Last updated: 27 July 2026
CertBox is operated by Paddy Dewhurst, a sole trader based in England. We are the data controller for the personal data processed through this Service. Contact: privacy@certbox.app.
We use your data to: provide and maintain the Service; authenticate your identity; generate and store certificates; enable sharing of certificates via share links; send transactional emails; and improve the Service.
We do not sell your personal data. We share data with:
We retain your account and certificate data for as long as your account is active. Upon account deletion, we will delete your personal data within 30 days, except where retention is required by law. Shared certificate snapshots may persist until the share link expires.
Your data is stored on Hetzner servers located in Germany (EU). Static assets are served via Cloudflare's global CDN. Both the EU and Germany benefit from UK adequacy decisions. Where data is transferred outside the UK/EU, we rely on appropriate safeguards including Standard Contractual Clauses.
Under UK GDPR, you have the right to:
To exercise these rights, contact privacy@certbox.app. We will respond within one month.
If you allow your device to share its location, CertBox can record where you are while you are working on a job, so your employer can see your team’s positions:
If you subscribe to our newsletter, we collect and process the following data:
We use essential cookies required for authentication and Service functionality. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to understand aggregate usage patterns. Cloudflare Web Analytics does not use cookies and does not track individual users across sessions or sites. No advertising or remarketing cookies are used.
We use PostHog to see which pages help people complete a certificate. It is off until you opt in: we ask once, and if you decline it is never loaded and sets nothing on your device. If you accept, PostHog sets a ph_ cookie to recognise a returning browser. It is hosted in the EU. PostHog does not record your screen — its session recording is turned off. PostHog does record which buttons and links you click, but not the words on your screen: text is masked before anything is sent, so the details you type into a certificate never leave your device. We ran Google Analytics alongside PostHog until 5 August 2026; it has been removed and no longer receives anything. You can change your answer at any time:
We also count events in our own database — page views, certificate started, certificate finished — so we can tell whether the app is working. Before you sign in, the choice above controls that count fully: if you opt in, it carries an identifier stored on your device so we can follow one visit through to the end; if you decline, nothing is stored on your device and no identifier is sent, so the count is not tied to you or to any earlier visit. Once you are signed in, we also log which pages and features your account uses, in the same database, so we can fix things that are not working. That logging is tied to your account rather than to a cookie, so the choice above does not affect it — it is part of running the service, under our legitimate interest in keeping it working. You can ask us to stop by emailing privacy@certbox.app. We keep these counts for 24 months.
One more thing you should know about errors: if something breaks while you have opted in, our error-monitoring tool (Sentry, see section 5) records a short replay of what was on screen around the failure so we can reproduce it. Every piece of text is masked and images and video are blocked before it leaves your browser, so the replay shows the shape of the screen and not the details on it. This only happens when an error occurs, and never at all if you have declined.
We implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your data. All traffic is encrypted in transit using TLS. Access to your records is enforced at the database layer, so one account cannot read another's data. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes, never in readable form, and two-factor authentication is available on your account. Database backups are encrypted before they leave our server. We review our security posture and dependencies regularly.
The Service is not directed at individuals under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children.
We may update this policy from time to time. We will notify you of material changes via email or in-app notification.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal data, you can complain to us directly at privacy@certbox.app. Please tell us what happened and what you would like us to put right.
We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days of receiving it. We will then investigate without undue delay, keep you informed of progress, and explain the outcome once we have concluded.
You do not have to complain to us first. You can contact the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at any time, and you keep that right whatever the outcome of our own investigation. The ICO can be reached at ico.org.uk, by phone on 0303 123 1113, or by post at Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF.