Privacy Policy

Irish Manual Handling provides online Manual Handling and workplace safety training to learners and employers across Ireland. To run the platform, take payments, issue certificates and support you, we need to process some personal data. This policy describes what we collect, why we collect it, how long we keep it and the choices you have.

We follow the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Irish Data Protection Act 2018 and the ePrivacy Regulations 2011 (S.I. No. 336 of 2011). We only collect what we genuinely need, we never sell personal data, and we explain every use in the sections below. This policy works together with our Cookie Policy, our Terms and Conditions and our Refund Policy.

If anything in this policy is unclear, email us at [email protected] and a member of our team will explain it in plain words.

The data controller for personal data processed through www.irish-manualhandling.ie is:

• Legal entity: Irish Manual Handling Ltd., trading as Irish Manual Handling
• Registration: Registered in Ireland with the Companies Registration Office (CRO), Company No. 765014
• Location: Dublin, Ireland
• Email: [email protected]
• Website: https://www.irish-manualhandling.ie/

Being the data controller means we decide why and how your personal data is processed, and we are responsible for protecting it. You can raise any privacy question, request or complaint with us directly using the email address above. We aim to reply within a few working days and never later than one month.

We collect only the information needed to deliver Manual Handling and workplace safety courses, issue valid certificates and keep the platform secure. Depending on how you use www.irish-manualhandling.ie, this can include:

• Account details: your name, email address, password (stored only as a secure hash), phone number where you provide it, and your account settings.
• Order and billing details: the courses you purchase, the amount paid, the date, your billing name and, for business customers, the company name and address needed for invoices. Card payments are handled by our payment provider, Stripe. We never see or store your full card number.
• Training records: your course progress, the date you started and finished, your assessment answers and scores, and the details printed on your training certificate, including the certificate number used for verification.
• Communications: messages you send us by email, through the contact form or through the live chat on the website, together with our replies.
• Technical data: your IP address, approximate location derived from it, browser and device type, pages visited, referring website and the time of each request. This is recorded automatically in our server and security logs.
• Consent records: your cookie choices and the time you accepted our Terms and Conditions or confirmed the start of a course.

If an employer or training coordinator enrols you, they provide your name and email address so we can create your learner account. We do not ask for any special category data (such as health or ethnicity data) to deliver our courses.

Every use listed here has a clear purpose connected to running Irish Manual Handling well and safely:

• Delivering your training: creating your account, giving you access to Manual Handling and workplace safety courses, saving your progress and marking your assessments.
• Issuing and verifying certificates: generating your training certificate, sending it to you and allowing you or your employer to confirm that it is genuine.
• Processing payments: taking payment through Stripe, issuing receipts and invoices, and handling refunds under our Refund Policy.
• Customer support: answering your questions by email or live chat and resolving any problem with your course or certificate.
• Security and fraud prevention: protecting accounts, detecting misuse, keeping reliable records of when training was delivered and completed, and defending against payment disputes.
• Legal compliance: keeping the financial records required by tax and company law and responding to lawful requests from authorities.
• Improving the platform: understanding which pages and course modules work well, fixing errors and making the learning experience faster and clearer, using aggregated or anonymised data wherever possible.
• Marketing with your consent: sending occasional emails about new courses, refresher reminders or offers, only where you have opted in. Every email includes an unsubscribe link and you can opt out at any time.

We do not use your personal data for automated decisions that have a legal or similarly significant effect on you. Course assessments are marked against fixed answer keys, and you can always ask a member of our team to review a result.

the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires a lawful basis for every use of personal data. We rely on the following:

1. Performance of a contract: to create your account, deliver the course you purchased, mark your assessment and issue your certificate.
2. Legal obligation: to keep accounting and tax records, to issue valid invoices and to respond to lawful requests from courts or regulators.
3. Legitimate interests: to secure the platform, prevent fraud, keep evidence of service delivery, improve our courses and website, and answer enquiries. We always balance these interests against your rights and freedoms.
4. Consent: for optional cookies, for marketing emails and for any other use where we ask you first. You can withdraw consent at any time without affecting your training or certificate.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, you have the right to object. Section 12 explains how.

www.irish-manualhandling.ie uses cookies to keep you signed in, protect forms against misuse, remember your preferences and, only with your consent, measure how the website is used and support our advertising. Strictly necessary cookies are always active because the platform cannot work without them. Analytics, marketing and preference cookies stay off until you accept them in our consent banner.

You can change your cookie choices at any time through the cookie icon on every page or in your browser settings. The full list of cookie categories, their purposes and their lifetimes is in our Cookie Policy.

We share personal data only with the service providers we need to run the platform, and only for the purposes described in this policy. Each provider acts under a contract that limits what it may do with your data:

• Payment processing: Stripe processes card and wallet payments (including Apple Pay and Google Pay) and holds your payment details under its own privacy policy. We receive confirmation of payment, the last four digits of the card and the billing name.
• Hosting, content delivery and security: our web hosting provider stores the platform and its database, and Cloudflare sits in front of the website to filter malicious traffic and speed up delivery. Both see technical data such as IP addresses.
• Email delivery: transactional email providers deliver your receipts, certificates and password reset messages.
• Analytics and advertising: where you consent, Google Analytics and advertising platforms receive usage data as explained in our Cookie Policy.
• Reviews: the review widget on our pages is provided by a third party and displays public Google reviews. It receives technical data when it loads.
• Professional advisers: accountants, lawyers and insurers where necessary to comply with the law or protect our rights.

