Lighthouse Mentoring
Privacy Policy
Version 1.0 · Last updated 6 September 2026
0. The short version
This bit is for everyone, and it is meant to be easy to read. The full detail is below it.
Lighthouse Mentoring runs the mentoring sessions you book here. To make a booking we need your name, your email address, your date of birth and a time. There are other questions too — about what you want to talk about — and you can leave those blank without it stopping your booking. We use what you tell us to set up your session, send you the joining details, and get the right mentor ready for you.
Your mentor also writes notes about your sessions. You can ask to see those notes, and we will show you, unless part of them is about someone else or showing them would put someone at risk — and we will tell you if we have held anything back.
One important thing: what you say in a session is private, but it is not completely secret. If a mentor thinks you or someone else might get seriously hurt, they have to tell someone who can help. They will try to tell you first.
We do not sell your information to anyone, and we do not use it for advertising.
If you want your information deleted, or you are unhappy about how we have handled it, write to us at info@lighthousementoring.org or use the complaint form at https://www.lighthousementoring.org/contact/, and a real person will reply.
1. Who is responsible for your information
Lighthouse Mentoring is the data controller. That means Lighthouse Mentoring decides what personal data is collected here and why, and is answerable to you for it.
Lighthouse Mentoring is a trading name of LIGHTHOUSE MENTORING, RESEARCH & EDUCATION, Company number 16127538, registered at 17314 Legend Brook Ct, Tomball, TX 77375-1065, USA. You can contact us at info@lighthousementoring.org or at that address.
Lighthouse Mentoring's Data Protection Officer can be reached at info@lighthousementoring.org.
Lighthouse Mentoring runs its booking, scheduling and mentoring records on software supplied by Puntoria. For everything to do with your sessions, Puntoria is a data processor: it stores and moves your information on Lighthouse Mentoring's instructions, under a written contract, and does not use it for its own purposes.
There is one exception, and we would rather say it plainly than bury it. Puntoria also measures how its own booking software performs across all the organisations that use it. For that limited purpose it decides things for itself and acts as a controller in its own right, not as Lighthouse Mentoring's processor. Section 11 explains what that involves and how to say no. If you have an account that shows your bookings across more than one organisation, Puntoria is the controller for that account too, and its own privacy notice covers it.
This service is provided from the United Kingdom and this policy is written to the law of England and Wales.
What this policy covers. The booking pages for Lighthouse Mentoring, the emails you get about a session, and the pages those emails link to — for joining your session, managing your booking, giving feedback, or correcting a detail — as well as your account area if you have one.
2. What we collect, why, and on what legal basis
"You" below means the person attending the session. Where an adult books on behalf of a young person, some of this is provided by that adult — see section 2A.
| What we hold | Why we hold it | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Your name | To identify your booking, address you correctly, and put your name on the calendar invitation | Contract (Art 6(1)(b)) |
| Your email address, and a tidied-up copy of it used to recognise you as the same person across bookings | To confirm your booking, send joining details, reminders, changes and feedback requests, and to keep your bookings together | Contract |
| Your date of birth | To check you are 18 or over, which we require in order to offer you a session. A booking form that gives a date under 18 is refused | Legitimate interests — offering sessions only to adults |
2A. Where someone else gives us your details
Sometimes we get your details from someone other than you:
- a mentor or a member of staff who invites you to book — in that case we hold your name and email address, and any note that person wrote about why they were inviting you;
- a mentor who writes down questions to raise with you before you have booked anything;
- a parent, carer, teacher or support worker who books on your behalf — in that case they give us the details in section 2 about you.
We will tell you that we hold it the first time we contact you, and you have all the same rights over it as over anything you gave us yourself — including the right to know who gave it to us.
People are also sometimes mentioned by name inside a session or in something you write. We do not go looking for those people to notify them, because tracing everyone named in a conversation would take disproportionate effort. If you are someone who has been mentioned and you want to know what is held, write to us.
3. Checking that you are 18 or over
Sessions here are for adults. You need to be 18 or over to book, and the booking form asks for your date of birth to check that.
A form that says you are under 18 is refused. The check runs on our own servers, not just in your browser, so a booking cannot get past it: no session is booked and no session record is created. Something is already held by then, though, and we would rather say so. Most sessions here need an account, so you will have signed in before the form asks your date of birth — with a one-time code sent to your email address, or with Google — and that leaves an account holding your email address, your name and the answer you gave to the gender question. The date of birth itself is not kept when it puts you under 18. You can delete that account yourself from your account page, or write to info@lighthousementoring.org and we will delete it for you.
How we check your age. We take the date of birth you type at face value. We do not ask for ID documents. If we later find that someone under 18 has booked, we will cancel the session and delete what we hold about them, and we will write to the email address on the booking to say we have done so.
