Privacy policy — AI on Maternity Leave

Who we are

AI on Maternity Leave is run by Katie Rose, a sole trader, at AI on Maternity Leave, 4th Floor, Silverstream House, 45 Fitzroy Street, Fitzrovia, London, W1T 6EB GB. We are the data controller for the information described here. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office, registration number ZC226685.

For anything about your data, email hello@aionmaternityleave.com. We are a very small business — that email reaches Katie.

The short version

We collect the least we can get away with. We do not sell anything to anyone. We do not put your name, email or anything you tell us in confidence into general AI tools. Our coach works from Montenegro, so some of your data is accessed from outside the UK, and we explain below how that is covered. You can ask us to delete anything at any time.

What we collect, and why

If you visit the website

The site is a set of static pages hosted by Netlify. Netlify logs standard server information including IP addresses, in order to serve the site and keep it secure. If you have accepted analytics, we also use Google Analytics — the detail is in the Cookies section below.

Lawful basis: legitimate interests for the server logs, which are needed for the site to work at all. Consent for analytics.

If you sign up to the newsletter

Your email address is collected via beehiiv. We use this to send you the newsletter and to tell you when events and cohorts open. Every email has an unsubscribe link and it works.

Lawful basis: consent. Withdraw it any time by unsubscribing.

If you buy an event ticket or a programme place

Your name, email address, anything you tell us in the checkout questions, and — for the programme — a postal address so we can send you the physical pack. Payment is taken by Ticket Tailor and its payment providers. We never see or store your card details.

Lawful basis: performance of our contract with you, and legal obligation for the financial records HMRC requires.

If you join the WhatsApp community and a programme WhatsApp group

Your phone number and your display name, plus whatever you choose to post.

WhatsApp groups work by making everyone's number visible to everyone else in the group. That is how WhatsApp is built and we cannot change it. Joining is always optional — for the programme, you can complete everything without it, and we will send voice notes by broadcast or email instead.

Meta owns WhatsApp and processes your data on its own terms, which are nothing to do with us. If you would rather not, do not join.

We keep contact syncing off, we do not save participants as contacts, and we leave the group and delete numbers at the end of a cohort.

Lawful basis: consent — you choose to join.

If you are on the Return to Paid Work Programme

On top of the above: your access to the private programme hub, your face and voice in live sessions, questions you post in the group, and your responses to the programme surveys.

Coaching conversations about returning to paid work after having a baby can touch on health, including mental health. That is special category data and we treat it accordingly:

Nothing is recorded, transcribed or written down about what you say. No live session is recorded unless every person in it agrees on the day. Fayrouz's own session notes carry no names or identifying details and are destroyed at the end of the cohort.
One exception, which is Fayrouz's own record, not ours. As an ICF-accredited coach she keeps a client coaching log for her credential — your name, your email address, and the dates and hours of coaching. Nothing about what was discussed. She will ask you in week one whether you consent to being on it, and if you say no you are simply left off. The log is confidential to her, is not sent to the ICF, and is held under her own professional and data protection obligations rather than ours. If the ICF audits her, they may contact you only to confirm that coaching took place — never to ask what it was about.
We do not ask you for health information and you never have to share any.

Lawful basis: performance of our contract for the ordinary programme data. For anything that counts as health data, your explicit consent, given by choosing to raise it.

If you fill in a survey

Our survey responses are pseudonymised — Tally gives each response an ID rather than attaching your name. We use the results to design the programme and, in aggregate, to describe what the work achieves. Where we publish figures we publish the sample size with them.

Lawful basis: performance of our contract with you and legitimate interests in improving and describing what we do. Completing the short surveys at the start and end of the founding cohort programme is part of the founding cohort deal — the introductory price is what we exchange for it, and we say so at checkout. Using the aggregated results to improve the programme and describe publicly what it achieves is our legitimate interest; we publish sample sizes alongside any figure.

If you give us a testimonial

Your words, your first name and whatever else you agree to. This is separate, optional, and never a condition of anything. You can withdraw a testimonial at any time and we will take it down, though we cannot pull back print or something already published elsewhere.

Lawful basis: consent.

If you come to an event

We photograph our events. The photographer is credited wherever images are published. Our house rules:

We never photograph or film anyone breastfeeding.
We only photograph a baby's face if you have told us that is fine, but our general stance is to endeavour not to photograph baby's faces or blur them out in backgrounds and we will brief our photographer to do this to the extent this is possible in a group event setting.
You can tell us at booking, or any time on the day, that you would rather not be photographed, and we will make sure you are not.

Where images go. Our website, our social media, our newsletter, and sponsorship and partnership pitches. We also give photographs to journalists and listings sites when we are seeking coverage — local press, parenting and business titles.

Press is the one thing we cannot undo. If you ask us to take an image down we will remove it from anything we control, usually the same day. Once a photograph has been published by a newspaper or a site that is not ours, it is theirs and we cannot pull it back.

