Privacy notice
This notice explains what OrCore Prep (prep.orcore.org) stores about you, why, and what you can do about it.
Who we are
OrCore Prep is run by OrCore Ltd, the data controller for the personal data in OrCore Prep. OrCore Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company number 17520251. Registered office: 82a James Carter Road, Mildenhall, Bury St Edmunds, IP28 7DE. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office, registration number ZC275844.
Contact: hello@orcore.org.
What we store and why
- Your login: email address and password. The password is stored only as a bcrypt hash, so we cannot read it. We also store your household name, when the account was created, and whether it is an admin account.
- Your household plan: what you enter in the app: household settings (budgets, savings, how many days to plan for, storage places, cooking gas, preferred supermarket, preparation level, number of people who need period products), people and pets (name or nickname, date of birth, weight, diet, allergies, pet food details), your stock list with expiry dates, your wish list (including any links you add) and your fuel records.
- Emergency plan and kit checklist (optional): if you are logged in and choose Save to my household account on the emergency plan, or tick items on the grab bag checklist, we store what you entered with your household so everyone in it can see it. You can remove it at any time with Remove from my account or Untick. If you do not, these tools keep what you type only in your browser.
- Household check-in (optional): if you use Check-in, we store your latest status (safe or need help), the short note you add and the time, so the other logins in your household can see it in the app. Only your latest status is kept; Clear my status removes it. Nothing is sent by email or text.
- Reserves and weekly drill: water reserve, gas canister and power station figures you enter on the Fuel page, and which weekly drills your household has marked as done, are stored with your household.
- Barcode scanning: if you scan or type a barcode on Scan a barcode, the camera picture is read in your browser only and never sent to us. The barcode number is sent from our server to the free Open Food Facts database to look up the product name; we keep the result (not who asked) in memory for up to 7 days. The camera is only switched on when you press Scan with camera.
- Medical card: what you type on the medical card page stays in your browser (local storage) and is never sent to us.
- Flood warning check: the postcode you type is sent from our server to postcodes.io to find its location, and that location to the Environment Agency's flood-monitoring service. We do not store the postcode; results are held in memory for up to 10 minutes.
- Health and belief information: diets and allergies can reveal health or religious information. They are optional; we use them only to filter food lists and recipes for your household. You can use nicknames for people and leave these fields empty.
- Shared households: if you invite others, we store which logins belong to the household. Join links and codes are stored only as a one-way hash and expire after 7 days.
- Password reset: if you use Forgot password?, we email a reset link to your login email address. The server keeps only a hash of the link, which works once and expires after 1 hour. The email is sent through Google Workspace, OrCore's email provider, which processes it only on our behalf.
- Sessions: when you log in we create a random session token. The server keeps only a hash of it, with an expiry 30 days later. Logging out deletes it.
- Security: to stop password guessing and spam sign-ups, the app counts failed log-ins, sign-ups, join attempts and password-reset requests against your IP address and the email address tried. These counts are held in memory only, for 15 minutes to 1 hour, are never written to disk, and are cleared when the app restarts.
- Logs: the app itself does not log your requests. If something goes wrong, technical error details may be written to the server's system log. The web server keeps standard access logs (IP address, date and time, page requested, browser type and referring page) for security and troubleshooting. They are rotated daily and deleted after 14 days.
- Backups: a copy of the database is made each night on the same server and the newest 14 copies are kept, so deleted data disappears from backups within 14 days. Before an update to the app we may also keep a one-off copy on the same server, which is deleted once the update is confirmed.
- Email: if you email us (for example to reset a password), we keep that correspondence as long as needed to deal with it.
Lawful bases
- Contract: your account, household plan, sharing and the other app features, which we need to provide the service you signed up for.
- Explicit consent: allergies, diets and any other health-related notes. You choose whether to enter them and can edit or delete them at any time, which withdraws your consent.
- Legitimate interests: security logs, error logs and rate limiting, to protect the service and your account from misuse.
Public guide pages and the about page can be read without an account; we store nothing about you when you read them, apart from the web server logs above.
Cookies and storage on your device
| Name | Purpose | Lasts |
|---|---|---|
| __Host-prep_s | Keeps you logged in (session). Strictly necessary. | 30 days, or until you log out |
| __Host-prep_p | Security token for the log-in and sign-up forms. Strictly necessary. | 2 hours |
| prep_src | Only if you use the OrCore Prep Android app: remembers that you opened it from the app, so the donate button is not shown there. Kept as a cookie and in local storage on your device. Our server ignores it. | 1 year |
| prep_calc_v1, prep_grabbag_v1, prep_plan_v1, prep_medcard_v1 | Local storage only: what you enter in the food and water calculator, grab bag checklist, emergency plan and medical card, so it is still there next time. Our server never reads it. Clear it with the tool's clear button or your browser settings. | Until you clear it |
| __gads, __gpi, __eoi and other Google cookies | Set by Google AdSense for advertising: showing and measuring ads, fraud prevention and, depending on your choices, personalised ads. Not strictly necessary. See Advertising (Google AdSense) below and how Google uses information from sites that use its services. | Up to 13 months |
The first two cookies are set by prep.orcore.org only, are secure and cannot be read by page scripts. We use no analytics cookies. Guide, recipe and preserving pages also load Google's advertising script, which may set the Google advertising cookies listed under Advertising (Google AdSense) below. App screens such as your stock list, household, settings and log-in pages show no ads.
