How your papers are protected

Your pages, your report and its log are removed 120 days after you send them, whether you ask or not. The clock starts the day your papers arrive, not the day your report goes out. There is nothing to remember and nobody to chase.

The one thing that can change that date can only ever push it later: if there is a legal reason to keep your papers — an ongoing complaint, or a court order — the clock stops until that is over.

The standard governments use for classified material. Each order is encrypted with a key of its own, and that key is itself locked by a master key kept outside the order. Destroying the order’s key makes that one order unreadable at once, and touches no other order — which is exactly how the deletion above is done.

Being straight about the edge of it: an order is encrypted once it is sealed. While your pages are actually being read, they are being worked on, and in that moment they are not.

Three independent reading systems, built by three different companies, see your page images and nothing about your account. Nobody looks at your papers as a matter of course: a named person looks only when you ask for a check — and, on the one occasion nobody would want left to a machine, if a page of yours mentions suicide or self-harm, a person looks at your report before it reaches you.

Your contract with us — the Terms and Conditions you agree to when you buy a report — is governed by the law of England and Wales, and nothing in it takes away the protection the law gives you as a consumer. If we cannot settle a complaint between us, an approved alternative dispute resolution service and the UK courts are both still open to you.