Privacy notice

Last updated: 17 October 2026

This notice explains what personal information Minute Book holds, why we hold it and what you can do about it. If anything is unclear, email privacy@minute-book.com.

Who we are

Minute Book (minute-book.com) is run by Fyllio Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 16520641). Our registered office is 11 Rockwell Road, Bolton, United Kingdom, BL6 4NT.

Fyllio Ltd is the controller of the personal information described in this notice. This means we decide how it is used and we are responsible for looking after it. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) under number ZC271050.

For anything about personal information, email privacy@minute-book.com or use our contact form and choose "Personal information about me".

Two kinds of information

We hold two different kinds of personal information and treat them differently.

• Information about you as someone who uses Minute Book, such as your account, your plan and messages you send us.
• Information about people named in the documents we collect, such as board members and staff named in NHS board minutes. Public bodies published these documents first. We make them easier to find and search.

Information about you

Why we use it

Data protection law says we need a reason, called a lawful basis, for each use of personal information.

API and tier-change records are used for allowance administration, billing, security and accountability.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed our interests against yours. You can ask us for details of that assessment.

Your searches are private

We know journalists, lawyers, unions and campaigners need to keep their work confidential.

• We do not tell the organisations you search, or anyone else, what you have searched for, opened or saved.
• We do not keep a search history linked to your account. Your search words are passed to our search service to find results. That service does not keep a log of searches.
• To stop automated copying, we count searches from each connection for a short time. We store only a coded fingerprint of your IP address made with a secret key, never the address itself, and delete it after two days.
• For API searches we count requests by key and kind of request, without keeping search words in those counts. Request addresses can include search or find words in our web host's technical logs, as described above.
• Our web host keeps short-lived technical logs of requests to the website. These can include the words in a search. We use them only to fix faults and deal with security problems, and they are deleted automatically within 30 days.
• We keep a record of the documents you open, to count your monthly allowance. Only a small number of our staff can see account activity, and only when they need to, for example to fix a problem you have reported.
• If we receive a legal demand for your information, we will check that it is valid and tell you before we respond, unless the law prevents us.

AI actions

When AI actions are available on your plan, you can ask for a summary of a document we hold, or an answer to a question about one document. On the Organisation and Enterprise plans, you can also ask a question across a folder or one organisation's papers. Anthropic, our AI provider, writes them for us.

• What we send. We send Anthropic the document's title and text and, for a question, the words you type. We do not send your name, email address or account details. For a question about a long document, we also pass your question to our search service to find the pages to read; it does not keep it.
• Questions across papers. We send Anthropic the pages that match your words, from up to 12 documents, their titles and the words you type. Your words also pass through our search service, which does not keep them. We do not send your name, email address, account details or folder name.
• Take care with what you type. The documents are public, but a question can contain personal information if you put it there. Please don't type information about yourself or other people that the question doesn't need.
• Anthropic acts on our instructions. Under its commercial terms, it doesn't use what we send to train its models, and it deletes what we send and what it writes within 30 days. There are two exceptions: if its safety systems flag a request as breaking its usage policy, it can keep that request for up to two years, and it can keep information for longer where the law requires.
• Answers are shared, questions are not linked to you. To save cost, we keep each answer and show it again to anyone who asks for the same thing about the same document or the same set of pages. An answer across papers is deleted from our shared answer store if a document it was made from is removed from our service on request. We store the answer with a coded fingerprint of the question's wording. We don't store your name or account with it, or the question as you typed it, though an answer can repeat words from the question.
• What we keep with your account. A record of each AI action you use, including which document, folder or organisation it was about, to count your allowance (see "Information about you"). On an Organisation or Enterprise plan, your organisation sees only the team's total, never what you used or asked.
• No decisions about you. AI actions only describe documents. We never use them to make decisions about you or about people named in the documents.

Press check

To get the Journalist plan, you tell us who you work for and send evidence that you work as a journalist, such as a photo of your press card, a work email address or links to work you have published.

A person reviews your evidence. We do not make the decision automatically. We delete the evidence within 30 days of our decision. After that we keep only the outcome (approved or refused) and the date, for as long as you have an account. We may ask you to repeat the check once a year.

Contact form and emails to us

Our contact form asks for your name, email address, organisation (optional), the topic and your message. We use these only to reply to you and deal with what you raised. The form, like email to our addresses, is delivered to our inbox at our email provider, Resend. It uses simple checks to block spam. It does not use a third-party CAPTCHA or tracking cookies.

We delete messages from our inbox 30 days after they arrive. If we need a message for longer, for example because it is a complaint or a request about personal information, we save a copy in our records, held with Proton, and keep it for two years after the matter is closed, or longer if we need it for a legal claim.

Weekly email

You can ask for our weekly email when you create an account, in Settings, or with the form on our "This week" page. It is separate from news about Minute Book: agreeing to one doesn't sign you up for the other.

If you use the form, we email you a link to confirm your address and send nothing else until you use it. If you don't use it, we delete the address after seven days. If the address already has a Minute Book account, confirming turns the weekly email on in that account's settings.

