more than that. To do it, the site makes a scrambled code out of the visit’s network address and the description the browser sends of itself, mixed with a secret that changes every midnight UTC, and keeps that code for the day it was made and the day after. The code cannot be turned back into an address. It is kept on its own and never stored next to a visit, so no visit can be traced to it. And because the secret has changed by the next morning, the same browser makes a different code the following day, with nothing left anywhere that could match the two. So the site can say how many different browsers came on a day, and it cannot tell whether any of them ever came back.

What is never recorded: an IP address, the long identifying string a browser sends about itself, a cookie, or a visitor or session number of any kind. The address and that string are used to make the day’s code and are then thrown away; the code is not the address and cannot be turned into one, so no address is written down anywhere. Nothing stored with a visit joins it to another visit, so Rota Monster cannot follow anybody through the site and cannot build a picture of anybody. The visit counts are deleted after 180 days, and the codes once the day after the one they were made in is over.

Why it is held

• To text the right housemate at the right time.
• To give each housemate a page showing their own turns.
• To keep a turn from landing on somebody who is away.
• To let the admin see whether a reminder arrived.

The lawful basis is legitimate interests. A house has asked for a rota, and a rota cannot run without names, numbers and turns. The admin is responsible for telling the people they add that their number is in Rota Monster. If you would rather not be in it, ask your admin to remove you, or write to the operator.

Who else sees it

Three companies handle part of this on Rota Monster’s behalf. Nobody else does.

• Twilio sends the text messages. It receives the housemate’s mobile number and the message, which contains their name and their private link.
• WorkOS handles admin sign-in. It holds the admin’s email address and their sign-in history. Housemates never sign in, so WorkOS never sees them.
• Anthropic’s Claude reads calendar event titles, so that a trip can be told apart from a dinner. Each request sends event titles, their dates, and the names of the housemates, so a title like “Ciara in France” can be matched to a person. It does not send phone numbers, email addresses, the calendar link, or anything from the calendar beyond titles and dates.

Rota Monster runs on Railway, a managed hosting platform, and its database runs there too. Railway, Twilio, WorkOS and Anthropic are United States companies and may handle this data outside the UK. Those transfers rely on the standard contractual terms each of them publishes for UK and European personal data.

How long it is kept

Rota Monster keeps what a house gives it for as long as the house is using it. The visit counting above is the only thing deleted on a timer: the counts go after 180 days, and the daily browser codes go once the day after the one they were made in is over. Nothing else is, and this page will say so plainly until something is.

• Disconnecting the house calendar deletes the stored link and every event that came from it, at once.
• Removing a housemate stops their private link working straight away. Their name and number stay on the house record, so past turns still make sense.
• Reminder records, including the wording that was sent, are kept so the admin can look back at what arrived.

There is no button that deletes a whole house yet. Ask the operator and the house, its housemates, its rota and its reminder records are deleted.

Keeping the secrets secret

A housemate’s private link and the house calendar link are both secrets: anybody holding one can see what it opens. The calendar link is never shown in full again once it is saved, and it is kept out of logs and error reports. Neither secret is encrypted by Rota Monster separately from the database it sits in, so both are as safe as that database and the one person with access to it.

Cookies

Rota Monster sets no advertising cookies, and nothing here follows anybody between sites. The visit counting described above sets no cookie of its own, and puts nothing at all on your device: the code that tells one browser from another for a day is worked out on the site’s own side and thrown away, so there is nothing to carry from one day to the next and nothing to follow you to another site with. Admin sign-in sets an encrypted session cookie and a short-lived one used only while signing in. A housemate opening their link from a text gets no cookie at all. Whether you chose light or dark is kept in your own browser and never sent anywhere.

One more cookie is set, and only for somebody who arrives with a campaign link. It holds the campaign labels from that link for up to thirty days so that, if they go on to set a house up, the house can record what brought them. It carries no identifier, it is never used to recognise anybody, and it is deleted the moment the house is made.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask for a copy of what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, ask for its use to be restricted, object to its use, or ask for it in a portable form. Write to [email protected] and you will have an answer within one month.

If that answer does not satisfy you, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

Children

Rota Monster is meant for adults sharing a house. It is not aimed at children and does not knowingly hold data about anybody under 13.

Changes

If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it. Questions go to [email protected].