PRIVACY
Privacy Notice
This notice explains how the Irish Office for Administrative Simplification (IOAS), an independent, non-governmental research initiative, handles personal information received through this website and its email addresses.
Who is responsible for the information?
IOAS is responsible for the personal information described in this notice. Privacy enquiries and requests may be sent to contact@ioas.ie.
What information may be collected?
If you contact IOAS or submit an observation, the information may include your name, email address, organisation (if you choose to provide it), the content of your message, and ordinary technical information generated in delivering or securing the communication. The public contribution form does not require a name or email address.
Please do not submit unnecessary sensitive personal information, confidential case files, identification documents, passwords, financial details, medical information, or allegations about identifiable individual staff members. IOAS research is concerned primarily with administrative processes and systems.
Why the information is used
Information is used to receive and assess research observations, identify recurring administrative issues, correspond with contributors where appropriate, protect the website from misuse, and maintain a reasonable record of research correspondence. IOAS does not use form submissions for advertising or sell personal information.
Lawful basis
For ordinary enquiries and voluntary research contributions, IOAS relies principally on its legitimate interests in conducting and administering independent public-interest research, responding to correspondence, and maintaining the security and integrity of its website. Those interests are balanced against the rights and reasonable expectations of contributors. Where another lawful basis is more appropriate to a particular activity, it will be identified at the relevant point.
Who processes the information?
IOAS uses service providers to operate its website and communications. These currently include Cloudflare for website delivery and email routing, Microsoft for the destination mailbox, and Brevo for authenticated outgoing email. Such providers may process information on IOAS's behalf in providing those services. Their infrastructure may involve processing outside Ireland or the European Economic Area subject to the safeguards applicable to the relevant service.
How long information is kept
Personal information is kept only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purpose for which it was received. In deciding retention, IOAS considers whether correspondence remains active, whether the material is still needed to understand or evidence a research issue, whether it has been anonymised or incorporated into a research record, and whether there is a legal or security reason to retain it. Information that is no longer needed is deleted or anonymised where reasonably practicable.
Research use and publication
A contribution may inform IOAS's understanding of an administrative process. IOAS will not ordinarily publish a contributor's name, email address or other directly identifying details without a separate reason and appropriate basis for doing so. Examples used in research should, where appropriate, be summarised or anonymised to focus on the process rather than the individual.
Your rights
Depending on the circumstances, data-protection law provides rights including access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and data portability. You may contact contact@ioas.ie to exercise a relevant right or ask how information about you is being handled.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with Ireland's Data Protection Commission. See dataprotection.ie.
Cookies and tracking
The IOAS website is designed to operate without advertising, behavioural tracking or non-essential analytics cookies. IOAS does not intentionally set non-essential cookies through the pages in this website package. Infrastructure providers may use strictly necessary technical measures to deliver and protect the service. If IOAS later introduces non-essential analytics or tracking, this notice and the site's consent arrangements will be updated before those technologies are used.
Changes to this notice
This notice may be updated as the website or IOAS's processing changes. The current version and its date will be published on this page.