your data, respected.

The Happy People Project is published by Stephen Shortt, an entrepreneur, keynote speaker and workshop facilitator, through ETC Consult Ltd, 10 Marlborough Court, Dublin 1, Ireland. For the purposes of the GDPR and the Irish Data Protection Acts, ETC Consult Ltd is the data controller for personal data collected through happypeopleproject.com.

Questions about this policy, or about data protection generally, should be sent to hello@happypeopleproject.com, or by post to ETC Consult Ltd, 10 Marlborough Court, Dublin 1, Ireland.

We only collect what a conversation or a workshop actually needs.

• Things you tell us. The contact form on this site opens your own email application with your name, email address, topic and message already drafted. That message arrives by email and is not stored by the website. The same applies when you write to us directly or reach out on LinkedIn.
• Things needed to run a session. If you book a workshop, offsite or speaking engagement, we collect the details required to organise it: name, email, organisation, role, number of participants, dates and location, and any access, dietary or scheduling requirements you choose to share.
• Things needed to keep in touch. If you join a mailing list or ask for materials, we keep your name and email address so we can send them.
• Things collected in the background. Our hosting platform keeps basic technical logs for security and aggregate traffic reporting: IP address, browser and device type, the page you came from, and the time of your request. This is not used to build a profile of you.
• Things a third party may collect. Some pages load web fonts from Google and embed a YouTube video. Those requests are made to Google's servers, and Google may log the IP address that made them. A YouTube player can also set its own cookies once you interact with it. See the section below on third-party services.

Every use below rests on one of three lawful bases.

• Your consent. Sending you materials, newsletters or updates you asked for. You can withdraw this at any time by replying to any email.
• Our contract with you. Preparing, delivering and following up on a workshop or keynote you booked, and issuing receipts and invoices.
• Our legitimate interests. Replying to enquiries, keeping the site secure and running, and understanding at a high level which content people find useful.

We do not make automated decisions about you and we do not profile you for advertising.

Personal data stays with us. It reaches outside the business only in these circumstances:

• Service providers. Hosting, email delivery, scheduling, and any booking or payment provider used at the time of a purchase. Providers act on our instructions, under confidentiality terms, and only for the job they are doing. Where a booking or payment provider takes your card details, their own privacy notice governs that transaction.
• Professional advisers. An accountant or legal adviser, where they need information to do their work for us.
• Clients and employers. Where a company books a session for its people, the relevant contact and attendance information may be shared with that organisation.
• Legal obligations. Where we are required to disclose information by law, by a court, or by a competent authority.

We never sell, rent or trade personal data, and we never have.

Two things on this site are served by someone else, and it is fair you know about them:

• Google Fonts. Page styling is loaded from Google's font servers, so Google sees the IP address of anyone viewing a page.
• YouTube. A video on the HAPPY Work Life MAP page is embedded from youtube.com. Loading that page contacts Google's servers, and playing the video can set Google cookies.

Links to LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and our other projects take you off this site. Their privacy practices are theirs, not ours.

We aim to keep data within the European Economic Area. Some providers we rely on, including Google, process data outside the EEA, including the United States. Where that happens, the transfer rests on an adequacy decision or on standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission. Ask us and we will explain which safeguard covers a given provider.

We keep things for as long as they have a job to do, then delete them.

• Enquiries and correspondence: for the life of the conversation and up to two years afterwards.
• Workshop and client records: for as long as needed to deliver and follow up, then in line with Irish tax and accounting retention rules.
• Mailing list subscribers: until you unsubscribe, or sooner if you ask.
• Hosting security logs: kept by the hosting platform for a short, rolling period.

The site is served over HTTPS. Access to email, documents and client records is limited to what is needed, with unique logins and two-factor authentication where available. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, so we cannot promise absolute safety, but we take reasonable technical and organisational care and we would tell you if something went wrong that affected you.

Under the GDPR you can ask us to:

• confirm what we hold about you and give you a copy;
• correct anything inaccurate;
• delete it where we have no reason to keep it;
• pause its use in defined circumstances;
• stop processing that rests on our legitimate interests;
• hand your data to someone else in a usable format;
• withdraw consent for anything you previously agreed to.

Email hello@happypeopleproject.com and we will respond within one month, at no charge. We may need to confirm your identity first.

If you are not satisfied with our answer you can complain to the Data Protection Commission in Ireland, dataprotection.ie.

This site is not aimed at children and we do not knowingly collect their data. Sessions designed for young adults are arranged through the parent, school or organisation that books them. If you believe a child has sent us personal data, tell us and we will delete it.

We may update this page as the site or the law changes. The date at the top of the page shows when it was last revised. Where a change materially affects people already on a mailing list, we will tell them directly rather than leave them to notice it here.