Privacy

Your time is yours.
Your data should be too.

Last updated: 10 August 2026

Who is responsible for your data

House of Time is an independent project based in Dublin, Ireland. For the website and House of Time services, House of Time is the data controller. Privacy questions and rights requests can be sent to houseoftimehq@gmail.com.

A university may be a separate or joint controller for a particular academic study. Where that applies, the study-specific participant information will name the institution, researchers and controller arrangements and will explain how to contact them.

What we collect

Depending on how you use the House, we may collect assessment answers and scores, broad demographic and contextual information, feedback, an anonymous profile reference, contact details you provide, correspondence, event-registration information, access or dietary requirements, and limited cookieless website analytics. We do not ask assessment participants to include their name or email in their assessment responses.

Some answers may reveal information about health, disability or neurodivergence. You may choose “Prefer not to say” where offered. We treat any information that constitutes special-category personal data with additional care and will identify an Article 9 GDPR condition where one is required.

Why and on what legal basis we process data

We use only the legal basis appropriate to the particular purpose:

• Providing the Mirror and its collective Laboratory: processing necessary to create and return an assessment result, link assessments you choose to complete, and include each submitted response in anonymous, aggregate Laboratory statistics. This forms part of the Mirror service requested by the participant. The basis will ordinarily be performance of a contract or steps requested before entering one.
• Academic research: only where you have made the separate research choice described below, together with any additional basis and safeguards specified by the responsible university for the approved study.
• House of Time analytics and improvement using assessment responses: only where you have made the separate business analytics and improvement choice described below.
• Essential security and administration: our legitimate interests in keeping the service secure, preventing misuse and maintaining necessary records, balanced against your rights.
• Legal obligations: where processing is necessary to comply with applicable law.

We do not treat accepting this Privacy Policy as consent. Where we rely on consent, we ask through a separate, clear, affirmative and purpose-specific choice.

How consented assessment data may be used

1. Formal academic research

When you select the academic research choice, you give consent at that point for your coded, de-identified assessment responses to be used in present and future formal academic research conducted within or in collaboration with a recognised university or research institution. The defined field of research is how people experience, understand and organise time; the development, reliability, validity and fairness of temporal measures; and related psychological, social, organisational and demographic patterns. Research may include comparisons across groups or settings, the development and testing of theories or measures, and scholarly articles, reports, conference presentations and teaching materials.

This is prospective consent within that defined field, not consent to an unlimited or unrelated use of your information. Compatible studies within the scope described above may use the coded dataset without asking you to complete a new consent form each time, provided the responsible institution has completed the ethics, governance and data-protection steps required for that study. Where practicable, current information about approved research uses will be made available through this policy or the House of Time website.

Fresh consent will be sought where a proposed project falls materially outside the research field and permission described above, requires new identifiable information, plans to disclose your identity, or otherwise cannot fairly be covered by the information and choice originally presented to you. A university may rely on a different lawful basis for a particular study; where it does, the responsible institution will provide the transparency information and safeguards required by law.

Research findings will normally be reported only in anonymous or aggregated form. We will not intentionally identify you in a publication, presentation or public dataset without separate, explicit permission.

2. House of Time analytics, insights and offering improvement

With your separate consent, House of Time may analyse de-identified responses to assess whether questions and results are clear, useful and accessible; examine completion and response patterns; evaluate scoring consistency and fairness; improve assessments, reports, website experiences and the Laboratory; develop aggregated benchmarks and insights; and inform the design or refinement of workshops, advisory services, learning experiences and other offerings.

We will not sell identifiable assessment data. We will not give an employer, client, insurer or other third party access to your identifiable results without separate explicit permission or another lawful basis clearly explained to you. Assessment responses will not be used to make decisions producing legal or similarly significant effects about you.

The Laboratory and your optional choices

The Mirror is a personal reflection and a contribution to a shared, anonymous picture. Every submitted response is therefore used to create and link the participant’s result and is included in anonymous, aggregate Laboratory statistics. This is part of the requested Mirror service, not an optional research or marketing use. The public Laboratory does not display an individual response, profile, profile reference or identifiable record.

