Privacy policy

Who we are

This site (solarracing.ie) is run by DCU Solar Racing, a student engineering team at Dublin City University. For anything in this policy, or to exercise any of the rights below, contact us at info@solarracing.ie, which reaches whoever currently holds the admin role for the team.

What we collect, and why

Contact form. When you message us via the contact page, we store your name, email address, and message so we can reply. Legal basis: legitimate interest in responding to enquiries. We keep messages for up to 24 months, or until we've resolved them, whichever comes first.

Site analytics. We run two analytics systems, both optional and off until you accept them in the cookie banner:

• Plausible Analytics, cookieless, aggregated traffic stats (pages viewed, referrers, rough location). We run this ourselves, it isn't sent to Plausible the company, and it doesn't use cookies or store anything that identifies you individually.
• First-party analytics. We log the page you viewed, referrer, browser/device type, and a one-way hash of your IP address (we do not store your raw IP). This helps us understand traffic without keeping anything that identifies you directly. Kept for up to 14 months.

Legal basis for both: consent, which you can withdraw at any time (see below).

Spam protection (Google reCAPTCHA). The contact form uses Google reCAPTCHA to block automated spam. It only loads after you consent to it, and sends your IP address and interaction signals to Google LLC in the United States under Google's standard contractual clauses. See Google's privacy policy (opens in a new tab) for how they handle it. Legal basis: consent.

Donations. The donate page links to and embeds DCU's own payments portal. We never see or store your card details. DCU is the data controller for anything you enter there, under their own privacy policy, not ours.

Cookies and similar technologies

We only set anything non-essential, meaning the analytics and reCAPTCHA scripts above, after you've consented via the banner shown on your first visit. Your choice itself is remembered in your browser's local storage, not a tracking cookie, so we can avoid asking again. Signing in to the admin area sets a strictly necessary session cookie, which isn't optional since it's what keeps you logged in. Team members previewing unsaved changes also get a strictly necessary preview cookie. Your language (English or Irish) comes from the page address, so it needs no cookie.

Who we share data with

Google (reCAPTCHA, if you consent), our email provider (to deliver contact form messages), and DCU (for donation payments only). Site photos and videos, including team member photos, are stored with DCU Redbrick, the university's student computing society, which hosts our file storage. Our analytics run on our own infrastructure, not a third party. We don't sell personal data, and we don't share it with anyone else.

Your rights

Under GDPR, you can ask us to: access a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to our processing of it, or receive it in a portable format. You can also withdraw consent for analytics/reCAPTCHA at any time by clearing your browser's local storage for this site (the banner will reappear) or by emailing us. To exercise any of these, email info@solarracing.ie. We'll respond within one month. If you're unhappy with how we've handled a request, you can complain to Ireland's Data Protection Commission at dataprotection.ie (opens in a new tab).

Changes to this policy

If how we collect or use data changes meaningfully, we'll update this page and change the date at the top.