If you just browse
You can use the timetables, boards, maps, fleet pages and API docs without an account. Like any web server, ours records each request — your IP address, the page asked for, the time and your browser's user-agent string — in logs used only to keep the site running and to deal with abuse, such as automated scraping. Those logs are not used to profile anyone and are not shared.
The site uses a few cookies. All are needed for it to work, none says anything about you, and none is used to track you:
- A session cookie (
PHPSESSID), set only when you sign in or fill in one of the site's forms (such as a report). It holds a security token that protects the forms and, if you sign in, keeps you signed in. It lasts up to 30 days. - A page token (
rf_pt), which lasts 15 minutes and is sent back only when a page fetches its live data. It proves the request came from one of our own pages, which is how we stop other sites and automated scrapers using the site's internal data feed. It holds only an expiry time, a random number and a signature. - A guest id (
rf_guest), set on the latest sightings page if you aren't signed in, so you can give a sighting a toot once. It's a random number, kept for a year; your IP address is used only in scrambled form, to limit toots from one place.
To know how many people use the site and which pages they read, each page view is counted by GoatCounter, which runs on our own server, so nothing goes to anyone else. It records the page, the site you came from, your browser and screen size, and your country (worked out from your IP address, which is then thrown away). It sets no cookies and keeps no IP addresses, so it can't follow you from one day to the next or from one site to another.
Two preferences are saved in your browser's own local storage and never sent to us: whether you have dismissed a page's explainer box, and the view you chose on the logbook (photos, list or map).
If you create an account
We keep:
- Your email address, and a name if your sign-in provider gives one — to identify your account. It is never shown publicly.
- A username you choose, which is public: it appears on any logbook entries you make public.
- A password, stored only as a one-way hash, if you set one. If you sign in with Apple, Google or Microsoft we keep that provider's account identifier and email instead, and never see your password there. With Apple we also keep a token Apple issues, used only to tell Apple to forget the link if you delete your account.
- When you created the account and last signed in.
- The session cookie described above, which keeps you signed in for up to 30 days.
- The stations and services you pin, so they appear on your boards.
- If you use the iPhone or Android app, which parts of it you used each day (for example the logbook, live trains or station boards) and how many times, so we can see which features are used. Not which trains, stations or units you looked at. Kept for 13 months.
- Your API key, if you create one — stored only as a hash, with when it was created and last used.
Logbook entries and photos
Anything you record in the logbook — the train, the place, the time, notes, and the location you pick on the map — is stored against your account. Entries are visible to others only while your logbook is set to public, and you can switch that off, or edit or delete any entry, at any time.
A public entry can appear on your logbook page, on the pages of the units in it, in the latest sightings feed and, if it has a photo, on the home page, with your username. The feed and the home page show an entry only once the sighting in it is at least 3 hours old, so they never show where you are right now, and name the station or place rather than the point you picked on the map. Your logbook and the entry's own page show that point as before.
Photos you upload are resized and re-saved on our server, and all embedded metadata — including any GPS location your phone wrote into the file — is stripped before the image is stored. Deleting an entry deletes its photos, and a photo uploaded but never attached to an entry is deleted after a day.
If you report something
A report keeps what you wrote, the entry it is about, your IP address and, if you give one, your email address, so it can be dealt with and abuse of the report form stopped. Reports are seen only by the person who runs the site.
Who else is involved
- Apple, Google and Microsoft, only if you choose to sign in with them. They tell us your account identifier, email and name, under their own privacy policies. With Apple you can choose to hide your email, and we then get an Apple relay address instead of your real one.
- Anthropic, whose AI model Claude checks new comments, photos and the titles and notes on logbook entries for anything that breaks the terms, to help keep the site safe. It is sent the comment, photo or entry text, what entry it's on, and how old the account is — never your name, email or IP address. Anthropic acts only on our instructions, doesn't use them to train its models, and keeps them only for a limited time under its own retention policy.
- OpenStreetMap serves the map tiles, and jsDelivr and unpkg serve some of the page's code libraries. Your browser fetches these directly from them, so they receive your IP address as with any website you visit.
Nothing else is shared with anyone. The site and its database are hosted on our own server in Europe.
How long it is kept
Account data is kept until you delete the account. Server request logs are temporary and are cleared as a matter of course. Nightly database backups are kept for 14 days, so anything you delete disappears from the backups within two weeks too.
Your rights
You can delete your account and everything attached to it yourself, at any time: on your account page, or in the RailFeed iPhone app. Under UK data protection law you can also ask for a copy of the information we hold about you, or have it corrected. Email hello@railfeed.co.uk from the address on your account and we will deal with it promptly, normally within a few days and always within a month. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. A change that affects how existing account data is used will be flagged on the site first.
