The Crown Dependencies Observatory examines re-identification risk, demographics, fiscal flows and other public-interest data across the Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey, under the Coalfinch brand. For data protection purposes, the person who decides what data is collected and why is currently the individual operating Coalfinch. We have regard to the Isle of Man Data Protection Act 2018 (and the GDPR as applied there), and to the equivalent laws of Guernsey and Jersey given the site's subject matter.
This site is built to use as little personal data as possible. Almost everything you see — re-identification risk scores, k-anonymity curves, demographic charts, fiscal flows, inflation series — is generated from synthetic populations and aggregate public statistics, not real, identifiable individuals' records. No account is needed to use any public tool. We don't use Google Analytics, advertising trackers, or cookies for analytics.
The only places personal data is actually involved are site analytics (aggregated, cookieless, not tied to your identity) and the Restricted tab, which is gated behind a login currently not open to the public.
We use Plausible Analytics, a privacy-focused service. It doesn't use cookies or any persistent identifier, and doesn't build visitor profiles or track you across sites. Your browser briefly sends your IP address and user-agent to Plausible to compute a non-reversible, one-day-only hash for aggregate counting — this isn't stored or linked to you afterwards. Legal basis: legitimate interests. Location: entirely on infrastructure owned by European companies (Germany, Finland, Slovenia) — your analytics data doesn't leave the EU.
The Restricted tab hosts a research tool gated behind authentication via Supabase. If you have an account, we hold your email address and an encrypted password credential, plus standard sign-in metadata. Purpose: limiting access to a tool intended for vetted use, given its subject matter. Location: AWS infrastructure in London, United Kingdom. Retention: for as long as the account exists, plus a short recovery window, then deleted. Account creation is not currently open to the public.
If you email observatory@coalfinch.com, we hold your email and message for as long as needed to respond, then delete it.
The site is hosted on Vercel. As with virtually all web hosts, basic request metadata (e.g. IP address) is necessarily processed to deliver pages and prevent abuse. We don't separately access or use these logs for any other purpose.
These tools use synthetic populations generated to match published demographic marginals from the 2021 census and official statistics for each island. They don't query, store, or look up data about any real, named individual, and can't tell you anything about a specific real person. If you enter a hypothetical profile into a tool, nothing is transmitted to us or stored — the calculation runs in your browser.
| Provider | Role | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel, Inc. | Website hosting | Global edge network; US-based company |
| Supabase | Login for the Restricted tab | AWS, London (UK) |
| Plausible Insights OÜ | Analytics | EU only (Germany / Finland / Slovenia) |
| GitHub (Microsoft) | Source code hosting | Global — no personal data is committed to the code repository |
Where a provider is outside the Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey, the UK or the EU/EEA, we rely on recognised safeguards (such as an adequacy decision, Standard Contractual Clauses, the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, or EU–US Data Privacy Framework certification, as applicable).
Subject to applicable law, you can:
To exercise any of these, email observatory@coalfinch.com. We'll respond within one month and may need to verify your identity first.
If you're not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Isle of Man Information Commissioner (inforights.im), or the equivalent authority in Guernsey or Jersey if you're resident there.
We use measures appropriate to the limited personal data we hold: encrypted credential storage, encryption in transit (TLS), restricted access to administrative systems, and reliance on processors with their own contractual security commitments. No system is perfectly secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security.
We'll update this page when our processing changes — for example, if the Restricted tab opens to a wider group, or if real (non-synthetic) data is ever incorporated into any tool. Material changes will be reflected here with an updated date.