Planning Register

Privacy noticeGDPR · plain English

What we keep about you, and why

Almost everything on Planning Register is public planning data about land, not about people. The little we hold about you is listed here, with the reason we hold it and how to have it removed.

What we store

Watch email
When you set up a watch we store the email address you typed, the point and radius you chose, and the alerts matched to it. Basis: performing the service you asked for (GDPR art. 6(1)(b)). Kept until you delete the watch from its private link, or we remove watches that have not been opened for two years.
Order email
When you buy or request a full report we store the email address, the site you asked about, the price and the order status so we can deliver the report and answer questions about it. Basis: contract (art. 6(1)(b)) and our accounting obligations. Kept for six years, as Irish tax law requires for records of sales.
Server logs
The web server records the address requested, the time, the response code, your IP address and browser identifier. Basis: our legitimate interest in keeping the service running and secure (art. 6(1)(f)). Rotated after roughly five files of 50 MB; not used for profiling.
Page-view counts
Each page you open sends one small message to our own server with the page path and the site you came from (the host name only). We store that with the browser family (Chrome, Safari…) and a code made from the day, your IP address and browser string, which changes every day and cannot be turned back into either. No IP address, no browser string, no search box text, no map coordinates. It tells us which pages are read and which councils people look at. Basis: legitimate interest (art. 6(1)(f)). Kept for 14 months.

Cookies and analytics

The site itself sets no cookies. It writes two things to your browser’s localStorage, under its own origin and never sent to us: the light/dark theme choice and your answer to the analytics question below.

We use Google Analytics 4 to see which pages help, when it is switched on. It loads in Google’s “consent mode” with every kind of storage denied: until you click Accept in the bar at the bottom of the page, Google sets no cookie and receives only cookieless pings — the page path and a few rough signals with no identifier, which Google uses to model totals. If you click Accept, Google may set its _ga cookies so that repeat visits can be counted; we never enable advertising storage or personalisation, and IP addresses are not retained in the reports. Decline keeps everything denied, and you can change your mind by clearing the site’s storage. The events we send name the kind of thing you looked at (a council, a radius, a tab) — never an address, an email, a search or a map coordinate. Google is a processor under its data processing terms; GA4 data retention is set to 14 months. If the site is instead using Plausible, it sets no cookies and collects no personal data at all.

Who else sees your data

  • Stripe processes card payments for the full report. Your card details go to Stripe directly; we never see them. Stripe acts as an independent controller for the payment and as our processor for the order record it sends back (email, amount, status).
  • Our hosting provider runs the server the site lives on, inside the EU. It has no reason to read the data and is bound by a processing agreement.
  • Email delivery. Watch alerts, when switched on, are sent through a transactional email service that receives only the address and the note.
  • Google receives the analytics pings described above when Google Analytics is switched on. Google Ireland Limited is the contracting entity; measurement data may be processed on servers outside the EEA under Google’s standard contractual clauses.

Apart from that, we do not sell, rent or share your data with anyone else, and we do not send it outside the European Economic Area.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, have it corrected or deleted, restrict or object to how we use it, and take it elsewhere. Email hello@planningregister.ie from the address in question; we answer within a month. If you are unhappy with the answer you can complain to the Data Protection Commission, 6 Pembroke Row, Dublin 2 (dataprotection.ie).

Personal data in the planning register

Applicant names and site addresses appear on the site because the local authorities publish them in the statutory register, as the Planning and Development Act requires. We show them as published and do not add to them. If a record about you is wrong at source, the council that holds the register can correct it; if you believe we are showing something we should not, tell us and we will look at it.

Last updated 2026-09-12 · Controller: Planning Register, hello@planningregister.ie