Grid Alert works without knowing who or where you are.

Who we are

Grid Alert is made by Oceanic Intelligence Ltd, an independent company registered in England and Wales (company number 17549486, registered office 28 Grand Ocean, Longridge Avenue, Saltdean, Brighton, BN2 8BU). We decide how the small amount of information described here is used, which makes us its controller under UK data protection law.

Write to us at admin@oceanicintelligence.co.uk.

Grid Alert isn’t affiliated with NESO, National Grid, Elexon or any network operator.

What stays on your phone

These are kept in the app’s private storage. They aren’t sent to us, and they’re left out of cloud backups and transfers to a new phone.

• Your rota letter, if you add one
• The places and weather towns you choose
• Your alert level, theme and other settings
• The last grid status, so the app and its widgets work offline
• Which “What’s new” cards you’ve seen or dismissed

The app never asks for your postcode, your location or your contacts. It never asks whether anyone in your home relies on medical equipment: that’s for your network operator’s Priority Services Register, which you can join by calling 105.

What leaves your phone

To show the grid’s state, the app downloads public information from:

• Elexon and NESO: grid data and official notices
• MeteoAlarm: weather warnings
• NOAA (the US space weather service): solar storm alerts
• Our own server: summaries we prepare from public data, including greenest hours, and the small “What’s new” file

These requests carry nothing about you. Like any website, each service sees your phone’s IP address when it answers. Our server is run on Cloudflare, which keeps short-lived operational logs (up to 7 days) to keep the service working. We don’t store IP addresses or use them to identify anyone.

Alerts

If you turn alerts on, your phone tells Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging which alerts it wants: an alert level, your rota letters, and any weather towns you chose. When NESO publishes a warning, our server sends one message to everyone who asked for that level. Firebase delivers it, and on iPhone it passes through Apple’s push service too.

Firebase and Apple hold a push address for your phone, issued by them, and the list of alerts it follows. They don’t know your name. Rota letters and towns can show roughly which area a phone follows, not an address. We don’t keep a list of phones at all.

On Android, the app also checks the grid itself every 15 minutes or so in the background. That check makes the same anonymous requests described above. Turning alerts off, or using Delete everything, stops all of it.

Buying Plus

Plus is sold through Google Play and the App Store. Google or Apple takes the payment under their own privacy terms, and we never see your card details, name or email. Your phone asks the store whether it has Plus, so that check doesn’t go through our server. The stores give us sales reports for our accounts.

Pro, when it opens, will need a simple account with an email address. It will have its own section in this notice before it does.

This website

This website sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads nothing from other companies: its fonts and videos are served from our own address. It’s hosted on Cloudflare, which sees your IP address in order to deliver the page.

The launch email

Before the app launches, you can ask this website to email you once when it’s ready. It’s separate from the app, which never asks for your address.

• What we keep: your email address, when you asked, and which wording you agreed to. Nothing else, and we don’t track whether you open the email or press its links.
• What we send: one email when the app is out, from admin@oceanicintelligence.co.uk. Nothing else, and we never share your address or sell it.
• How long: we delete your address within 30 days of the launch email.
• Why we’re allowed to: your consent. You can withdraw it at any time by emailing us, and we’ll remove your address.
• Who else handles it: Cloudflare stores the list in Western Europe. The launch email goes out through Google’s Gmail, as our other email does.

If you contact us

If you email us, we keep your message and address so we can reply, and delete them within two years unless the conversation is still going.

Why we’re allowed to

Showing the grid’s state needs no personal information. Where an IP address or a push address is involved, we rely on legitimate interests: delivering the service you asked for, in the least intrusive way we can. Settings on your phone are stored because you asked for them, so no cookie consent is needed. Replying to your email is also a legitimate interest.

Your rights

You can ask what we hold about you, and ask us to correct or delete it, or to stop using it. Because we hold almost nothing, most of this is in your hands already:

• See it: Settings → Your privacy lists what’s kept and what’s sent.
• Delete it: Settings → Delete everything clears the app and unsubscribes your phone from every alert.
• Stop it: turn alerts off, or uninstall the app.

For anything else, email us. If you’re unhappy with our answer, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

Changes

If we change what we collect, we’ll update this page and its date first, and say so in the app before the change takes effect.