Every weekly email has a link to stop it, which works without signing in. When you stop, we record when and how. If you don't have an account, we delete your address at once and keep only a coded fingerprint of it with the dates, for two years, so we can show what you agreed to and when you withdrew. We use the address only to send the weekly email.

People named in board papers

Board minutes and board packs of NHS and Health and Social Care (HSC) organisations and of the other public bodies we cover (such as integrated care boards, regulators and Healthwatch), and the reports Healthwatch publishes, often name board members and staff, and sometimes other people. We collect these documents only from the public websites of the organisations that published them. Our collector identifies itself, reads each website's robots.txt (its instructions for automated visitors), keeps to the pace it asks for and visits slowly. For published board papers and reports we treat those instructions as a request rather than a rule, and we stop collecting from any website whose organisation asks us to. We never get round a login or a security check. Where a website refuses our automated collector, we don't use automated tools to get past it; we may instead collect its public papers by hand in an ordinary browser, as any member of the public can.

What we hold. We store each document exactly as it was published, and the text in it so it can be searched. When we organise documents into structured data, such as attendance or actions, we record roles (for example "Director of Nursing"), not names. The full text stays searchable as published. When a subscriber uses an AI action on a document, its text, including any names in it, goes to our AI provider to write the summary or answer (see "AI actions").

Why. Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: making it easier for the public, journalists, researchers, unions and others to see what publicly funded health bodies discussed and decided. Most people are named because of their public or professional role, for example a chief executive presenting a report. We think it is fair to keep this searchable, because the organisation chose to publish it and it is about how a public body is run.

When we will remove information. We will remove information about a person from the text we hold and show (and tell the organisation that published it) if:

• it is not about their public or professional role;
• it includes health information or other sensitive details about someone who can be identified; or
• it appears to have been published by mistake.

Your right to object. If you are named in a document, you can object to our use of information about you. We will stop unless we have strong legitimate grounds that override your interests, rights and freedoms. To object or ask for removal, use our contact form (choose "Personal information about me") or email privacy@minute-book.com. Tell us the document and the passage. We will reply within one month.

The documents remain on the website of the organisation that published them. To have information removed there, contact that organisation.

Data protection law includes exemptions for journalism, academic work and research. We do not rely on them as a general basis for what we do. If we ever rely on an exemption in response to a request, we will tell you which and why.

If we contacted you about Minute Book

We sometimes tell professionals about Minute Book when their published work, such as articles or reports that use NHS board papers or coroners' reports, suggests it would help them. We use only details they have made public for that work. Our notice for people we contact explains what we hold, where it came from and how to tell us to stop, which you can do at any time.

Coroners' reports

Prevention of future deaths reports are published by the judiciary on judiciary.uk under the Open Government Licence. We collect them only from judiciary.uk.

These reports are public legal documents. We keep the text as the judiciary published it, including the names it contains, such as the person who died, other people whose deaths it mentions, family members, coroners, clinicians and officials. Data protection law does not protect people who have died, but the reports can include information about living people, and their families' privacy still matters.

We show short extracts and link to the full report on judiciary.uk. If you are a relative, or anyone else named in a report, and you want information about you or your family removed from what we hold and show, tell us and we will consider it promptly, in the same way as any other request to remove information.

Our open coroners' reports dataset holds each report's details, who it was sent to and what responses are published, never a report's text or the names of people who died, and anything we remove on request leaves it within a day.

We link a coroner's report to the passages in its recipients' public board papers that mention it, so you can see how an organisation discussed it. A link is found automatically and checked by our team before it is shown; it says only that the report is mentioned, never that someone failed to act. Tell us if a link is wrong and we'll remove it.

Who we share it with

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for advertising.

We use the following companies to run Minute Book. They act on our instructions and may use your information only to provide their service to us.

Stripe also uses some payment information for its own purposes, such as preventing fraud and meeting financial regulations. For that, Stripe is a separate controller and its own privacy notice applies (stripe.com/privacy).

When alert webhooks are available, your organisation's owners and administrators can choose a web address to receive its team alerts as well as the alert emails. Each message includes the watched phrase, the organisation's name and identifiers, and details of each match, including its source, meeting, page, draft label, reuse status, links and an extract of at most 50 words. We do not add members' account names, email addresses or identifiers to an alert message. The watched phrase, source details and extracts can themselves contain personal information about people named in them.

The receiver is selected by your organisation under its own arrangement with that receiver. It is not appointed by us to run Minute Book. The organisation is responsible for choosing an appropriate receiver and for its use of the messages. Our own duties when disclosing personal information still apply, including any required safeguards for transfers outside the UK.

We encrypt the full destination address and signing secrets in our application. Administrators see the host on the page; a short path hint is also stored in the destination record and is readable by administrators. A newly made signing secret is shown once. Our webhook sender does not log the address, secret, watched phrase or message body. We store destination settings, who created the destination and when, delivery attempts and their status or error category, and document or report identifiers and page numbers. We do not store the sent message body or the receiver's response body. Administrators can switch a destination off or delete it. Switching it off keeps its settings and delivery records; deleting it removes those records from our active database. An alert's delivery and duplicate-prevention records also go when the corresponding team alert is deleted. Copies already received are governed by your organisation's arrangement with the receiver and cannot be recalled by Minute Book.

