Privacy

This website sets no advertising or tracking cookies and embeds no third-party trackers. It does not load fonts from a content-delivery network: the typefaces are self-hosted and served from the same origin as the site, so no request is made to Google Fonts or any other third-party font service. There is no social-media tracking pixel and no cross-site profiling.

Because the site sets no non-essential cookies, there is no cookie banner.

If the Foundation measures use of the site at all, it uses a cookieless method that records aggregate page views without setting a cookie, storing a device identifier or building a profile of an individual visitor. No analytics data is sold or shared for advertising, and none is used to identify you.

Like any web server, the host serving this site may record standard request logs — the requested address, a timestamp, and technical details such as the browser and a truncated or anonymised network address — to operate the service, diagnose faults and protect it from abuse. These logs are kept no longer than necessary for those purposes and are not used to track individuals across the web.

If you email the Foundation — for example at enquiries@assayfoundation.org — it receives the message and the address you sent it from, and keeps the correspondence for as long as needed to deal with your enquiry and keep a proper record. Your message is used only to respond to you and is not added to a marketing list. The Foundation does not operate a newsletter.

The lawful basis for handling correspondence is the Foundation’s legitimate interest in responding to enquiries and keeping records of its dealings. Under UK data protection law you may ask what personal data the Foundation holds about you, ask for it to be corrected or erased, and complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office. To make a request, write to the address above.

Assay Guide lets visitors ask questions about the Foundation and its published materials. It is an information guide, with an optional AI mode; it is not a human correspondent, an independent Assayer or a substitute for the published Register. Please do not enter confidential information, client data, passwords, or sensitive personal information.

In reference mode, the Guide selects relevant material from the Foundation’s published knowledge base without sending the text of your question to an AI model. When AI answers are enabled, the text of your question and preceding messages in the current chat are sent through our Vercel-hosted endpoint to OpenAI to generate the answer. Chat is not saved into a separate Foundation conversation database, and is not used by the Foundation for marketing or visitor profiling. The server requests that OpenAI not persist the conversation as response application state. However, OpenAI may retain prompts and responses in abuse-monitoring logs for up to 30 days by default, with exceptions described in its API data controls. OpenAI states that API submissions are not used to train its models without an explicit opt-in.

The chat feature is optional. Its purpose is to answer voluntarily submitted enquiries about the Foundation, on the basis of its legitimate interest in providing an accessible information service. Technical hosting logs may be retained as described above. You can instead contact the Foundation without using AI chat.

The data controller is Assay Foundation. Incorporation is pending; the controller’s legal entity details will be published here once it is complete.