4. The lawful bases we rely on
Contract (Art 6(1)(b)). Most of what we hold exists because you asked us to arrange a mentoring session. Without a name, an email address and a time, there is no session.
Legitimate interests (Art 6(1)(f)). We rely on this for matching you with a mentor, continuity of mentoring, quality and supervision, keeping sessions safe, preventing abuse of the booking system, keeping a record of the people Lighthouse Mentoring works with, security, and understanding how the booking form performs. In each case we have weighed our interest against your rights and concluded the processing is what you would reasonably expect from a mentoring organisation. You can object at any time (section 9), and we will stop unless we have compelling grounds not to.
Recognised legitimate interests (Art 6(1)(ea) and Annex 1 UK GDPR, inserted by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025). In the narrow case where we are processing because we have reasonable cause to believe a child or an adult at risk needs protecting from harm or neglect, that is a recognised legitimate interest and no balancing test is required. We do not use this basis for ordinary record-keeping, for no-shows, or for moderation decisions that are not about protecting someone from harm — those rest on ordinary legitimate interests, and you can object to them.
Consent (Art 6(1)(a), and Art 9(2)(a) for sensitive details). We rely on consent for sensitive details where we have asked for them specifically. You can withdraw consent at any time; withdrawal does not undo what was lawfully done before you withdrew. We do not rely on consent for the gender question: it has to be answered before a booking can be made, and a question you are not free to refuse is not one you have consented to. We rely on legitimate interests for it, as section 2 sets out.
Legal obligation (Art 6(1)(c)). Where a specific law requires us to keep or disclose something — for example a court order, or a statutory safeguarding duty where one applies to Lighthouse Mentoring. We will tell you which law we are relying on if you ask.
5. Artificial intelligence
We use Anthropic's Claude models for a small number of clearly bounded jobs:
- helping staff search their own session records in plain language;
- reading what you wrote when booking and telling staff whether the request reads as ready to confirm, or whether to ask you for more detail, point you to a session that fits better, or turn it down;
- if you book by voice, checking each answer you give to the mentor's questions as you give it, so the booking assistant can ask you for more detail, suggest a session that fits better, or tell you the session does not cover it;
- reading what you wrote when booking, together with how your earlier sessions with Lighthouse Mentoring went, to suggest which reason best fits a session staff are about to call off;
- drafting the messages staff send you, the questions your mentor prepares for your session, and a first pass at your mentor's notes on it, for a person to edit;
- writing the summary paragraph in the periodic report Lighthouse Mentoring can subscribe to.
What is sent. For a job about your session, what can go to Anthropic is your first name, the session title, the time it is booked for, and what you wrote when booking — and, for the first draft of your mentor's write-up, your full name. If you have sat with Lighthouse Mentoring before, the dates and titles of those sessions go with it, along with what you wrote then, the questions your mentor prepared, and their note on what came up. The free-text box is the part to think about: as section 2 says, people sometimes put health, wellbeing, beliefs or other sensitive things in it, and it goes across in your own words. The first read of a new request is sent your answer and the session title, but not your name. The check on each answer in a spoken booking is sent your answers so far and the session title, but not your name either. Staff also send the words they type into search, the questions they ask about their own reports, whatever they type as the reason a session cannot go ahead, and the figures behind a periodic report, which can carry the name on the next session in the diary. Under our contract with Anthropic, none of it is used to train their models. Like most providers, they keep it briefly for security and abuse-prevention purposes before deleting it.
6. Who we share your information with
We share your information only with the service providers we need to run the service, and only what they need. Each acts under a written contract. We do not sell your data and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing.
| Provider | What it receives | Where it is processed |
|---|---|---|
| Convex | Everything described in section 2 — it is the database and application backend | European Union (eu-west-1) |
| Vercel | Hosting for this website; request data such as your IP address and browser | United States (global edge network) |
| Nylas | Your name and email address, to create the calendar invitation for your session | European Union |
| Your mentor's calendar provider |
7. Sending information outside the UK
Some of the providers above hold your information in the United States — Vercel, Resend, Anthropic and, if you book by voice, ElevenLabs — and Google, on the rows where it appears, holds it there and elsewhere. When your information goes to any of them, we make sure one of these is in place:
- the recipient is certified under the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, which the UK Government has found provides adequate protection; or
- we use the Information Commissioner's standard transfer terms — the International Data Transfer Agreement, or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, in whatever form is current — together with an assessment that the protection you get is not materially lower than under UK law.
Not all of it goes there. Convex, which holds everything in section 2, runs in the European Union — its eu-west-1 region. Nylas runs in its EU region, PostHog on its EU cloud, and Sentry in its EU region. Those four take in and hold what they process for us in the EU, which the UK treats as offering adequate protection. Where a provider's staff outside the EU can reach that data in support of the service, the safeguards above apply to that access too.