We may also share information:

• with professional advisers, such as accountants, lawyers and insurers, under a duty of confidence;
• when the law requires it, or to protect people's safety or our legal rights; and
• with a buyer if our business or Minute Book is sold, in which case this notice will continue to protect your information.

If you use Minute Book through an organisation plan, your organisation's administrators can see who is a member and anything placed in shared folders. Everyone in the organisation can see when each member was last active. When organisation data tools are available, owners and administrators can also download the organisation's data, including members' email addresses and last sign-in times, comments and assignments in shared folders, and the organisation's Enterprise agreement details. Private notes and our internal contract notes are not included. The owner can request deletion of the organisation after a 30-day period to change their mind, once its billing and single sign-on arrangements allow it. Deletion removes the organisation's shared folders and their contents, including members' private notes attached to those shared items. Each member's own account and personal folders remain. Administrators can set up shared watched phrases that email every member when they match, unless you mute them for yourself on the Team alerts page, or use the link in any such email. When the API is available on an Enterprise plan, administrators can also see the organisation's API keys (their names and first characters, never the key), who made them, when they were last used and how much they have been used. They cannot see your private searches or saved items. Comments and assignments in a shared folder are seen by everyone in the organisation. If you leave the organisation or close your account, your comments stay in the folder and are shown as from a former member; your name is no longer shown with them. We email you when a colleague mentions you or assigns you an item, unless you turn that off in Settings or from the link in any such email.

Information stored outside the UK

Some of our providers store or access information outside the UK. Where they do, we make sure it is protected:

• The European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland. The UK recognises these countries as giving adequate protection.
• The United States. Vercel, Cloudflare, Resend and Stripe are certified under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (the "UK-US data bridge"), which UK law recognises as adequate.
• Anthropic (United States). We rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses, which form part of our data processing agreement with Anthropic.
• Elsewhere. Where a provider's staff may access information from another country (for example, Supabase's support staff), we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses in our contract with that provider.

Ask us at privacy@minute-book.com if you want more detail.

How long we keep it

If you close your account, you can change your mind for 30 days. After that we delete your account and profile automatically. If a plan you pay for is still set to renew, or you are an owner of an organisation whose plan is still set to renew or has a payment or contract still to settle, and no other owner is staying, we keep your account until that changes, and then delete it automatically. Copies in our backups are overwritten within a further 30 days.

Your rights

You have the right to:

• get a copy of the information we hold about you;
• have information corrected if it is wrong;
• have information deleted;
• restrict how we use it;
• object to our use of it, including where we rely on legitimate interests;
• receive information you gave us in a format you can take elsewhere; and
• withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on consent.

You can download your account information as a file (JSON) and close your account at any time from your account Settings. For anything else, email privacy@minute-book.com. We will reply within one month. If a request is complex, we may extend this by up to two more months and will tell you why. Some rights have limits, and we will explain if one applies.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled personal information, please complain to us first at privacy@minute-book.com or through our contact form. We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days, look into it, keep you updated and tell you the outcome.

You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

Security

We protect information with encryption in transit, access controls that give each account access only to its own information, and limited staff access. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects you and puts you at high risk, we will tell you.

Children

Minute Book is not intended for people under 18 and we do not knowingly collect information about them as users.

Automated decisions

We do not make decisions about you by automated means that have legal or similarly significant effects. The press check is decided by a person.

How we count visits

To see which pages bring people to Minute Book, we keep simple daily totals. They are not information about you.

• For each day we count how many times each kind of page was opened (for example the home page or an organisation's page), roughly where visits came from (a search engine, social media, an NHS or government site, another site, or directly), and how many follows, sign-ups, checkouts and paid plans there were, by the kind of page they were made from. For an embedded list of an organisation's papers on another website, we count how many times it loaded for that organisation.
• We never record the address of the page, your search words, your IP address, your browser or device, a cookie or your account, and we store nothing on your device to do this. So the totals can't be linked to you or to each other.
• If your browser asks sites not to track you (Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track), it isn't counted at all.
• We keep the daily totals for 24 months, then keep only monthly totals.

Cookies

A cookie is a small file a website stores in your browser. We use only cookies that are strictly necessary to provide the service you ask for. The law does not require consent for these, so we do not show a cookie banner.

When you pay, you go to Stripe's checkout or billing pages. Stripe sets its own cookies on its own website, for security and fraud prevention. Stripe's cookie policy applies to those.

We do not use analytics, advertising or tracking cookies. Our visit totals use no cookies at all (see "How we count visits"). If that changes, we will update this notice before it happens and give you any choice the law requires.

Changes to this notice

If we make important changes, we will email account holders before they take effect. The date at the top shows when this notice last changed.