Legal · Ark HQ
Privacy Policy
How Ark HQ collects, uses and protects personal data — including the sensitive student and staff data we process on behalf of schools.
Last reviewed 30 October 2026
Who we are
Ark Innovative Technologies & Services Limited, trading as Ark HQ, is a company registered in Ireland (CRO 600940). Our registered office is Cube Building, Monahan Road, Cork, T12 H1XY. We also use an address at 124 City Road, London EC1V 2NX for UK correspondence — a correspondence address rather than an establishment.
Ark HQ is the data controller for this website, our marketing, our enquiry handling and our billing. For the personal data inside our products, the school is the controller and Ark HQ acts as a processor on the school’s documented instructions under a Data Processing Agreement.
Data-protection contact: dpo@thearkhq.com. That address reaches our Data Protection Officer.
What this notice covers
This notice covers the personal data Ark HQ controls: website visitors, enquiries, people who book a call, and the people who buy and administer a subscription.
It does not govern the staff or student data a school processes inside SafeSchool, Ark Academy, Giraft or AskArk. There the school’s own privacy notice applies and our Data Processing Agreement sets what we may do with it.
The data we collect
When you enquire or book a call. Your name, email address, school, role, which brands you asked about, and your message. A booking also records the time you chose.
When you buy a subscription. Checkout is hosted by Stripe, not by us. Stripe collects your email address, your school’s name and roll number, a billing address, and your payment details. We receive the order, the billing contact and the subscription record. Card and bank details are handled by Stripe and never reach Ark HQ systems.
When you read a proposal we sent you. A proposal link records which sections were opened and for how long, together with the IP address and browser of the device reading it. If you countersign, we store the signatory’s name, role and email, the signature image, and the IP address and browser used to sign it — that is the audit trail that makes the signature evidence of agreement. Comments you leave on a proposal are stored with your name and email.
When you simply browse. Aggregate, cookieless analytics (page, referrer, country — no cookies and no cross-site identifier), plus the server logs any website produces. If a page errors, our error monitoring records the diagnostics — see error monitoring below.
As processor, inside the products. The staff and student personal data a school chooses to process, which may include special-category data under Article 9 and children’s data.
Why we use it, and our legal bases
| What we do | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Answer an enquiry | To reply and to work out whether we can help | Legitimate interests, and steps towards a contract |
| Send the auto-acknowledgement | So you know the message arrived | Legitimate interests |
| Keep a CRM record | To run a sales process and not ask you the same thing twice | Legitimate interests |
| Take payment and bill a subscription | To perform the contract you entered at checkout | Contract |
| Keep accounting and VAT records | Because tax law requires it | Legal obligation |
| Record proposal views | To know a proposal arrived and what was read | Legitimate interests — in knowing a document we sent was received and read |
| Record a countersignature | To evidence agreement to a proposal | Contract, and legitimate interests in an audit trail |
| Set optional cookies | To load a booking scheduler you asked for | Consent |
| Marketing email | To tell you about our services | Consent, or the soft opt-in where it applies |
| Monitor errors | To find and fix faults | Legitimate interests — in keeping the service working |
The bases above cover the data Ark HQ controls — enquiries, bookings, billing and the running of this website. None of that involves special-category data: we do not ask for it and we have no use for it.
Sensitive data about students and staff — a medical note, a disability or support need, a vetting outcome — can reach us only inside a product, where your school is the controller and we are the processor. It is the school that decides to process it and the school that identifies the condition in law allowing it, in its own privacy notice. We process it only on the school’s documented instructions under our Data Processing Agreement, and never for our own purposes.
Children’s and student data
We treat student data as sensitive personal data and follow the Data Protection Commission’s Fundamentals for a Child-Oriented Approach to Data Processing. The school decides what is processed and remains the controller. We minimise what we hold, isolate each school’s data, host it in the European Union, and in AskArk we tokenise identifiers before any AI processing. School data is never used to train a public model.
Who we share it with
We do not sell personal data. We use the processors below to deliver the service. This is the definitive list, maintained from the code: each one is a dependency we ship, a host we embed, or a service we hold data in.
