Data retention
Last updated 17 October 2026
In short. If you answered our research questions, your answers are not linked to your name unless you chose to leave contact details at the end. We keep them for two years. You can have everything about you deleted by writing to privacy@hygge.team, and we will do it within one month. We do not use cookies to track you, we run no analytics, and we sell nothing to anyone.
This page covers two different things that are kept in two different ways, because different people control them. The first is our own research, which we control. The second is the meeting content of companies who use the Hygge product, which they control and we only hold on their behalf. The difference decides who may delete what, and when.
Part one — our research
This part applies now, to anyone who has opened or answered the research form at hygge.team/research. For this research, Hygge Cambridge Ltd, the company behind hygge.team, is the data controller. You can reach us about anything on this page at privacy@hygge.team.
What we keep, and for how long
| What | Why we hold it | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Your answers to the research questions | To understand why group decisions stall, which is the whole purpose of the study | 24 months from the day you answer |
| Answers to a part you finished before leaving | So partly-finished responses still tell us something, rather than being lost | 12 months |
| Which part of the form a visit reached, and when | To see where the form loses people. It records position only, never what was typed | 12 months |
| Your name, email, role and how you asked to be contacted | Only if you chose to leave them at the end, so we can follow up as you asked | Until you ask us to stop, or 24 months after we last spoke, whichever comes first |
| Where the link came from, if it carried a campaign tag | To know which outreach is working | 12 months |
What we do not collect
We do not put a cookie on your device when you answer the research form. We run no analytics and no tracking scripts, we load no fonts or assets from other companies, and we do not record your IP address in our database. While the form is open, your browser holds one random number so that your answers to different parts join up; it is gone the moment you close the tab, and it is not derived from anything about you.
Why we are allowed to hold it
For the answers themselves, our lawful basis is legitimate interests: we are a small company researching a problem in order to build a product, the questions are about your professional work rather than your private life, and we ask you not to include confidential detail. For your contact details and any follow-up, our basis is your consent, given when you chose at the end of the form to hear from us. You can withdraw that consent at any time and it costs you nothing.
Who sees it
A daily summary of the research goes to the Hygge mailbox. It includes answers people have written in their own words, and the name and email of anyone who asked to be contacted. The full set of responses can be read by Hygge through a page that requires signing in, and only a named list of Hygge addresses can open it at all. Nobody outside Hygge sees any of it, and we do not sell, rent or share it. The companies listed under sub-processors below hold it only in the course of running our website, database and email.
How deletion actually works
Nothing in the research is deleted automatically. Every deletion is proposed, reviewed by a named person at Hygge, and only then carried out, so that no scheduled job can quietly destroy something we meant to keep. Once a quarter we review everything that has passed the periods in the table above and delete it on that approval.
If you ask us to delete your data, that approval has a deadline: we will action it within one month of your request, as the law requires. If your request is unusually complex we may take up to two further months, and we will tell you within the first month if that happens.
You can ask us to delete everything, or only part of it. A common and perfectly reasonable request is to remove your name and email while leaving the answers themselves, which are not linked to you once the contact details are gone. Tell us which you want. Before anything is deleted we will show you exactly what we found and what will go.
One honest limit. If you started the form and left without finishing, what you had answered is kept, but it carries nothing that connects it to you — no name, no email, no address, nothing that persists after you close the tab. That means we cannot find it by looking you up. If you want it removed, tell us roughly when you answered and what the decision you described was about, and we will search for it and show you any match before deleting it.
As with anything held on a live service, a copy may remain for a limited period after deletion for technical and support purposes. It is not used for anything else.
Your rights
You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to restrict what we do with it, and object to us holding it at all. Where you gave consent, you can withdraw it. Write to privacy@hygge.team and we will reply within one month. If you are not happy with how we have handled it, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, or to your own country's data protection authority if you are in the EU.
Part two — meetings run with the Hygge product
The Hygge product is not yet in use and is holding no meeting content. This part sets out the rules it is being built to, so that they can be read and argued with before anyone relies on them.
When a company runs a meeting with Hygge, that company controls its own meeting content and we hold it on their behalf. They decide how long it is kept, and they can have it deleted at any time without asking us for permission. Where a period has been set, deletion happens automatically once it elapses.
