The Amalgamator · Privacy

Privacy policy

Effective 30 July 2026

In brief: The Amalgamator does not require an account, request Facebook profile information, use advertising trackers, or operate its own database of personal information. It may use privacy-preserving, cookie-free analytics to measure aggregate use of the site and fixed stages in the tool journey.

Who operates this site

The Amalgamator is an independent local-government modelling tool operated by Mischewski Consulting.

Information handled by the application

Council selections and modelling choices are processed in your browser. Journey events may record that a stage was reached or an action occurred, but they do not include the councils selected, the encoded scenario, calculated results, or changed assumption values. The application does not use an account system, advertising trackers, fingerprinting, application-set cookies, or a permanent visitor identifier. During the homepage experiment, the browser stores only the assigned variant (A or B) in local storage so the same browser continues to see the same homepage. This value is not a unique identifier and contains no council selection or personal information.

When you choose to share a result, the selected scenario is encoded in the shared URL. The URL describes the council scenario; it does not contain your name, Facebook profile, email address, or an access token.

Aggregate web analytics

The site may use Umami Cloud to measure aggregate visits, page views, referring sites, broad device and browser categories, countries, and fixed stages in the tool journey. Two fixed events record whether homepage variant A or B was shown; manually selected review variants are excluded. Journey events record that somebody started the tool, made a first council selection, added another council, viewed a calculated result, completed a scenario, returned to revise a scenario, opened explanatory material, used a sharing control, or copied or downloaded result material. These fixed events do not record which councils were selected, the scenario or calculation, or what was revised.

Sharing events record that somebody clicked a Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Reddit, or Copy link control, downloaded a share image, or copied the suggested write-up. They may also record the app-generated council name selected for that share. The name comes from the tool's offered options, not a free-text field. The events do not record the underlying council selection, social-media account, or whether a social-media post was completed.

Umami does not use cookies for this analytics. It uses technical request information, including the IP address and user agent, to derive a rotating pseudonymous session identifier; Umami states that the IP address itself is not stored. The Amalgamator does not assign a distinct ID or other permanent identifier and does not use analytics to recognise somebody as a named person or track them across websites. This site also asks Umami to respect the browser's Do Not Track setting.

Before any analytics payload is sent, the site removes the encoded council scenario, URL fragments, arbitrary query parameters, and query information in referrer URLs. Only fixed campaign labels added by the four social-sharing buttons are retained so resulting visits can be attributed to a platform.

The analytics are used to understand how people reach and move through the tool, whether explanatory and sharing controls are useful, and whether its pages perform reliably. They are not used for advertising, profiling, or identifying named visitors. Session replay and heatmaps are not enabled. See Umami's documentation and Umami's privacy policy.

Facebook and other sharing services

The Facebook button opens Meta's Share Dialog with the result URL. The application does not log you into Facebook, request Facebook permissions, receive Facebook profile data, or publish without your confirmation. LinkedIn and your device's sharing features operate in the same user-initiated way.

Facebook, LinkedIn, your browser, and your device may process information under their own privacy policies when you use those services.

Hosting and technical information

The public application is delivered through GitHub Pages, and shared-link previews are delivered through a separate web service. Those infrastructure providers may process ordinary request information—such as an IP address, browser type, requested URL, and time of access—for security and service operation under their own policies. The Amalgamator does not combine that technical information with social-media profile data.

Retention and disclosure

The application does not create or retain a user account or personal-information database. It does not sell personal information. Infrastructure, aggregate-analytics, and social-sharing providers determine their own retention and disclosure practices. Umami Cloud states that its analytics servers are located in the United States and European Union, so analytics information may be processed outside New Zealand.

Data deletion

Because the application does not collect Facebook user data or maintain user accounts, it normally holds no personal information that can be deleted. If you believe you have submitted personal information through a project-support request, ask for its removal through the contact channel below. Content posted to Facebook or another third-party service must be managed through that service.

Contact

For privacy questions or deletion requests, email brenden@mischewski.co.nz. Do not send passwords, identity documents, financial information or other sensitive material unless it is specifically required and requested.

Changes to this policy

This page will be updated if the application's data-handling practices change. The effective date above identifies the current version.