PRIVACY STATEMENT
What we collect when you report a road hazard, what we publish, what we never publish, and how to get it changed or removed.
Last updated 2 August 2026
1.Who we are
The Garfield Batts Hotspot Solutions Foundation (“GBHSF”, “we”) operates this site, where members of the public report road hazards so they can be mapped, published, and raised with the authorities responsible for fixing them.
We also share hazard data — without reporter contact details — with parish councils and the National Works Agency, so repairs can be located and prioritised.
We are the data controller for everything described here. For any privacy question or request, contact us through privacy@gbhsf.com.
2.The short version
- You do not need an account to report a hazard, and nothing you tell us about yourself is ever published. Your name and email — if you give them at all — are seen only by our moderators.
- We do not track you. No analytics, no advertising, no third-party tracking scripts, and no cookies beyond the ones that keep you signed in.
- Photos and videos are stripped of hidden metadata in your browser, before they leave your device — including the GPS tag most phones embed.
- Nothing you submit appears publicly until a person reviews it, and what gets published is a redacted copy, not your original file.
- Everyone in a photo is covered up before it is published — not only the people we think are recognisable. Photographs showing children, or showing injuries, are not published at all.
- Published map pins are deliberately approximate. We hold the precise location so repairs can be found, but the public map shows the right stretch of road rather than the right doorstep.
3.What we collect, and why
Hazard reports — no account required
When you submit a report we store the title, the location description you type, the parish or region, the category and severity, your description of the hazard, and the photo or video you attach.
Optionally, and only if you provide them:
- Your name. Defaults to “Anonymous”. It is never published — not on the report, not in the gallery, not on the map. Moderators see it so they can recognise repeat reporters and answer you by name; nobody else does.
- Your email address. Used only to tell you what happened to your report — that it was received, published, or not published. Like your name, it is never published.
- Coordinates.Either from tapping the “use my location” button — your browser asks permission first, and you can refuse — or read from the photo’s own metadata to save you typing. See section 5.
Reporter accounts
An account is optional. If you create one we store your name, email address, a one-way cryptographic hash of your password (we cannot read, recover, or tell you your password), whether your email is verified, the date you joined, and the date you last signed in. Short-lived email-verification and password-reset tokens are stored while they are valid.
Contact form
The contact form stores your name, email, phone number if you give one, subject, and message — and, for abuse prevention, your IP address and browser user-agent string.
Anti-spam records
To stop automated signups we record the IP address and email address of each registration attempt, and delete them automatically after 24 hours. We also use Cloudflare Turnstile, a privacy-focused alternative to CAPTCHA, on the signup form. Cloudflare receives your IP address and limited browser signals in order to judge whether you are a person. It does not set tracking cookies or profile you across sites.
Staff activity
Every moderator action — publishing, rejecting, editing, or deleting a report or an account — is recorded in an append-only log with the moderator’s username and IP address. This records our staff’s behaviour, not yours, and exists so moderation decisions can be accounted for.
What we do not collect
No analytics or statistics packages. No advertising or advertising identifiers. No social-media pixels or share-trackers. No profiling, no automated decisions with legal effect, and no sale or rental of personal data to anyone, ever.
4.Our lawful basis
We rely on legitimate interests — the public interest in road safety — for hazard reports and the media attached to them, including for people who appear in a photograph without having submitted it themselves. We chose this rather than consent because a published hazard record has to remain reliable: a pothole outside a school does not stop being a hazard because the person who reported it later changes their mind.
Because that basis is ours rather than yours, it comes with obligations we take seriously and describe in the rest of this statement: minimising what we collect, covering every person before publishing, refusing to publish some images at all, generalising public coordinates, and giving anyone — including someone who never used this site — a way to object. If you think the balance is wrong in your case, write to us and say so.
For account data we rely on legitimate interests in operating the service and on your request for the account itself. For the moderation log we rely on legitimate interests in accountability and security of processing.
5.Photo and video metadata
Phones bury a great deal in the files they produce: GPS coordinates accurate to a few metres, the exact moment of capture, the device’s make, model and sometimes serial number. Published unchanged, that would undo the promise that reporting can be anonymous. All of it is removed in your browser, before the file is uploaded — it never reaches us in the first place.
Photos
- We read the GPS coordinates and capture date, and use them to pre-fill the location field and warn you if the photo looks old. You can change or clear anything we pre-fill.
- We then re-encode the image, which discards every metadata block — GPS, timestamp, device model and serial included. The visible picture is unchanged.
Videos
Video is rewritten rather than re-encoded, so the picture and sound are bit-for-bit what your camera recorded and nothing is lost to a second round of compression. What is removed are the metadata sections sitting alongside the footage: embedded GPS coordinates, the device make and model, and the capture timestamps — including the ones in the mandatory headers, which are overwritten with zeroes rather than deleted.
We only accept video formats we can clean this way — MP4 and MOV, which covers essentially every phone. A format we cannot clean is refused when you choose it, rather than uploaded with its metadata intact.
Every format we accept is cleaned. We deliberately accept a short list — JPG, PNG and WebP photos, MP4 and MOV video — because those are the ones we can clean in your browser. A file we cannot clean is refused when you choose it, rather than uploaded with its metadata intact. If your file is turned away for its format, that is why.
6.What becomes public
When a moderator publishes a report, the following is visible to anyone:
| Published | Not published |
|---|---|
| Title, location text, parish or region | Your email address |
| Description, category, severity | Your IP address |
| — | Your name, and your account details |
| The redacted photo or video | The original, unredacted file |
| Approximate map coordinates | The precise coordinates you gave us |
| Date submitted | Anything in a report we did not publish |
| Contact-form messages |
Put plainly: we never publish your name, your email address, the precise coordinates, or the original unredacted file. A published report shows the hazard, where it is to within a stretch of road, and what you wrote about it — not who sent it.