Being quoted or interviewed. We sometimes ask whether you would be willing to be quoted, named in a case study, or put in touch with a journalist. Each is asked separately, each is optional, and saying no to one does not affect the others. Nothing you say at an event goes to a journalist without you agreeing first.

We keep a clearance record of who has agreed to what.

Lawful basis: legitimate interests for general photographs of the room and the event, with the opt-out above. Consent for anything that identifies you individually — a portrait, an image used with your name, a case study, or an introduction to a journalist.

Who your data goes to

We use these services to run the business. Each one only gets what it needs.

Ticket Tailor — Ticketing and checkout. Sees: name, email, checkout answers, postal address.
Stripe, Partial.ly — Payments and payment plans. Sees: payment data. We see the transaction, not your card.
Notion — The private programme hub. Sees: your access to the hub.
Google Workspace and Google Sheets — Email, calendar, records. Sees: email address, name, scheduling.
Tally — Forms and surveys. Sees: whatever you enter.
beehiiv — Newsletter. Sees: email, first name, expected return month.
Zapier — Moving data between the above. Sees: whatever passes through.
Netlify, GitHub — Website hosting. Sees: server logs.
WhatsApp (Meta) — Community and voice notes. Sees: your number, on Meta's own terms.

Fayrouz Essack delivers the coaching as a self-employed associate. She is our processor and works to a written agreement that meets the requirements of Article 28 of the UK GDPR.

What Fayrouz sees: your name, your face in live sessions, your email address for scheduling, your phone number where WhatsApp shows it, what you post in the group, and survey and completion data in anonymised or aggregated form only.

What she does not see: your postal address, your checkout or payment data, identifiable survey responses, consent records, or any export of our participant list.

Beyond this, we share data with nobody. We do not sell it, rent it, or pass it to sponsors, partners or speakers.

AI tools

We use AI tools heavily in the way we build this business. We do not put identifiable participant data into them. Survey exports we work with are pseudonymised at source. If we ever need to change this, we will tell you before we do it, not after.

Data going outside the UK

Two things to tell you plainly.

Our coach works from Montenegro. Fayrouz is resident in Montenegro, which is not covered by UK adequacy regulations. Your data stays on UK and EEA servers, but her accessing it from Montenegro is a restricted transfer under UK data protection law. That transfer is covered by an International Data Transfer Agreement — the ICO's own approved contract — and we have completed the transfer risk assessment that goes with it.

We tell you this before you buy, not after, because you are entitled to decide with it in front of you.

Some of our suppliers are based outside the UK, mostly in the United States. Where that is the case, transfers are covered by the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or by an International Data Transfer Agreement.

How long we keep things

Participant and community data — 12 months after your cohort or after you leave the community.
Financial records — 6 years, because HMRC requires it.
Newsletter subscription — until you unsubscribe.
Testimonials — until you withdraw consent.
Event photographs — 3 years, then reviewed.
Fayrouz's ICF coaching log — held by Fayrouz under her own obligations, for the life of her credential, where you have consented.

Keeping your data is not the same as permission to market to you. Marketing needs its own consent, and we ask for it separately.

Your rights

You can ask us to: show you what we hold, correct it, delete it, stop or limit what we do with it, hand it over in a portable format, or object to us using it. You can withdraw consent at any time, which stops future use but does not undo what was lawful before.

Email hello@aionmaternityleave.com. We will reply within one month, usually much faster.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled it, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or 0303 123 1113. We would rather you came to us first, but you do not have to.

Cookies and analytics

Nothing loads until you say yes. When you first visit, you will see a banner asking whether you are happy with analytics. Nothing analytics-related runs on this site until you accept — the Google Analytics script is not loaded at all, so no analytics cookies are set. Rejecting is one click, in the same place and the same size as accepting.

Remembering your choice. We store your answer on your own device using local storage, not a cookie. It stays there until you change it or clear your browser data, and it applies across every page on this site so you are not asked twice.

If you accept. We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how many people visit, which pages they read and roughly where in the world they are. It sets cookies named _ga and _ga_ followed by a code, which last up to two years. We use this to decide what to write and where to put a poster. We do not use it for advertising, we do not track you across other websites, and we do not sell or share the data with anyone. Google acts as our processor and processes some of this data in the United States, covered by the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

Changing your mind. There is a "Cookie settings" link in the footer of every page. It opens the same panel and shows your current choice. If you switch analytics off, we disable Google Analytics and clear its cookies from your browser.

Essential technology. Our host, Netlify, logs standard server information including IP addresses in order to serve the site and keep it secure. This is not analytics and cannot be switched off, because without it the site does not work.

That is the whole list. No advertising cookies, no social media pixels, no session recording, no heat mapping.

Children

This is a service for adults. Nothing here is aimed at anyone under 18 and we do not knowingly collect data about children. Babies come to our events, and our photography rules above are how we protect them.

Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date below and, where the change matters, tell participants directly.

Last updated: 21 August 2026