What is kept, and for how long
| What | Why we hold it | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Private notes about a participant, written by the organiser | To brief the facilitator on who is in the room | Deleted 24 hours after the session closes, and this cannot be extended |
| The session transcript | To run the session and produce its documents | 30 days by default. The customer may set anything from zero to 24 months |
| Decisions, owners, dates, poll results | They are the output the customer is paying for | 12 months by default, customer-settable up to 24 months |
| The executive memo and action list | The documents that leave the meeting | 12 months by default, customer-settable up to 24 months |
| Who took part, with their role and mandate | It is the company's record of who was in the room and what they were there to decide | Held under the company's account, and removed when the account is deleted |
| Account and billing records | Required to run the account and to meet UK tax and company-record duties | 6 years, which is a legal obligation and not customer-settable |
A customer can shorten any of these, including to nothing at all, in which case a session runs and produces its documents without a transcript ever being stored. If a customer stops using Hygge, we return or delete their content within 30 days of being asked.
Asking us to delete it
A deletion request is one of two things, and the console keeps them apart. The first is the account and everything belonging to it: every session, whether it was held or only planned, together with the account's own records and the invitations and joining links it has issued. The second is particular sessions and their content only, leaving the account and everything else as it was.
A session can be deleted whether or not it ever took place. A meeting that was planned and then dropped still has an agenda, mandates and notes attached to it, and those go with it. Within a session request a company can narrow further — to one kind of content across their sessions, or to what one person contributed.
Invitations, joining links, and the record of who took part with their role and mandate all belong to the company whose account the meeting ran under, rather than to any one session. Deleting a session leaves them in place; deleting the account removes them. If you took part in a meeting run on Hygge and want your details removed, the company holding the account is who to ask — the record is theirs, not ours, and we act on their instruction.
The request is made in the console, it records who asked and when, and we confirm when it has run. A request covering a whole account is confirmed by the account sponsor before anything happens, whoever raised it.
Some things a deletion request does not cover. We would rather set them out here than have anyone find out afterwards:
- Credits are not affected and nothing is refunded. A credit is used when the session runs, and deleting what it produced afterwards does not bring it back
- Billing and account records are kept for six years, because UK law requires it
- The record of the deletion is kept — who asked, what it covered, when it ran — with none of the deleted content in it. It is how we can show the deletion happened
- Content is removed from the live service straight away. A copy may be held for a limited period afterwards for technical and support purposes, and is not used for anything else
- Some of the services we rely on to run Hygge may hold a copy for a limited period where their own legal or compliance obligations require it
- The counts and categories described below carry no marker of which customer they came from, so there is nothing in them to find or remove
Content that has left the platform is outside our control. A memo that has been emailed, exported or downloaded exists in places we do not hold, and Hygge Cambridge Ltd is not responsible for content once it has been distributed outside the platform and cannot retrieve or delete it. What we can do, and do, is delete our own copy.
Learning from meetings without reading them
Hygge gets better at facilitation by learning from how sessions go. That learning must never carry one customer's content to another, so it is built to cross the boundary only as counts and categories, never as words. These are the things that may travel:
- How long a session took to reach its first decision
- How many times the facilitator spoke, and how often people reacted well to it
- Whether a session ended in consensus, in disagree-and-commit, or stalled
- How many people voted in a poll, and how many abstained
- Whether a decision ended up with a named owner and a date
- Whether, two weeks later, the action had actually happened
These never travel, in any form, and are not stored outside the customer's own area:
- Anything anyone typed or said, in any form, including summaries of it
- Objectives, boundaries, mandates, agendas and pre-reads
- Names, roles, email addresses and expertise descriptions
- Decision summaries, memos and action lists
- The customer's name, industry, or anything else identifying them
These measurements are held without any marker of which customer they came from, and are only ever read as a group covering several customers at once, so that no single organisation's pattern can be picked out of them. If we ever want to learn from the content itself, we will ask that customer first and it will be off unless they turn it on. We do not allow any AI provider we use to train their models on customer content.
Companies that help us run this
These companies process data on our behalf. Each is bound by a contract that limits them to doing so on our instructions. The database holding everything described above is hosted in the United Kingdom, in Supabase's London region. Some of the others operate outside the UK, in which case the transfer is covered by the UK addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.
- Vercel — Hosts the website. Its request logs briefly hold IP addresses
- Supabase — Hosts the database where everything above is stored, in its London region (eu-west-2), so the database itself does not leave the United Kingdom
- Resend — Delivers our email
- Clerk — Runs sign-in for customer accounts, and holds the name and email address you sign in with
- Stripe — Takes card payments on its own hosted page and issues receipts. Card details never reach Hygge; Stripe receives the name and email of the person paying
- Google — Hosts the Hygge mailbox that research summaries are sent to
Changes to this page
If we change what we collect or how long we keep it, we change this page and the date at the top. If a change materially affects people whose data we already hold, we will tell them rather than rely on them re-reading it.