Privacy information

Oxford Science Group Forum Monitor privacy information
Updated 6 October 2026. Assessment: OSG-LIA-2026-10-06-INDUSTRIAL-PILOT.

Lancing Ltd is the controller of information used by this monitor across Oxford Science Group. Contact sales@lancinguk.com for privacy information, to object, or to request access, correction, deletion or restriction. Include the relevant thread URL if possible; you do not need to give us extra profile information merely to raise a concern.

Purpose and source
We review recent public technical questions about industrial equipment and automation to identify questions our businesses may be able to help with. The monitor selects potentially relevant questions and prepares internal draft replies for a person to review. This is a commercial activity. Our lawful basis for this limited screening is legitimate interests: finding relevant technical enquiries and preparing useful, openly attributed business responses, balanced against the people concerned and subject to the limits below.

This assessment covers only the public Node-RED Industrial category RSS feed at https://discourse.nodered.org/c/industrial/18.rss. It does not authorise monitoring every Node-RED page or the other forums in our research register. Activation is a limited pilot, with source approval expiring on 20 October 2026. Collection starts only after the completed review is applied. The source is polled at most every six hours, with robots restrictions and host delays respected. Only dated entries from the preceding 14 days are eligible. The forum and its contributors are independent of Lancing Ltd and do not endorse this monitor.

Information used
Feed entries are processed briefly to assess the subject of the question. For a match, we retain the title, a short excerpt, publication date, original thread link, topic relevance, review flags and an internal draft. The application does not retain the feed's author field, scrape profiles, obtain private contact details or create lists of people. It removes email-address and long-number patterns from text; names or identifying details can still occur in a title, excerpt or link, so this is not anonymous data. Unmatched post text is not retained. URL fingerprints help avoid duplicate collection and honour deletion/suppression requests.

The monitor is intended for ordinary professional technical questions. Personal or sensitive information unrelated to that purpose must not be used. An operator must remove such material and pause the source if it cannot be kept within this scope. The pilot does not assess a person's character, employment, finances, health or eligibility for services. It makes no decisions with legal or similarly significant effects on people.

Who receives it
Access is limited to authorised Lancing/Oxford Science Group reviewers through the protected dashboard and the sales@lancinguk.com mailbox. Selected draft batches are emailed internally to that mailbox. The app cannot send emails to forum authors or post replies to forums. External AI and paid discovery services are disabled. We do not sell or publish the collected material through this monitor.

UK2 provides the existing server and mailbox services. Its published service agreement describes processing on customer instructions and use of contracted subprocessors. Public provider information describes UK VPS infrastructure, and this server's IP network is registered in GB; neither establishes every storage, support or subprocessor location for this existing account. The app adds no overseas AI service or other transfer destination. UK2's terms permit processing by subprocessors in other countries. We have not independently verified the account's complete subprocessor locations or any transfer mechanism for this particular service; we do not claim that all processing is confined to the UK. Contact us for the provider information available to us. Any proposed additional destination or identified restricted transfer requires assessment of the applicable safeguards before use.

Retention
Matched titles, excerpts and drafts are removed from the app after 30 days. Duplicate URL fingerprints, audit entries and mail-batch metadata are kept for up to 90 days. Suppression fingerprints are kept to prevent recollection and are reviewed for continuing necessity; they are not treated as anonymous. Expired app sessions are removed, and login-attempt fingerprints are retained for one day.

The existing sales-mailbox policy for these app-generated draft emails is 30 days. The app cannot delete mailbox copies; Lancing is responsible for applying that policy. Managed local daily database/configuration backups have seven-day retention, so deleted content may remain in those protected backups for up to a further seven days. Earlier installation/manual snapshots predate operational collection. Off-server/provider snapshot arrangements have not been verified. If a backup is restored, deletion and suppression requests must be reapplied before monitoring resumes.

Transparency and contact
For this narrowly limited screening, our recorded impact assessment supports the disproportionate-effort exception to individual initial notices: notifying each incidental author would require identity/account lookup and additional unsolicited forum contact for a short-lived technical screening process that does not retain author profiles or contact people. This conclusion is specific to the limited scope and safeguards, rather than a general exemption for public information. We publish this notice and identify the monitor, notice address and privacy contact in its request User-Agent. We will reconsider the assessment if scope or impact changes or a concern is raised.

The exception does not cover a subsequent approach to an individual. Before any manual business reply or other contact using a selected question, the reviewer must provide or clearly direct the person to this privacy information, identify the relevant Lancing/Oxford Science Group business, check the forum's reply/link rules, and check any attribution obligations against the original. Where the forum does not permit an appropriate notice/reply, the draft must not be posted. There is no automatic posting now or after two weeks.

Your choices and rights
You can object to this commercial screening and ask us to delete/suppress the relevant thread without changing the original forum post. Requests concerning the original post should also be directed to the forum. We will consider requests for access, correction, deletion and restriction under the applicable data-protection rules. Contact sales@lancinguk.com; we aim to respond within one month, subject to the statutory provisions for complex requests. You may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/.

This notice will be revised before any expansion, external AI use or change to the assessed purpose. The privacy assessment and source approval must be renewed before collection continues beyond the pilot expiry.