You can ask us which mechanism applies to a particular provider and ask for a copy of it, and we will send you one. Write to info@lighthousementoring.org.
8. How long we keep things
We keep personal data only as long as it is useful for the purpose it was collected for, or as long as the law requires.
These periods take effect from 1 November 2026, and we are being straight with you about that. Until then, records are kept until they are deleted at your request or on Lighthouse Mentoring's instruction — so if you want yours removed sooner, ask, and we will do it. From that date the following happens automatically.
| We keep | For |
|---|---|
| What you tell your mentor when you book, and the notes your mentor writes about your sessions | 2 years after your last session |
| Your name and contact details | 2 years after your last session, then removed from your record |
| A basic record that a session happened — when, how long, which mentor, no names and no notes | 6 years |
| A record that we have blocked someone from booking | 6 years, with the written reasons removed after 2 years |
| Invitations that were never taken up, and pre-session questions |
9. Your rights
Under UK GDPR you have the right to:
- Get a copy of your data (a subject access request), including the notes your mentor has written about you. We may hold back another person's information (Schedule 2, Part 3, paragraph 16 of the Data Protection Act 2018), or material where releasing it would be likely to cause serious harm to someone's physical or mental health (Schedule 3, Part 2). We will tell you if we have held anything back and why.
- Correct anything inaccurate.
- Ask us to delete your data. See section 8 for exactly what deletion means. If you have an account, you can also delete it yourself from your account area — tell us as well if you want your records at Lighthouse Mentoring erased, because deleting an account and erasing a mentoring record are not the same thing.
- Restrict what we do with your data — for example while we check its accuracy, or while we consider an objection you have made.
- Object to processing based on legitimate interests. You can object to direct marketing at any time and we must stop, no questions asked. For analytics, use the control in section 11.
- Portability — where we hold something because you gave it to us, and we process it by consent or under our contract with you, you can have it in a machine-readable format, and we can send it straight to another organisation where that is technically possible.
- Withdraw consent at any time, for anything you agreed to.
- Ask for human review of any decision you believe was made about you by automated means (section 5).
- Complain — to us, and then to the Information Commissioner's Office. Section 10 explains how.
One thing we may refuse. If Lighthouse Mentoring has blocked you from booking, we keep a minimal record of that decision — your email address, the fact of the block and its date — even if you ask us to erase everything else, and even after we have deleted the reasons. We do that under Article 17(3) UK GDPR, because the record is needed to keep sessions safe and to defend the decision if it is challenged. If we refuse an erasure request on this ground we will tell you so, in writing, and tell you how to challenge it.
10. Complaints
Complain to us first. Since 19 June 2026, section 164A of the Data Protection Act 2018 gives you the right to complain directly to us about how we have handled your personal data, and obliges us to deal with it properly.
How to complain. Use the complaint form at https://www.lighthousementoring.org/contact/ — it takes a minute and you do not need an account. You can also write to info@lighthousementoring.org, or to us at 17314 Legend Brook Ct, Tomball, TX 77375-1065, USA, or ask us to send you a paper form. If none of those works for you, tell us and we will agree another way. If you need help making a complaint — including because you are a young person — someone else can make it for you.
We will:
- acknowledge your complaint within 30 days of receiving it;
- take appropriate steps to investigate it; and
- tell you the outcome without undue delay.
Then the ICO. If you are not satisfied with our response, or we do not respond, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's supervisory authority. The ICO will normally expect you to have complained to us first and to have given us a reasonable time to answer, so please start with us.
Complaining to the ICO does not affect any other legal remedy you have.
11A. How we protect your information
Your information is held in access-controlled systems, encrypted in transit and at rest by our providers. Access inside Lighthouse Mentoring is limited to staff and hosts who need it for their work, and the links we email you are treated as credentials — see below. Our providers are contracted to tell us without undue delay if they suffer a personal data breach, and if a breach affects you and is likely to result in a high risk to your rights and freedoms, we will tell you.
Links we email you. Some emails contain a private link — to join your session, manage your booking, give feedback, or correct a detail. The link is the credential: anyone who has it can do those things. Do not forward it or post it anywhere public. Links that manage a booking stop working after the session. If you think someone else has one of your links, tell us and we will cancel it.
12. Changes to this policy
We will update this policy when what we do changes, or when the law does. The version number and date at the top always reflect the current version, and the current version is always on this page.
If a change materially affects you — a new category of data, a new recipient, a different retention period, or a new reliance on consent — we will tell you by email before it takes effect where we still hold a working address for you, and we will post the change here in any event.
We keep the previous versions of this policy, and you can ask us for one at info@lighthousementoring.org.