We may also disclose personal data when the law requires it, to respond to a valid request from a court, regulator or law enforcement body, or to protect the safety of learners and staff. If Irish Manual Handling is ever sold or merged, personal data may pass to the new owner under the same protections. We never sell personal data to anyone.

Many learners complete Manual Handling and workplace safety courses because their employer or a training coordinator has bought the course for them. In that case the employer is entitled to know whether the training it paid for was completed, and workplace safety law usually requires it to keep evidence of that training.

• The employer can see your name, your completion status, your completion date and a copy of your training certificate.
• The employer does not receive your password, your individual assessment answers or your private messages with our support team.
• Your certificate remains yours. You can download it from your account and use it with any future employer during its validity period.

Where an employer provides your details to enrol you, the employer is responsible for telling you that it has done so. If you believe you were enrolled without a proper reason, contact us and we will help.

Wherever possible we keep personal data within the European Economic Area (EEA). Some of the providers listed in section 7, such as Stripe, Cloudflare and Google, are global companies and may process limited technical or payment data outside the EEA, including in the United States.

Whenever personal data leaves the EEA we make sure it is protected by a safeguard recognised under GDPR: an adequacy decision of the European Commission (for example for the United Kingdom, or for US companies certified under the EU US Data Privacy Framework), or the European Commission Standard Contractual Clauses together with additional technical measures such as encryption. You can ask us for more information about the safeguard used for a specific provider.

We keep personal data only as long as we need it for the purpose it was collected, and then we delete or anonymise it. The main periods are:

• Account and training records: for as long as your account is active and for the period needed to reissue, verify and evidence your training certificate. Training records are legally important for you and your employer, so we keep them for at least the validity period of the certificate and any renewal cycle that follows.
• Orders, invoices and payment confirmations: for the period required by Irish tax and company law, currently six years after the end of the financial year in which the transaction took place.
• Acceptance of our Terms and course start confirmations: for as long as they may be needed as evidence of service delivery, which follows the same period as our financial records.
• Support conversations: for up to 24 months after the conversation ends, so we can follow up on your case.
• Security and server logs: detailed request logs are deleted automatically after a limited period, normally within 90 days, unless they are needed to investigate a security incident.
• Marketing consent: until you unsubscribe or three years after your last interaction with us, whichever comes first.

If you ask us to delete your account, we remove or anonymise the data we no longer need and keep only what the law requires us to retain, such as invoices and the minimum record needed to prove that a certificate was issued.

We take the security of your personal data seriously and use technical and organisational measures appropriate to the risk:

• All traffic between your browser and www.irish-manualhandling.ie is encrypted with HTTPS (TLS).
• Passwords are stored only as salted hashes, so nobody at Irish Manual Handling can read them.
• Card details are entered directly into Stripe and never touch our servers.
• Cloudflare filters malicious traffic, rate limits abusive requests and blocks known attack patterns before they reach the platform.
• Access to personal data inside our systems is limited to staff who need it for their role, protected by strong authentication and logged.
• We keep regular backups and test our ability to restore them.

No system can be guaranteed completely secure. If we ever become aware of a personal data breach that is likely to put your rights at risk, we will notify the Data Protection Commission (DPC) within 72 hours as the law requires and tell you directly without undue delay.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) you have the following rights over your personal data. All of them are free to exercise:

• Access: ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you and information about how we use it (a subject access request).
• Rectification: ask us to correct data that is inaccurate or incomplete, for example the name printed on your certificate.
• Erasure: ask us to delete your data where we no longer need it or where you withdraw consent, subject to the legal retention periods in section 10.
• Restriction: ask us to pause processing while a question about accuracy or lawfulness is resolved.
• Portability: receive the data you gave us in a structured, machine readable format and have it transferred to another provider where technically possible.
• Objection: object to processing based on legitimate interests, and object at any time to direct marketing.
• Withdraw consent: withdraw any consent you have given, for example for optional cookies or marketing emails, without affecting processing that has already taken place.

To exercise any right, email [email protected] from the address linked to your account, or tell us how we can confirm your identity. We respond within one month, or within three months for complex requests, and we will always tell you if we need more time.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Data Protection Commission (DPC). The DPC can be reached at 21 Fitzwilliam Square South, Dublin 2, D02 RD28, or through its website at www.dataprotection.ie. We would appreciate the chance to resolve your concern first, so please contact us before you complain to the regulator if you can.

Manual Handling and workplace safety courses are workplace training products intended for adults and for young workers who are enrolled by their employer or training provider. The website is not directed at children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them.

If you believe a child has created an account or provided personal data to us without appropriate consent, contact us at [email protected] and we will remove the data promptly.

We review this policy regularly and update it when our services, our providers or the law change. The current version is always published on this page. When a change materially affects how we use your personal data, we highlight it here and, where you hold an account, we let you know by email or by a notice when you next sign in.

Continuing to use www.irish-manualhandling.ie after an update means the updated policy applies. If you do not agree with a change, you can close your account and exercise your rights under section 12 at any time.