Data may be out of date. Our scheduled checks are behind: the last successful check of the sources finished 20 Oct 2026, 21:00 UTC (16 days ago), more than 36 hours ago. Checks normally run twice daily, so figures on this page may be out of date. See the service status.
ShortageSignal

Privacy

What we store, and for how long

Reading ShortageSignal needs no account and sets no cookies. The only personal data we hold is what you type into an email sign-up — and email alerts are not yet sending.

Page views

The only page-view measurement is Vercel Web Analytics. Vercel's documentation says it works “without using any third-party cookies”, that visitors are “identified by a hash created from the incoming request”, and that a visitor session “is automatically discarded after 24 hours”. Each page view records the page address, referrer, approximate location, operating system, browser and device type (Vercel: Privacy and Compliance ↗). We remove the personal code from confirmation and unsubscribe links before a page view is counted. ShortageSignal itself sets no cookies.

The site is hosted by Vercel (functions run in London). Like any web host, Vercel processes request data such as IP addresses to serve pages, under its own privacy policy ↗. We do not store IP addresses.

Feeds and calendars

Atom and RSS feeds, the calendars (.ics) and the weekly digest need no sign-up: your reader or calendar fetches them like any page, and we keep nothing about who subscribes.

Email sign-ups

Email alerts are not yet sending. When you leave your address we store, in our database (Supabase, London region):

  • your email address;
  • your role, if you chose one (for example “Pharmacy team”);
  • what you asked for — the monthly Index, news about the API, or a watch on a medicine or protocol — and the medicine or protocol you named;
  • the page you signed up on and when;
  • a random confirmation code, and whether and when the confirmation email was sent and confirmed.

Once email is sending, we also keep, per address, a random unsubscribe code (the one-click unsubscribe in every email) and a list of which alerts and digests were sent to it, so nothing is sent twice. The website's own database connection can only add a sign-up, or confirm or unsubscribe one when shown its code; it cannot list or look up addresses. Addresses are read only by the scheduled job that sends email, and its logs show them masked (a***@example.org). Email will be delivered through Resend.

How long we keep it

  • Before email launches: no confirmation email has been sent, so sign-ups wait, unconfirmed, until launch. Nothing is sent to an address that has not clicked its confirmation link.
  • Unconfirmed: a sign-up whose confirmation email goes unanswered is deleted 30 days after that email was sent (signing up again re-sends the link at most once a day, which restarts the 30 days).
  • Confirmed: kept until you unsubscribe.
  • Unsubscribed:one click deletes all your sign-ups and the record of what was sent to you, at once. Only your address and the unsubscribe code are kept, so the link still answers “unsubscribed” if clicked again — and that pair is deleted 90 days after you unsubscribe, by the scheduled email job (it runs every two hours once email is sending), unless you have signed up again.

Your choices

To see, correct or delete what we hold about you, email mustafa@doctor-data.co.uk. ShortageSignal is run by Doctor Data Ltd, which is responsible for this data. If you are unhappy with how we handle it you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office ↗.

ShortageSignal is not an official NHS or DHSC service and is not clinical advice. See also About and Methodology.