So the app works offline, your browser keeps copies of pages you have opened (a service worker cache) on your device. They are not sent to us, and are cleared when you log out or delete your household.
Advertising (Google AdSense)
OrCore Prep shows ads from Google AdSense to help keep it free. Google, as a separate controller, places the ads and decides which ones to show. Ads appear only on our content pages (the guides, recipes and preserving guide), never on app screens such as your stock list, household, settings or log-in pages. To do this, a Google script on those pages, and Google's ad frames, use cookies and similar technologies (such as local storage) on your device. Google and its partners can use them to show and measure ads, limit how often you see an ad, prevent fraud and, depending on your choices, personalise the ads you see based on your visits to this and other websites.
Your consent
If you are in the UK, the European Economic Area or Switzerland, Google shows a consent message (Google's own consent management tool, certified under the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework) the first time you open a page with ads. It asks whether you agree to Google and its partners using cookies and your data for personalised ads. You can accept, decline or choose options. If you decline, Google may still show non-personalised ads, which use cookies only for things like frequency limits, measurement and fraud prevention. You can change your choice at any time through the privacy and cookie settings link that Google's message adds to the page, or by clearing your cookies for prep.orcore.org, after which the message will be shown again.
Google receives your IP address, browser details and the address of the page you are on. Page addresses in OrCore Prep do not contain your household data, and we never send Google your email, your household plan, diets, allergies or anything else you enter. We do not receive any personal data back from Google.
Cookies Google may use for ads include:
| Name | Set by | Purpose | Lasts |
|---|---|---|---|
| __gads, __gpi | Google, on prep.orcore.org | Lets Google show ads on this site and limit how often you see the same ad. | 13 months |
| __eoi | Google, on prep.orcore.org | Security: helps Google detect fraud and abuse in ad traffic. | 6 months |
| IDE, id | Google (doubleclick.net) | Shows and personalises Google ads on non-Google sites, or remembers that you turned personalised ads off. | 13 months in the UK and EEA |
| DSID | Google (doubleclick.net) | Respects the ad personalisation setting of a signed-in Google user. | 2 weeks |
| NID | Google (google.com) | Remembers your Google preferences; can be used for ads. | 6 months |
Google changes these names from time to time. To see how Google uses data from sites that use its services, and how to control it, read How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services and How Google uses cookies. You can turn off personalised ads at adssettings.google.com or My Ad Center, and you can block or delete cookies in your browser at any time (the app still works, but you will need to log in again if you delete our own cookies).
Shop links and affiliate links
Lists and guides link to shops such as supermarkets and Amazon UK. We do not share your personal data with any shop. When you follow a link you are on the shop's website, and its own privacy and cookie policy applies.
Some links may be affiliate links, marked (Ad). When you click one, the shop or affiliate network (for example Amazon Associates or Awin) may set a cookie on its own website to record that you came from OrCore Prep, so that we can be paid a commission if you buy something. Those cookies are set by them, not us. We receive reports of commissions, not your name or account details. Affiliate links send the shop only our web address (prep.orcore.org), not the page you were on. Ordinary links with no (Ad) are not affiliate links, and we do not earn a commission from them. The Budget shop is a page of these same outbound links. It does not take payment or store an order.
Donations
The donate button takes you to PayPal, which handles the payment under its own privacy policy. PayPal shares with us the payment details it shows to anyone who receives money, such as the payer's name and email address.
Who else sees your data
We do not sell your data or use it for advertising (Google AdSense chooses the ads shown on our pages, as explained under Advertising). It is stored on a virtual server in the United Kingdom, rented from VM6 Networks, which processes it only on our behalf. Password-reset emails are sent through Google Workspace (Google), which also acts only on our behalf. Your data is stored in the UK. We would disclose data only if the law requires it.
How long we keep it
Your household data is kept until you delete it, or until no login in the household has been used for 24 months, when we delete the household as an inactive account. Deleting your household (Household page, owner only, with your password) removes it from the live database straight away and from backups within 14 days. Expired sessions, join codes and password-reset links are removed automatically.
Your rights
You can ask to see, correct, export or delete your data, or object to or restrict how we use it. Most of this you can do yourself: edit anything in the app, download everything as CSV from Print & backup, and delete your household from the Household page. For anything else, email hello@orcore.org.
If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, please tell us first. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.
Children
Accounts are for adults. A parent or carer may add children's details (such as age and diet) to plan for the household.
Changes
We will update this page if what we store changes. Last updated 3 November 2026.