Privacy

FormatDNA is an independent site operated by a single person. If you want to know what data is held about you, have it corrected, or have it deleted, email [email protected] and it will be handled directly rather than by a support queue.

The only personal data this site stores is an email address, and only if you type one into the “email me my result” form. Nothing else you do here is tied to you.

Quiz answers and results are stored, but they carry no personal data at all. The answers are a fixed set of options — hours per week, budget band, camera comfort, and so on — so there is no free-text field anywhere in a quiz submission that could contain something identifying.

We do not store your IP address. Not in the database, not in a log, not hashed. The rate limiting that protects the quiz and email endpoints derives a key from your connection in memory and discards it; it never reaches storage.

We do not ask for or store your name, and there are no accounts.

This site uses Google Analytics 4 to understand which pages are read and which are ignored.

No analytics cookie is set unless you accept it. Until you do, Google Consent Mode is set to deny analytics storage, which means no identifier is stored on your device and no cookie is written. If you decline, or ignore the banner entirely, that state persists and the site works exactly the same.

Your choice is remembered in your browser's local storage — not a cookie, and never sent to us. You can change it at any time from the link in the footer.

There is no advertising, no ad network, no remarketing pixel and no social tracking on this site.

Email uses double opt-in. When you submit an address we send one message with a confirmation link, and nothing else is ever sent until you click it. This exists because people mistype addresses and because someone could enter an address that is not theirs — confirming is what stops a stranger being sent mail they never asked for.

If you never confirm, the address is deleted automatically within 14 days. That deletion is a scheduled job, not a promise we intend to keep manually.

Every email has a working unsubscribe link, and one-click unsubscribe is supported directly in Gmail and Outlook. Unsubscribing is permanent: a later submission of the same address will not quietly resubscribe you.

Email is sent via Resend, which processes the address in order to deliver the message.

Unconfirmed email addresses: deleted within 14 days.

Confirmed email addresses: kept until you unsubscribe or ask for deletion.

Quiz results: kept indefinitely, because each one backs a shareable permalink someone may have sent to somebody else. They contain no personal data.

Quiz analytics — how long an attempt took and which page it started from: deleted after 180 days.

The site and its database run on a server in Germany. Email is delivered through Resend's EU region. Google Analytics processes data under Google's own terms and may do so outside the UK and EU.

Under UK and EU data protection law you can ask for a copy of your data, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, or object to processing. Email [email protected]. In practice, for almost everyone, the entirety of what we hold is one email address — and the unsubscribe link in any message removes it without needing to contact anyone.

If you think this has been handled badly, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.