Privacy and your information

Version WDP-Privacy-2026-09-19-v2. See also the Enquirer Authorisation and Terms.

The public pages provide probate information. The estate assistant lets you organise your answers into notes, download them and, if you choose, submit them for review. Practitioner matching and introductions are still being prepared.

Who looks after estate-chat notes?

Sarah Hougie, who is developing WeDoProbate.com, is responsible for the estate-chat notes. For questions, corrections, withdrawal of your agreement or a request about your information, email sarahhougie.legal@gmail.com. Please include your enquiry reference if you have one.

Before you send your notes

We ask about the estate first. After you confirm that you are happy with your estate answers, we ask for your name, email address, telephone number, preferred contact method and best time to call. Delaying contact details does not make all estate information anonymous. Typed answers are held in the open page and are not sent to our enquiry database as you answer the questions. We do not save a draft in cookies or browser storage. Refreshing or closing the page clears unsent answers. You can download a copy to your own device. Those downloaded copies remain under your control.

The assistant uses a prepared set of questions and relevant follow-ups. Unless you choose optional AI question selection when it is offered, it does not send your typed answers to a generative AI service. It does not provide legal advice or verify what you tell it. You can skip questions and correct the notes. Please do not include bank account numbers, passwords, identification documents, children’s full dates of birth or unnecessary medical information.

Optional AI question selection, when offered

You can choose whether to let OpenAI consider your estate answers and select the next question. This option starts off. If you enable it, excerpts of estate answers are sent through our server to OpenAI as you go, including if you later leave without submitting an enquiry. The separate name, email, telephone, contact-preference and deceased-name fields are excluded. Names or other identifying information written within other answers may still be sent, so please use relationships or initials.

We do not save these intermediate answers in our enquiry database or application logs, and request that the API response is not stored as a saved conversation. This is not a promise of zero retention by OpenAI: its security logs can normally retain content for up to 30 days, subject to legal or security requirements, and processing may take place outside the UK. See OpenAI’s data controls. You can turn AI off for subsequent questions, but earlier processing cannot be undone. Global usage counts are kept briefly to limit costs; they contain no answers, IP addresses or visitor identifiers and expire after two days, with deletion on the next AI request.

If you use the microphone

Voice input is optional. Your browser asks for microphone permission. Its speech service may send audio to its provider for transcription and may need an internet connection. The website does not record or store the audio. The resulting words appear in the answer box so you can check and edit them before using the answer. You can stop the microphone at any time or type instead. Browser and device speech services have their own privacy arrangements. Read-aloud questions use an available British female browser voice. Only prepared question text, hints and a fixed preview message are spoken; your answers are not sent for speech playback.

If you send an enquiry

After you check your estate answers and provide contact details, we ask you to accept the Enquirer Authorisation and Terms and separately authorise storage and contact. Preliminary law-firm checks and feedback invitations have separate unticked boxes. The saved record contains the answers, structured notes, contact preferences, any sharing restrictions, a reference, the server-recorded date and time, the selected permissions, and a copy of the wording and terms accepted. The receipt page lets you download the authorisation record. You can download notes without submitting an enquiry.

Submitted notes are stored in the website’s hosted database, using ChatGPT Sites and its Cloudflare hosting infrastructure. They can be viewed through the site owner’s protected management page. They are not published, automatically emailed, used for unrelated marketing or sent to any practitioner. Preliminary checks require the separate permission recorded at submission and a documented lawful basis and disclosures before sharing. Release of detailed intake or contact information for an introduction needs a further affirmative agreement after the relevant financial explanation. A Firm is an independent controller and provides its own privacy information.

For current requests, we use information necessary to take steps at your request or perform the agreed service. Service authorisation is not blanket UK GDPR consent. Necessary information about other people, administration or legal claims requires a documented lawful basis, including an assessment where legitimate interests is relied on. Sensitive information or criminal allegations about living people need additional legal conditions. Where consent is required, we request it separately and name the organisations relying on it; it may be withdrawn without undoing earlier lawful processing. Please give only information needed to explain the matter and use relationships or initials where names are unnecessary.

Keeping and removing the notes

Submitted estate-chat notes are available for 90 days. Expired records are removed when a new enquiry is submitted or the owner next opens the notes page. The owner can delete notes sooner. This initial 90-day website record includes the acceptance evidence. If the enquiry proceeds, necessary permission, referral, fee, complaint or legal-claim records may be retained separately for a documented purpose, ordinarily up to six years after the final relevant event with annual review. Any different retention will be explained before relying on it; an instructed Firm gives its own retention information. While your confirmation page remains open, you can also use “Delete my submitted notes”. This removes the website’s saved record, not any copies you have downloaded or information lawfully retained separately for a later engagement.

You can ask to access or correct your personal information, request deletion or restriction, or withdraw your agreement using the email address above. You may also raise a concern with the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Reading the legal section

You do not need to provide estate details to read the guides. We have not added advertising trackers or third-party analytics. The hosting service processes technical connection information needed to deliver the website and maintain security. Links to official forms and judgments take you to separate websites with their own privacy arrangements.

The visit counter

Our counter records page visits, including repeat visits. It does not use cookies or browser storage, or save IP addresses. We use approximate country, administrative area and town or city information derived from the connection. Where the host does not supply a UK town or city, we compare the public connection IP address with a reference database held within this website. We do not send it to an external geolocation service. Our statistics database does not retain the visitor’s IP address, coordinates or postcode. We keep daily totals for these areas, not an individual location history, and do not link them to an Enquirer’s answers. We do not collect precise coordinates or full postcodes. These aggregate location statistics are private to the site owner and retained for up to 180 days, with expired rows removed on the next visit or statistics-page access. They may reflect a VPN or mobile network location and are not proof of where someone lives. Some locations may be unavailable because the host withholds the connection address or the reference database has no matching UK record. Outside the UK, we use only location information supplied by the host. The UK reference data is derived from IP Geolocation by DB-IP, licensed under CC BY 4.0. A random reference for each page opening prevents a retried request being counted twice. These references expire after 24 hours and are removed when the counter next records a visit. We keep daily totals for the public pages viewed for up to 180 days. Only recognised public page paths are recorded, without query strings, form contents or individual browsing histories. We also keep daily totals showing arrivals from search engines, other websites, direct or unknown sources, and tagged links for up to 180 days. Your browser sends only a source category, not the full referring URL, search terms, campaign values or advertising click identifiers. Identifiable reloads and internal navigation are excluded from these arrival totals. We do not use a persistent visitor identifier, so these figures do not count unique people. We retain the overall page-view total and the date counting began. Management pages, embedded previews, recognised signed-in owner visits and recognisable automated requests are excluded, but the total is an approximate measure of page visits, not a count of individual people.

The owner’s questionnaire preview

The separate original questionnaire remains an owner-only preview for sample details. Those preview records are restricted to the owner and are not sent to practitioners.

Before an introduction

Submitting notes does not instruct a solicitor or arrange an introduction. The operator, selected practitioner, proposed sharing and any relevant introduction-fee arrangement will be explained before a separate agreement to proceed. Do not rely on this assistant to check legal deadlines.