Okay, thank you.
Yes. When we were setting up the system we worked with the Government Digital Service, which is responsible for implementing and overseeing the range of government digital provision to citizens. A decision was made very early on within the standard government protocols that we would store the minimum amount of information on individuals necessary to make the site workable. So the information that we store on the system is people's names, postal codes, email addresses. That's the only information that's stored on an individual.
This is currently stored by the government and it isn't made available to any third parties. So it cannot be mined by political parties or others.
In terms of your secondary question regarding what appears on the website, the author's name would appear for the creator of the website and someone signing a petition. But the email address or contact address is not available on the website, so it is a minimum amount of information and it isn't able to be used by anyone wishing to contact those people.
We store the information for the minimum time possible. At the moment we are storing information for the period of the administration. That's five years. This is largely because with the permission of those creating or signing petitions, we ask them to tick a box if they want to have further information about the progress of that petition. For example, whether it's been debated. Therefore, we store the information necessary for the government to make contact just to update them about the progress of the petition.