Privacy notice

Who we are

ClearCare is a research project run by master's students at Technological University Dublin. The research is building a free website that gives the public clear information to help them choose a nursing home. ClearCare is not run for profit.

We're responsible for the personal data described here. For any question about this notice or your data, email hello@clearcare.ie.

Using ClearCare without an account

You can search for homes, read their reports and use the guides without telling us who you are. We don't use advertising or analytics cookies, and we don't track you across other websites.

• Some choices you make are saved in your own browser: the colour theme, the easier-to-read design, whether you've closed the welcome tour's box on this visit, and the homes on your Compare Homes shortlist. Clearing your browser's site data removes them. When you open Compare Homes, your shortlist's homes are in the page address, like any other page you visit, so they appear in the technical logs below.
• Like any website, our servers keep short technical logs of requests. Finding faults and keeping the site secure is our legitimate interest in keeping them, and they're deleted after 14 days.

If you answer the survey

Our usability survey asks how easy ClearCare was to use. It runs on Microsoft Forms, so your answers go to Microsoft, which stores them for us, and not to ClearCare's own servers. The survey doesn't ask for your name or email address and doesn't record who you are, so please don't include them in your answers.

We use the answers in our research, to find what's unclear or hard to use and improve ClearCare. Microsoft may set its own cookies when the form loads, which Microsoft's privacy statement covers. We keep the answers for the duration of the project and delete them when it ends.

If you create an account

Accounts aren't open yet. When they are, this is what we'll hold:

• Your email address, and your name if you give it, held by Amazon Cognito in the EU. We use them to sign you in and to contact you about your account. The legal basis is providing the service you asked for.
• The cookies needed for signing in. One keeps you signed in: it's encrypted, page scripts can't read it, and it expires after 7 days without a visit. A few others last only while you sign in, to keep the sign-in itself secure. None of them needs your consent, because signing in can't work without them.
• We keep your account until you delete it, or ask us to by email.

HIQA inspection reports

ClearCare is built from the inspection reports HIQA publishes on its website, which anyone can read. We store each report and show what it says, so families can find and compare nursing homes.

What the reports contain about people

• The names and roles of people who run each home, such as the person in charge and the registered provider, as HIQA prints them.
• The names and roles of the HIQA inspectors who carried out each inspection.
• Descriptions of residents' care, which HIQA writes without naming anyone. We don't try to work out who any resident is, and we don't add anything about residents to what HIQA has published.

How we use them

• To show each home's inspection history and what its reports say.
• To find details such as care types and amenities. An AI service reads each report and records what it finds, including short notes that summarise what the report says. This tool is still being developed: its results haven't yet been checked against the reports, and none of them are shown on ClearCare yet. We'll update this notice before they are.
• For research on how findings change from one inspection to the next. An AI service reads the reports for this too. The research results aren't shown on ClearCare.

The legal basis is legitimate interests: ours and the public's, in making published inspection findings easier to find and compare, on a free website that isn't run for profit. The people named in the reports are named in their professional roles, in reports HIQA has already published, so we believe this use doesn't override their interests.

Objecting

If you're named in a report, you can object to how we use your data by emailing us. HIQA is responsible for the reports and what they say: to have a report itself corrected, contact HIQA.

How long we keep it

We keep a report, and the details found in it, for as long as ClearCare shows that home's history. Research copies of the AI service's answers are kept for the duration of the project and deleted when it ends.

Who handles it

Service providers handle data for us: hosting providers run the site and store its data in the EU, and AI services read the reports. Some of these providers are in the United States, where data is protected by the safeguards EU law requires, such as the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. Email us for a copy of these safeguards.

Your rights

You can ask to see the personal data we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to limit how we use it, to get a copy to take elsewhere, or to object to how we use it. Email us and we'll reply within a month.

If you're unhappy with how we've handled your data, you can complain to the Data Protection Commission.

Changes to this notice

We'll update this page when ClearCare changes how it uses data, such as when accounts open. Last updated 2 November 2026.