What’s the story, Dublin?

Privacy

Last updated 5 November 2026.

This site is run by Athreya Chandramouli, trading as What's the story, Dublin?, who is responsible for your data. Questions or requests: hello@whatsthestorydublin.ie.

Browsing the site

No accounts, no advertising and no tracking cookies. We rely on our legitimate interest in running a useful, secure events guide for what follows.

Page views are counted with Vercel Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and doesn’t follow you between sites. We strip anything you typed (like searches) from what it sees, and it never sees the weekly-email pages.
Usage counts like “an event was opened” or “a ticket link was clicked” carry no identifier that links them to you or your other visits, and are deleted after 90 days. We skip them if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.
Event pictures load straight from the organisers’ and ticket sites’ own servers, so those sites see your IP address when your browser fetches a picture, as they would if you visited them.
Your shortlist is saved only in your own browser.
The search box works out most words (like “tonight” or “free”) in your browser. When some words aren’t understood and few events match, or when you press Search, it sends your words to our AI provider (Ollama) to turn them into filters, after a short pause in typing. For the rest of that day we keep a scrambled code of the words with the filters they gave, so the same search doesn’t ask the AI twice.
What people search for: to learn what visitors look for and which searches find nothing, we keep the words of each search for a year, sent from your browser after you stop typing, with the day and how many times they were searched that day. We don’t keep your internet address, a cookie, your device or the time, so a search can’t be linked to you or to your other searches, and we remove email addresses and phone numbers from the words. Please don’t type personal details about yourself or anyone else in the search box. If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, your searches aren’t kept.
“Pick for me” sends your words and the list of events you’re looking at to our AI providers (Ollama and OpenAI) to choose a few. We don’t store them or link them to you.
“Near me” (the distance filter) uses your location only when you choose it, and only after your browser asks your permission. The distances are worked out on your own device: your location is not sent to us or anyone else, and it’s never stored, put in a web address or counted in our statistics. Turn the filter off or close the page and it’s gone. If you type “near me” in the search box, those words are handled like any other search words; your location isn’t part of them. The venue positions come from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors) or the event’s own listing, and describe places, not people.
IP addresses: we don’t keep them in our database. We hold them briefly in memory to stop abuse, and our website host (Vercel) keeps them in security logs for its own short period.

Feedback and source suggestions

If you send feedback, we keep what you write, the page you were on and your browser type (for example “Safari on iOS”), to fix the problem. A short excerpt is sent to the operator’s Telegram, and an AI assistant (via Ollama) helps sort reports. Please leave out personal details. Reports we’ve dealt with are deleted once they’re 180 days old, and every report after a year. If you suggest a source, we keep the link; links we don’t add are deleted after 90 days.

People named in event listings

We list public events from venues’, organisers’ and ticket sites’ own public pages. Listings can include the names of organisers, hosts, teachers or performers as they published them. We do this on the basis of our legitimate interest, and the public’s, in finding out what’s on in Dublin.

We remove email addresses and phone numbers from the descriptions we keep; the listing links back to the original page for contact.
AI providers (Ollama and OpenAI) read page text to pull out event details.
A listing stays on the site until the event is over (or the original page is taken down). After that we keep a record of the event (title, venue, date, price, category, the description and organiser name as listed, and a link to its picture) for two years to understand Dublin’s events over time. It holds no email addresses, phone numbers or copies of pictures, and we don’t publish it.
Some events are featured in our Instagram posts, with the event’s published picture.

Want something removed? Use “Report” on the event, or email hello@whatsthestorydublin.ie. We’ll take the listing down, block that page so it doesn’t come back on the next update, and remove any of our Instagram posts that feature it. If the same event also reaches us from another site, send us that link too. You can also object to us listing your events at all.

Our events API

Developers we’ve approved can get listings through our events API. It shares only the facts about each event: title, time, venue, price and category. It never includes descriptions, pictures or organiser names. If you ask us to remove a listing, we also tell them, and their terms require them to remove it within 7 days.

If you have an API key, we hold your name, email address, what you told us you’re building, and a log of your requests: when, which address you asked for, and the network address your request arrived from (our hosting provider, Vercel, also sees your IP address, as it does for every visitor). Zuplo runs the key checks and request logs for us. We use this to run the API and stop abuse, on the basis of our legitimate interest, and delete it when you stop using the API.

The weekly email

If you ask for a weekly email, we hold:

your email address;
your search (and earlier questions in that same search);
when you signed up and confirmed, and which version of the consent wording you agreed to;
the dates we emailed you and how many events each email had;
one-way fingerprints of the events we’ve sent you, so we don’t repeat them. They can’t be turned back into event names.

Why, and on what basis: only to send you the email you asked for, based on your explicit consent, given when you confirm from your inbox. Your search might say something sensitive about you (for example your religion, health or sexuality), which is why we encrypt your email address and search in our database, keep them out of email subject lines, and never send your email address to our AI providers.

Who handles it for us: Hetzner (the server our database runs on, in Germany), Cloudflare (the encrypted connection to that server), Vercel (website hosting), Resend (sending email). Each week your search, without your email address, goes to Ollama and OpenAI to find matching events. Our emails contain no tracking pixels or tracked links. Event pictures in them load from our own site at an address that’s the same for every reader, so they can’t show who opened an email.

What	How long
An unconfirmed sign-up	Deleted after 7 days
Your email and search	Until you unsubscribe or delete them (removed from our database at once), or a year after you pause
Copies held by our providers	Our email provider keeps copies of sent emails for its own limited period. Our database backups, which hold your email and search only in encrypted form, are deleted after 14 days
Email dates and event fingerprints	180 days
An address that bounced or reported spam	Kept only as a one-way fingerprint, so we never email it again

You must be 16 or over to sign up.

Who handles data for us, and where

Hetzner (our server in Germany, which holds the database and the event archive), Cloudflare (carries traffic to that server), Vercel (hosting and page-view counts), Resend (email), Ollama and OpenAI (AI), Telegram (operator alerts), Meta (our Instagram posts) and Zuplo (events API keys). Until we delete it, Supabase (our previous database host) still holds a copy of the database as it was on 23 October 2026. Some are in the United States; transfers rely on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses. We don’t sell data. Beyond these providers, the only sharing is the events API described above.

Your rights

Every weekly email has a link where you can pause it, change the day, download everything we hold, or delete all of it straight away. Unsubscribing also deletes that subscription’s data. No email to hand? Get a fresh link. For your safety, downloads need a link sent in the last 24 hours, and the settings page only stays open for an hour.

For anything else (a copy of what we hold, a correction, a removal, or an objection) email hello@whatsthestorydublin.ie. We reply within a month. You can also complain to Ireland’s Data Protection Commission.