About the map pin
Coordinates are stored precisely, because a repair crew has to find the hazard. What we publish is rounded to roughly an 11-metre grid, so a pin marks the stretch of road rather than a particular doorstep. Parish councils and the National Works Agency receive the precise figure, because they are the ones doing the repair.
One thing rounding cannot fix: the location you type is published word for word.If you write “outside 12 Hope Road”, that is public no matter how approximate the pin is. Describe the place rather than the address, if that matters to you.
About people in photographs
This is a record of hazards, not of people. You chose to take part; nobody else in the frame did. So before anything is published:
- Every person is covered up — not only the ones we judge recognisable. A figure in the background, behind a windscreen, or turned away still gets covered, along with licence plates and house numbers.
- We do not publish photographs showing children. Not covered up and published — not published at all. We will ask you for the same hazard photographed without anyone in frame.
- We do not publish injuries, casualties, or crash scenes involving people. If someone is hurt, please call emergency services rather than reporting it here.
- Video cannot be blurred, so we only publish clips with nobody in them at all. If a clip shows people, we will ask for a photo instead.
If covering everyone would hide the hazard itself, we do not publish the report and will ask for another photo. Reports we do not publish are never public, and their photos and videos are destroyed after 30 days.
Two further safeguards
- Approval alone does not publish anything.A published report needs a redacted copy to exist first. Until a moderator has produced one there is simply no public file to leak, so a report cannot be exposed by a moderator’s mistake.
- Your original file is never a public address. It is kept privately for moderation and evidential purposes and is reachable only by a moderator, through a link that expires within minutes.
Published reports are indexed by search engines and may be quoted by media or road authorities. Once something is public we cannot fully recall it.
7.How long we keep things
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Media on reports we did not publish | Destroyed after 30 days |
| The private original of a resolved report | Destroyed after 90 days; the published redacted copy remains |
| Signup-attempt and anti-spam records | 24 hours |
| The IP address and browser details on a contact message | Erased after 90 days |
| The contact message itself | Deleted after 24 months |
| Email verification and password-reset tokens | Until used or expired |
| Published reports | Kept as a public safety record |
| Accounts | Until you ask us to delete yours |
| Moderation log | Kept as an accountability record |
The first five are enforced by automated jobs that run every day — not by somebody remembering to do it.
Contact messages get two clocks rather than one, because the message and the technical details are collected for different reasons. Your name, email and message are the correspondence. The IP address and browser details are there to catch abuse of the form, and stop being useful for that within weeks — so they are erased long before the message is, rather than being kept longest simply because nobody separated them.
8.Who else processes your data
We use these providers. None of them is permitted to use your data for their own purposes.
| Provider | What it handles |
|---|---|
| Vercel | Website hosting and delivery |
| Neon | The database — reports, accounts, messages |
| Vercel Blob | Photo and video storage and delivery |
| Resend | Sending our email |
| Cloudflare | The bot check on the signup form |
| OpenStreetMap Foundation | Map background tiles |
A note on the map.Map imagery is loaded directly from OpenStreetMap’s servers by your browser, so viewing the map reveals your IP address and the area you are looking at to the OpenStreetMap Foundation. This is normal for web maps and applies to almost every site with one, but you should know it happens.
These providers operate internationally, so your data may be processed outside Jamaica, including in the United States and Europe.
9.Cookies
We use no advertising, analytics, or tracking cookies, and therefore show no cookie banner. The only cookies we set are the ones without which the site cannot function: a session cookie if you sign in, so you stay signed in, and a separate administrator session cookie for moderators. Both are httpOnly, meaning scripts on the page cannot read them.
The site also installs a service worker that caches pages and images so it keeps working on a poor connection or after a storm. That cache lives on your own device, is never sent to us, and deliberately never stores anything from a signed-in or administrative area.
10.How we protect your data
Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes. Moderator accounts support two-factor authentication, and their sessions are signed and expire after eight hours. Original media is never publicly addressable. All traffic is encrypted in transit. Moderation actions are logged.
No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.
11.Your rights
You may ask us to:
- tell you what we hold about you;
- correct anything inaccurate;
- delete your account and personal details;
- stop using your data, or object to how we are using it;
- give you a copy of what you provided, in a portable format.
This includes people who never used this site. If you appear in a published photograph, or believe you do, write to us and we will look at it — you do not need an account and you do not need to explain yourself.
Write to privacy@gbhsf.com or use our contact form. We will respond within 30 days.
One important limit. We will always delete your account, your email address, and your name. We may decline to delete the hazard report itself where it has been published and forms part of a public safety record — a pothole outside a school does not stop being a hazard because the person who reported it has withdrawn. In that case we anonymise the report rather than erasing it: your name and contact details are deleted from our records, and what remains is the hazard itself — which never carried your name in the first place. Tell us if that is a problem for you and we will discuss it.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Office of the Information Commissioner (Jamaica), or to your local data protection authority if you are elsewhere.
12.Children
This site is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their personal data. Anyone can report a hazard anonymously without giving us anything about themselves. We do not publish photographs showing children. If you believe a child has given us personal details, contact us and we will remove them.
13.Automated decisions
We make none. Every report is reviewed by a person before it is published or turned down. The bot check on the signup form may prevent an automated submission, but never makes a decision about you as an individual.
14.Changes to this statement
If we change how we handle your data we will update this page and change the date at the top. If the change is significant we will say so on the site.