Privacy notice

Who is responsible

fellows.directory is an independent project operated by Tax Heaven Limited, the controller of the personal data described in this notice (“we”). It is not affiliated with the Royal Academy of Engineering.

To contact us about your data or to use any of your rights, use the correction form: choose “Removal” to have a profile removed, or “Other” for anything else. We reply by email if you give an address.

Data about Fellows

For each Fellow listed in the Academy’s public directory, we process:

• name, title and post-nominal letters
• fellowship type and year of election
• region, as listed by the Academy: never a town, city or address
• the organisations the Academy’s directory lists the Fellow under in its company search, shown without a date because the directory gives none
• organisation and role, current or at election, with the date they apply to
• sector (academia, industry, government or other), stated by a source or inferred from the organisation’s type
• expertise tags and research topics
• a short summary: the opening of the Fellow’s Wikipedia article, or one generated from the facts on their profile
• links to public professional pages, such as Wikipedia, ORCID, Google Scholar, OpenAlex, LinkedIn or a personal or institutional website
• the address of the Fellow’s photo on the Academy’s website or, for some Fellows the Academy has no photo of, of a freely licensed photo on Wikimedia Commons, with its author and licence (the photo itself is never copied or stored)
• for each fact, its source, the date it was retrieved, how it was obtained and how confident we are, with a short quotation from the source for facts found by research
• a position on the map, a field and a list of similar Fellows, calculated from the facts above

Facts from sources other than the Academy are published only once we have confirmed that they are about the same person. The directory holds no contact details and nothing about Fellows’ private lives, health, beliefs or families. Personal details that appear in a source, such as a date of birth in a Wikipedia summary, are removed before anything is published.

Where it comes from

All of it is publicly available: the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Fellows directory, election citations and election lists; Wikidata; Wikipedia; Wikimedia Commons; OpenAlex; ORCID; and public web pages about the Fellow, such as those of employers, universities and the Fellow’s own website. The Data page describes each source and its licence.

Why we use it and the lawful basis

We use this data to help people find Fellows with particular engineering expertise, such as companies, researchers, journalists and policymakers looking for an expert, and to show where each fact comes from so that it can be checked and corrected.

The lawful basis is legitimate interests (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)): our interest, and the public’s, in finding engineering expertise in the Fellowship. We consider that this does not override Fellows’ interests, because the directory shows only professional information that is already public, much of it published by the Academy itself; gives a region rather than any address; holds no contact details; cites a source for every fact; and removes any Fellow who asks.

Who receives it

The directory is public, so anyone can read it, and search engines index it. We also use these providers, who act on our instructions:

• Vercel hosts the site and serves every page.
• GitHub hosts the project’s private repository, which holds the directory’s data and correction requests.
• OpenRouter and the model providers it routes to. To order search results and explain each match, a search sends the published details of up to 30 candidate Fellows (name, role, organisation, sector, region, election year, expertise, topics and the first sentence of the summary) to a language model. When the data is built, each Fellow’s professional details, without their name, are sent to an embedding model so that search can match by meaning. Search requests are routed only to providers that do not store or train on what they receive.
• Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (Codex) are used when the data is built, to research public professional sources and write short summaries. They receive the Fellow’s name and professional details for that purpose.

What visitors’ browsers send, and to whom, is described under Visitors to the site.

How long we keep it

• A Fellow’s data is published for as long as they are listed in the Academy’s directory, unless they ask for it to be removed. A Fellow who leaves the Academy’s directory is removed in the next monthly update.
• When a Fellow asks to be removed, we keep a minimal record (their directory identifier, name, election year and the date of the request) in a private suppression list, so that later updates do not add them again.
• Earlier versions of the data are kept in the project’s private repository so that changes can be checked and undone. They are not published.
• Correction requests, and visitors’ data, are kept as described under Visitors to the site.

Visitors to the site

The site has no accounts and does not ask visitors for personal data. Using it still involves the processing below, which we and our providers carry out under legitimate interests: running a working, secure site, protecting it from automated abuse and measuring overall use.

Searches

What you type is sent to our server and, to interpret it, order the results and match by meaning, to OpenRouter and the model provider it routes to. Search requests are routed only to providers that do not store or train on what they receive. We do not keep a search history or associate search text with visitor identifiers. Completed results may be reused from server memory for up to 24 hours, without details of who searched. This temporary cache is lost when the server restarts. The search appears after the hash sign in a shared link and in your browser history. That part of the address is not sent with page requests; the app sends the search separately to process it.

Request logs and bot checks

Like any web host, Vercel records each request in its logs: the page or API address, your IP address, the time and your browser details. The app keeps search text out of these request addresses and does not send a referring page address. Vercel BotID checks searches and correction requests to tell people from automated traffic, using the same details and your approximate location. Vercel keeps these logs for a limited period set by its service, after which they are deleted. We use them only to keep the site working and secure.

Analytics

Vercel Web Analytics counts page views. It records the page, the referring site and your country, device type, browser and operating system, never what you searched for. Profile addresses are grouped together rather than identifying individual Fellows. It uses no cookies, and we see only totals.

Photos

Photos are loaded by your browser directly from the Academy’s website, raeng.org.uk. As with any web request, the Academy’s servers receive your IP address and browser details. The site does not send a referring page address. The Academy’s own privacy notice covers what it does with them. A few photos come from Wikimedia Commons instead, loaded from upload.wikimedia.org in the same way; the Wikimedia Foundation’s privacy policy covers those requests.

Correction requests

A correction or removal request is stored as an issue in the project’s private GitHub repository: the request type, the Fellow concerned, your message and, only if you give it, your email address, which we use only to reply about the request. We keep a request until it is closed and delete it within 30 days after that. To prevent abuse, the form checks for automated submissions and limits how many requests one connection can send, using a short-lived count held in memory; your IP address is not stored.

Cookies and storage

The site uses no cookies for tracking or advertising, and analytics work without cookies. The one thing it stores in your browser is a note, for the current tab only, that the map’s opening animation has played, so that it is not repeated. The note is never sent anywhere and is cleared when you close the tab.

What we do not do

• Publish contact details, home addresses or any personal information about Fellows beyond their professional details.
• Show citation metrics or rank Fellows by them.
• Keep a record of searches, or link a search to the person who made it.
• Use cookies for tracking or advertising.
• Sell personal data or use it for marketing.

Transfers outside the UK

Vercel, GitHub, OpenRouter, the model providers, Anthropic and OpenAI may process data outside the UK, including in the United States and the European Union. Where they do, the transfer is covered by the safeguards in their data processing terms, such as the UK International Data Transfer Addendum or the UK extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. You can ask us for details through the correction form.

Your rights

You have the right to:

• access the personal data we hold about you
• rectification: have inaccurate data corrected
• erasure: have your data deleted
• restriction: have its use limited while a question about it is settled
• object to our use of it, at any time

If you are a Fellow and you object or ask for erasure, we remove your profile within 7 days. The removal applies to every page, search result and map, the sitemap and link previews, and the suppression list keeps you out of every later update.

To use any of these rights, use the correction form. We answer other requests within one month. Because we do not link visits or searches to people, we usually cannot find a visitor’s data to act on a request about it.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, please tell us first through the correction form. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK regulator, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113.

Automated decisions

We make no decisions based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects on anyone. A language model orders search results and suggests why a Fellow matches, and automated checks decide which facts are published, but none of this decides anything about a person’s rights or circumstances.

Changes to this notice

We update this notice when the way we handle personal data changes. The date at the top shows when it last changed.