| Processor | What it does for us | Data it sees | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Hosting, content delivery, and file storage for proposal payloads and signature images | Requests, IP addresses, proposal documents, signature images | Ireland — our functions run in Dublin (dub1) |
| Supabase | The database behind proposal acceptance, comments, read analytics and staff sign-in | Signatory name, role and email, comments, IP addresses, browser strings, school names | Ireland (eu-west-1) |
| Stripe | Card and SEPA payment, subscription billing, and VAT calculation | Email, school name and roll number, billing address, payment details, invoices | Ireland — Stripe Payments Europe, with group processing outside the EEA under Standard Contractual Clauses |
| HubSpot | CRM, and the scheduler used to book a call | Name, email, school, role, interests, your message, booking times | European Union (EU data centre) |
| Resend | Sends our transactional email: enquiry notifications, acknowledgements and acceptance receipts | Name, email address and message content in transit | United States, under Standard Contractual Clauses |
| Microsoft | Our staff email, and the Bookings calendars for the committee pages | Message contents, booking name, email and time | European Union — our Microsoft 365 tenant |
| Sentry | Error and performance monitoring. No session recording | Error diagnostics, page URL, IP address, browser | European Union (Germany) |
| Cloudflare | Cookieless website analytics | Aggregate page, referrer and country. No cookies, no cross-site identifier | Cloudflare’s global network. Aggregate, cookieless data only |
| Upstash | Rate limiting, so a proposal link cannot be hammered | IP address and a short-lived request counter | May be outside the EEA, under Standard Contractual Clauses. Held for minutes |
| Sanity | The content system behind our marketing pages | Published marketing copy. No personal data by design | Not applicable — it holds no personal data |
| Vimeo | Hosts one walkthrough video, embedded with tracking disabled | Player requests, IP address, browser | United States, under Standard Contractual Clauses |
Where your data is held
Your data is held and processed in the European Union. Our database is in Ireland, our CRM is in HubSpot’s EU data centre, our error monitoring is in the EU, and the servers that run this website execute our code in Dublin.
Three of the services listed above are provided by companies based outside the EEA: our payment provider’s wider group, the service that sends our email, and the host of one embedded video. Where personal data reaches them it is protected by an adequacy decision or by Standard Contractual Clauses, and we hold the relevant terms with each provider.
How long we keep it
We keep personal data for as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it, or as long as the law requires. For most of what we hold as controller, that is tied to our relationship with your school rather than to a fixed clock: we keep a record while we are working with you or in contact about doing so, and afterwards for as long as a claim arising from it could still be brought.
Where the law sets the period, the law decides: accounting and VAT records are kept for six years. Where we have said a record lives with the document it belongs to, deleting that document deletes it.
We review what we hold and delete what we no longer need. You can ask us at any time what we hold about you and ask us to erase it, and we will do so unless we are required to keep it — see your rights.
| Record | Where it lives | How long | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enquiry and its CRM record | HubSpot, and our mailboxes | While we are in contact with your school, and afterwards while a claim could still be brought | Relationship-based |
| Meeting booking | HubSpot or Microsoft Bookings | As for the enquiry it belongs to | Relationship-based |
| Proposal document | Vercel file storage | For the life of the contract it became, and afterwards while a claim could still be brought | Relationship-based |
| Countersignature and audit trail | Supabase, and the signature image in file storage | For the life of the contract and afterwards while a claim could still be brought — it is the evidence the contract was agreed | Evidence of agreement |
| Proposal read analytics | Supabase | For as long as we hold the proposal it belongs to | Lives with the proposal |
| Proposal comments | Supabase | For as long as we hold the proposal it belongs to | Lives with the proposal |
| Subscription, invoices and payment records | Stripe, and our accounts | Six years, as Irish tax law requires | Set by law |
| Error diagnostics | Sentry | As Sentry retains them on our plan | Platform default |
| Rate-limit counters | Upstash | Minutes | Set in code |
| Your cookie choice | A cookie in your own browser | 180 days, then we ask again | Set in code |
| Server and access logs | Vercel | Vercel’s default retention for our plan | Platform default |
| Data inside the products | The school's instance | As the Data Processing Agreement says, and returned or deleted on request | Per contract |
Error monitoring
When a page fails we capture the diagnostics needed to fix it: the error and where in the code it happened, the page, the browser and the IP address. This is held in the European Union.
We do not record sessions. Session replay — which would capture what happened on screen, including text being typed into a form — is not enabled, and we do not use error monitoring to watch how people use the site.
How we protect it
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Each school’s data is kept separate. Access is least-privilege and our database is reachable only by the server, never from a browser. A proposal link carries a 128-bit random token rather than a guessable reference, so one link cannot be used to find another. Signature images are held in private storage and served through an authenticated proxy, not from a public URL.
Your rights
You have the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict and port your personal data, to object to processing, and to withdraw consent. Write to dpo@thearkhq.com and we will respond within one month.
Where we hold data on a school’s behalf, the school is the controller. We will pass your request to them and support their response rather than act on it ourselves.
Some data we cannot delete on request: a countersignature is the evidence that a contract was agreed, and invoices are kept because tax law requires it.
Complaints
You can complain to the Data Protection Commission in Ireland (dataprotection.ie). UK data subjects may complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk). We would ask that you raise it with us first so we can put it right.
Changes and contact
We may update this notice; the date above shows when it was last reviewed. For any privacy question, contact dpo@thearkhq.com.