- No accounts, no advertising, no third-party trackers, no fingerprinting.
- Everything you type into the symptom navigator stays on your device. There is no endpoint that receives it.
- Analytics and research categories are off until you switch them on, and switching them off again costs one click.
- We hold no health data about you, which means there is nothing about you for anyone to subpoena, breach, or sell.
- You can erase every trace this site has written on your device from the button further down this page.
Who we are
AURORA is an open infrastructure project for neurosurgical disease, run by a distributed collective and currently in private pilot. For this website, the AURORA Collective is the data controller.
This notice covers this website only. It does not cover hospital deployments of AURORA software: in a federated install, patient data stays inside the institution and the institution is the controller. We never receive it.
What we collect
Almost nothing, and nothing that identifies you. There is no account system, no login, no advertising, no third-party trackers, no fingerprinting, and no data broker relationship of any kind.
Three things are worth naming explicitly:
- Everything you type into the symptom navigator — symptoms, scores, notes, your symptom log — stays in your browser's local storage on your own device. It is never transmitted to us.
- If you opt in to analytics, we record page-level counts with truncated IP addresses. We cannot reconstruct a person or a session history from them.
- If you subscribe to the council newsletter, we store the email address you give us and nothing else.
Health information
Anything you enter about symptoms is health data — the most strongly protected category there is. We have designed this site so that we never hold it. That is a deliberate architectural choice, not a policy promise: there is no endpoint to send it to.
This also means we cannot recover it for you. If you clear your browser storage or use a different device, your answers and symptom log are gone. Print or export anything you want to keep.
Why we're allowed to
Strictly necessary cookies rely on our legitimate interest in serving a working, secure website. Everything else — preferences, analytics, research improvement, the newsletter — relies on your consent, which you give explicitly and can withdraw at any time without giving a reason and without losing access to anything.
How long we keep things
Server logs are truncated and deleted within thirty days. Aggregate analytics counts are retained for thirteen months, then discarded. Newsletter addresses are kept until you unsubscribe. On-device data lives until you delete it — see the erase button below.
Children and families
Many of these conditions are diagnosed in infancy, so we expect parents and carers to be reading on a child's behalf. We do not knowingly collect anything from a child, and because the navigator stores everything locally, a child's information never reaches us even when they use it themselves.
If you are under 16 and want the newsletter, ask a parent or guardian to subscribe instead.
Where data goes
This site is hosted in the European Union. If any processor is located outside the EU or UK, transfers rely on Standard Contractual Clauses and we will name the processor here before it goes live.
Changes to this notice
We will note material changes at the top of this page with a date, and never quietly widen what we collect. Because this is a pilot document pending legal review, expect it to become more precise rather than more permissive.
Your rights
Under GDPR, UK GDPR and CCPA you have the rights below. Because this site holds almost nothing about you, most of them you can exercise yourself in one click — no request form, no waiting period.
Erase everything, right now
This clears every AURORA key this site has written on this device: your cookie choice, guide-entry agreement, reading preferences, symptom navigator answers and symptom log. It cannot be undone, and there is nothing on our side to delete.