Privacy Policy | Driving Instructor Wicklow

This page explains what personal details this website collects, why, who handles them and what you can ask us to do with them. It is short on purpose, so that it gets read.

Who is responsible for your data

The data controller is Driving Instructor Wicklow — Ailbhe, an ADI approved driving instructor based in County Wicklow, Ireland. For anything about your data, email hello@drivinginstructorwicklow.ie.

What we collect

We only collect what you give us and the little a website records by itself:

Your enquiry. When you use the contact form we store your first and last name, email address, phone number, the service and transmission you are interested in, your location, whether you have passed the theory test, your message, and — if you arrived from one of our other sites — which site sent you.
Technical details. Like every website, our servers and security services see your IP address and browser details when you visit. We use them to keep the site running and to block abuse, not to identify you.
Visit statistics. Depending on the analytics tool in use, the site may record which pages are visited — see Cookies and analytics below.
Which link brought you here. A link from one of our Google ads carries a click identifier and campaign labels; a campaign link from one of our other sites carries only the campaign labels. If you then send the form, we store them with your enquiry so we can see which link led to it.

Why we use it

We use your details to:

reply to your enquiry and arrange lessons with you — this is the step before any agreement between us, and it is the only reason we ask for your details;
keep the website secure and stop spam and automated abuse — our legitimate interest in running a working site;
understand how the site is used and whether advertising brings genuine enquiries, so we can spend sensibly.

We never sell your details and never use them for marketing you did not ask for.

Who handles it for us

Your details are only ever passed to services we use to run this website and to reach you:

Render hosts the website (Frankfurt, Germany, EU).
MongoDB Atlas stores enquiries in our database.
WhatsApp — a new enquiry is sent to Ailbhe's phone as a WhatsApp message and contact card so she can reply quickly. WhatsApp is run by Meta, and the message passes through a WhatsApp messaging service (Whapi) on the way.
Cloudflare sits in front of the site to protect it and speed it up, so it sees your IP address and requests.
Sentry (EU) records errors. If the form fails while you are sending it, the error report may include the details you entered so the fault can be fixed.
Google provides the visit statistics and advertising measurement described under Cookies and analytics.

Each of these acts on our instructions under its own data-processing terms. Where a service is based outside the EU, transfers are covered by the European Commission's standard contractual clauses or the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

How long we keep it

Enquiries are kept while we are dealing with your enquiry and any lessons that follow, then deleted. You can ask for yours to be deleted at any time.
Suspected spam. A submission the site thinks is automated is set aside for 30 days so that a real enquiry mistaken for spam can be recovered, then deleted automatically. No IP address is stored with it.
Technical and security logs are kept briefly and cleared automatically; the rate-limiting that blocks abuse forgets your IP address within an hour.

Cookies and analytics

The website does not need cookies to work for you: blocking or deleting them does not stop you using the site or sending the form. These are the cookies the site sets itself:

dsw_ad — set only if you arrive on a link from one of our Google ads or on a campaign link from one of our other sites. It holds the click identifier and campaign labels from the link, so the form can record which link led to your enquiry. It lasts 24 hours.
dsw_cg — set when you send the form. It holds a random code, matched by a record on our server, so that the thank-you page counts your enquiry once and no more. Neither says anything about you. Both last 10 minutes and are deleted as soon as the thank-you page has used them.
A login cookie and a security token on the admin pages, which only the instructor uses.

Google Analytics is currently enabled, and the Google Ads tag runs with it. They set their own cookies — the analytics one is named _ga — to tell one visit from another and to measure whether our Google ads lead to enquiries; Google uses that data under its own privacy policy. You can block or delete these cookies in your browser settings and the site will work exactly the same.

When you send the form, the thank-you page tells Google Ads that an enquiry was made. That message does not carry your name, email address or phone number.

Tapping a phone number or a WhatsApp link on this site sends Google Analytics an event recording which of the two was tapped and where on the page it sat. It does not send anything you typed.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us at any time to:

tell you what details we hold about you and give you a copy;
correct anything that is wrong;
delete your details;
limit what we do with them, or object to our using them;
hand them over in a form you can take elsewhere.

Deleting your enquiry deletes the whole record, including the ad click identifier stored with it. We cannot withdraw a conversion that has already been reported to Google Ads.

Email hello@drivinginstructorwicklow.ie and we will answer within a month. If you are not happy with how we handle your data, you can complain to the Data Protection Commission at dataprotection.ie.

Other websites

Links to other sites — the RSA, the NDLS, theorytest.ie, our Dún Laoghaire site and DriverTheory.online — take you to sites with their own privacy policies, which we do not control.

Changes to this page

If the way we handle your data changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves.