Privacy Policy

The controller for the processing described here is the operator of shouldhavebeenan.email, publishing as a CubicleComa production. The routes for exercising your rights are described in section 8.

Nothing that identifies you, and nothing you have to give us. There is no account system, so we hold no usernames, passwords, or profiles. There is no contact form and no inbox wired to this site, so in normal use there is no way to hand us personal data even on purpose. The tools on this site (the meeting cost calculator, the email relevance checker, the performance review generator, and the meeting simulator presets) run entirely in your browser. Salaries, attendee counts, text you type, and results you generate are never transmitted to a server we control. Close the tab and they are gone.

Two third parties process data about your visit on our behalf or in their own right.

Google Analytics 4 (property G-9X7X3S03ZG). We use Google Analytics to understand traffic: how many visitors arrive, which pages hold their attention, which ones they close immediately, and roughly where in the world they are. This is aggregate reporting; we cannot and do not attempt to identify an individual reader from it. Analytics processes, at minimum: a truncated IP address, the page URLs you view and when, referrer information, approximate location derived at country or city level, device type, browser, operating system, and a randomly generated identifier stored in a cookie that lets Google recognise a returning browser. IP anonymisation is enabled. We do not have Google Signals or advertising personalisation features turned on in the Analytics property.

Google AdSense (application pending).We have applied to Google AdSense and, if approved, advertising will appear on some pages. When ads are served, Google and its partners may set and read cookies or similar identifiers in order to serve, cap the frequency of, and measure the performance of those ads. Depending on your consent choice, this may include personalised advertising based on your prior browsing. Google's own explanation of how it uses data from sites that use its services is published at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites, and its advertising cookie practices at policies.google.com/technologies/ads. You can manage Google's own ad personalisation at adssettings.google.com. If AdSense approval is refused or the ads are removed, this section will be updated rather than quietly left standing.

For readers in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, analytics and advertising cookies are set only on the basis of your consent, given through the consent banner shown on your first visit. Google Consent Mode v2 is active with every signal defaulted to denied: until you press Accept, no analytics or advertising cookies are set and Google receives only cookieless, anonymised pings. Consent is optional, and refusing it does not restrict any part of this site — every tool and every page works identically whether you accept or decline.

You can withdraw consent at any time, and withdrawal is as easy as giving it: clear this site's cookies and site data in your browser settings, and the banner will ask you again on your next visit. Where advertising is served without personalisation, or where you are outside the jurisdictions above, the basis for the limited processing involved is our legitimate interest in operating and funding a free website, balanced against your interests and rights. You have the right to object to processing on that basis; section 8 describes the routes that give that objection practical effect.

For Analytics, Google acts as our processor and handles the data on our documented instructions under Google's data processing terms. For AdSense, Google acts in part as an independent controller in respect of its own advertising operations, which means some of what happens to advertising data is governed by Google's policies rather than ours. We have named that split rather than glossing over it, because it is the part of any advertising-funded site's privacy policy that most often goes unmentioned.

Google may process data outside the European Economic Area, including in the United States. Google states that such transfers are covered by the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and by its certification under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. We rely on those mechanisms and hold no separate transfer arrangement of our own.

We retain no personal data ourselves, because we collect none directly. Analytics data is retained in the Google Analytics property for the configured retention window, after which Google deletes the user-level and event-level records; aggregate reporting totals survive that deletion because they are no longer tied to any individual. Advertising data retention is determined by Google under its own policies.

Under the AVG/GDPR you have the right to access the personal data held about you, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to restrict or object to its processing, and to receive it in a portable form. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. In the Netherlands that is the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens; elsewhere in the EEA it is your national data protection authority.

There is an honest limitation worth stating plainly. Because we hold no identifiers that connect to you as a person, we are usually not able to locate your data in order to act on an access or erasure request. If we cannot identify you from the information you give us, we will say so rather than pretend, and we will point you to the two routes that actually work: to erase the analytics record of your visits, clear this site's cookies in your browser — the identifier that ties your visits together is that cookie and nothing else; and to reach Google's own records, Google is the party holding the data and operates its own rights request process at policies.google.com/privacy. We will support any request you send us that concerns processing we instructed.

We do not currently publish a direct contact address. The two routes above — clearing this site's cookies, and Google's own rights process — are the effective ones, and they are also the complete set, because Google holds all of the data this site's operation produces.

This site is about the experience of attending corporate meetings. It is not directed at children, it is not attractive to them, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16.

If we add a service that processes data, remove one, or change the basis on which we process, this page will be updated and the date at the top will change with it. There is no version history archive; the current version is the whole policy.