Academic research and House of Time analytics or offering improvement are additional and separate choices. You may select either, both or neither. Neither option is preselected. Choosing not to permit either additional purpose does not prevent the response from contributing to the anonymous collective Laboratory described before submission.

We record the consent choice, date and time, and the version of the wording shown. We will not silently expand an existing permission to cover a new purpose.

De-identification, minimisation and access

We collect only information reasonably necessary for the stated purpose. Assessment records use a random profile reference rather than a name or email. Where contact details are collected for another service, they are not intentionally joined to assessment responses unless you specifically request a linked service, such as a personal results conversation.

Pseudonymised information uses a code in place of direct identifiers but remains personal data. Aggregated information combines multiple records. Anonymised information has been processed so that a person is no longer reasonably identifiable. Pseudonymised data continue to receive GDPR protection.

Access to identifiable or pseudonymised information is restricted to authorised people who need it for an approved purpose. We use managed storage, role-based access, private research-console controls, data separation and confidentiality requirements. No internet service can promise absolute security; if a personal-data breach creates a risk requiring notification, we will follow the GDPR notification requirements.

Sharing and international transfers

We may share only the data necessary with contracted hosting, database, email and technical service providers acting on our instructions, and with named universities, authorised research teams or research collaborators for an approved study. The relevant controller, processor, joint-controller or data-sharing arrangements will be put in place where required. Recipients may not use the data for unrelated commercial purposes.

If personal data are transferred outside the European Economic Area, we will use a recognised transfer mechanism and supplementary safeguards where required, such as an adequacy decision or approved Standard Contractual Clauses.

Retention

We keep personal data only for as long as necessary for the stated purpose and periodically review what is held. Assessment records retained solely to provide and link your results will be deleted or anonymised when they are no longer needed for that service. Consented research records may be retained for the period specified in the relevant university study information and research-integrity policy. Business-analysis records will be reviewed at least annually and deleted or anonymised when identifiable or pseudonymised data are no longer necessary. Enquiry and event records will be retained only while the relationship, event administration or related legal record-keeping need continues.

Before launching a formal university study, its participant information will state a defined retention period or the criteria used to determine it. We will not rely on “kept indefinitely” without a documented justification.

Cookieless website analytics

We use first-party, cookieless measurement to understand aggregate use of the House: pages visited within a visit, broad country or region, device and browser category, source website or campaign, engagement time, scroll depth and selected actions. We do not collect section-level journey analytics inside The Mirror. A random visit token exists only in the page’s working memory and is not written to cookies, local storage or session storage. It disappears when the page runtime ends and is not connected to a name, email or assessment response. We do not use advertising trackers, device fingerprinting, heatmaps or session recordings.

Withdrawing consent

You may withdraw either optional consent at any time by emailing houseoftimehq@gmail.com. If your request concerns an assessment, include the anonymous profile reference shown with your result so we can locate the correct record without asking for unnecessary identity information. Withdrawal from an optional purpose does not by itself remove already anonymised aggregate statistics from the Laboratory.

Withdrawal does not affect processing already lawfully carried out. We will stop future processing that depends on the withdrawn consent and delete, restrict or anonymise the relevant personal data unless another lawful basis requires retention. Information already irreversibly anonymised cannot be linked back to you. It may not be possible to remove aggregated results from analyses or publications already completed; any study-specific limitation will be explained before participation.

Your GDPR rights

Depending on the processing and legal basis, you may have rights to access your personal data; correct inaccurate data; request erasure; restrict processing; object to processing; receive eligible data in a portable format; withdraw consent; and obtain information about relevant safeguards for international transfers. Rights can be subject to lawful exceptions, including limited research exemptions with appropriate safeguards.

To exercise a right, contact houseoftimehq@gmail.com. We may ask only for information reasonably needed to verify and locate the record. We aim to respond without undue delay and ordinarily within one month, subject to the GDPR rules for complex requests.

You may also complain to the Irish Data Protection Commission or another competent supervisory authority. We would welcome the chance to address your concern first, but you do not have to contact us before making a complaint.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the House develops. The date above will change when we do. A policy update will not be used to convert an earlier consent into permission for a materially new purpose; we will seek a new choice where required.