Privacy policy
Last updated 16 August 2026
Family Day Out helps families discover events, festivals, attractions and activities across Ireland, while giving local places and organisers another way to be found. It carries no paid placement and does not build an advertising profile of you. We keep a count of how well the search itself works — how often it finds a family five suitable options — on our own server, without a cookie and without storing anything on your device. Google Analytics is separate, needs your agreement, and nothing from Google loads unless you give it. This page says plainly what happens to information when you use the site.
Who is responsible
This site is run by Digital Destiny, which is the data controller for the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation. You can reach us about anything on this page at privacy@familydayout.ie.
What the site is for
Our purpose is to help families plan days out and to promote relevant local events, festivals, attractions, activities and experiences by making them easier to discover. Here, “promote” means presenting useful listings to families; organisers do not pay to be included or to appear higher in the results. Some booking links can earn us a commission, as explained below.
What we do not do
- No advertising: nothing on this site is a paid placement, and nothing about you is shared with advertisers.
- Accounts are optional, and there is no newsletter or mailing list.
- Nothing about you is sold or used by us for advertising or personalisation.
- Nothing stored on your device for measurement unless you agree to it, and no cookie wall: saying no changes nothing about what the site does for you.
- Nothing you type as a starting point is recorded if it looks like an address, and your children’s ages are never recorded as ages.
Accounts, saved ideas, reviews and suggestions
You can create a free account with an email address and password, or sign in through Google or Facebook when that option is available. We keep your first and last name, town or city, email address, a one-way password hash for email accounts, the provider’s stable account identifier for social sign-in, and the ideas you save. The town is deliberately coarse and is not a home address; it is used to bring relevant nearby ideas forward and show approximate distances. It is not used to send recommendation emails or marketing without a separate choice from you. We do not keep Google or Facebook access tokens and do not ask either provider for contacts, posts or photos. Email accounts must be verified before use; verification links are single-use and expire after eight hours. Verification is bypassed only on the localhost development site. While signed in, you can connect another available sign-in method to the same account. Connecting a provider is an explicit action: accounts are not merged just because two providers report the same email address.
Signed-in accounts can keep separate idea lists with optional dates. If you explicitly mark a place as visited, we keep that visit in the selected plan and open the review form. If no review has been submitted after 24 hours, we use the verified account email to send one service reminder asking how the visit went. Submitting a review cancels the reminder. It is not a newsletter or recommendation email.
A review’s 1–5 score, optional comment, selected age guidance and facilities, and any photos are public. Reviews from an account are shown with the reviewer’s first name and surname initial, for example “Reviewed by Artur B.” The full surname, town and email address are not shown. A signed-out review is shown without a personal name. Uploaded photos are resized and converted before publication, which removes embedded camera and location metadata. Only share a photo you have the right to publish and that you are comfortable showing publicly. Write to privacy@familydayout.ie to remove an account, review or photo.
You can also submit a review without an account. In that case, we require an email address but keep it private. If you later create or connect an account and verify that exact address, the review is attached to your account so you can edit it. Merely entering an address on a review does not prove ownership and never gives access to it.
Account data is processed to provide the account service you asked for. Public reviews are processed because you chose to share them to help other families; you can withdraw that choice by asking us to remove them.
A day-out suggestion made while signed in is linked to your account so you can see whether it is waiting for review, published or not published. If you say that you own or represent the place or event, we also keep the role, work email and verification information you choose to provide. Those ownership details are private and are shown only to administrators checking the request. Requesting verification does not itself grant control of a page.
A venue, festival or organiser can also claim an existing page from the public page or from For venues. We keep the role, work email and any verification note they provide, and we record how the claim was proved — a clicked link sent to a work address on the same domain as the official website, a DNS or website token on that domain, or an administrator’s review. Those details are private. A verified claim lets that account update the page’s public details. It does not let them hide parent reviews.
Account creation and review submission can run a managed Cloudflare Turnstile security check. It assesses technical browser and network signals to distinguish ordinary use from automated abuse. Most people pass without seeing anything; a simple checkbox appears only when a further check is needed. The result is short-lived, single-use and checked by our server before the form is accepted. It is used only to protect these forms, not for advertising.
How this site is paid for
Some listings include affiliate booking links. We participate in the Ticketmaster and Viator affiliate programmes and may receive a commission if you make a booking after following one of those links. Some booking links also use GetYourGuide’s partner programme. There is no extra charge to you for using an affiliate link.
What that does not do is decide anything. The search has no knowledge of which listings earn us anything: nothing is ranked higher, added, or kept in the results because of it, and the great majority of what you see earns us nothing at all. Every link that pays us is marked where it appears, and there is a note at the foot of every page.
Ticketmaster links pass through its affiliate network, Impact, so the referral can be credited before you arrive at Ticketmaster. Viator and GetYourGuide links carry our partner identifiers in the link itself. When you choose to follow an affiliate link, the relevant provider or affiliate network may record the visit and use cookies on its own website to attribute a later booking under its own privacy and cookie policies. We do not send it your Family Day Out search preferences, name, contact details or payment details.
GetYourGuide also provides an optional partner analytics tag that reports which of our pages led to it. Because that is a third-party script, it is loaded only if you have agreed to analytics and never before you answer. The commission itself is attributed by the link, so the tag is not required for a booking to be credited.
Checking whether the search works
We keep our own record of how the site is performing: that a search was made, roughly what it was for, how many suitable results came back, and whether anything was then saved, shared or followed to a venue. Without it there is no way to tell a search that helps a family from one that returns a long list of things nobody wants.
It is kept deliberately coarse. A search is recorded as a town and a set of bands — “ages 3–5”, “up to 45 minutes”, “under €20” — never as an address or an age. If what you type as a starting point looks like an address rather than a place name, it is recorded only as the fact that something was typed. Visits are grouped by a one-way hash of your IP address and browser under a key that changes every day, so two visits on the same day can be seen as one and the same browser tomorrow cannot be recognised at all.
Nothing is read from or written to your device for this, which is why you are not asked about it: the ePrivacy Regulations are about storage on your device, and there is none. The lawful basis under the GDPR is our legitimate interest in knowing whether the site works, balanced against an interest in you that is measured in bands and expires daily. These records are deleted after 180 days. You can object at any time by writing to privacy@familydayout.ie.
Counting visits
If you agree, Google Analytics tells us which ideas people find useful, using the cookies listed in the cookie policy. The tag is not requested from Google until you have answered, so refusing means your browser never contacts them at all. We turn off Google’s advertising signals, so the measurement is not used to follow you elsewhere.
The lawful basis is your consent, which you can withdraw at any time on the cookie policy page; withdrawing deletes those cookies from your browser immediately. Google Analytics is provided by Google Ireland Limited, and data may be handled outside the EU under Google’s data transfer terms.
What stays on your device
When you save an idea with its heart, the site keeps that listing’s identifier in your browser’s local storage under fdo.saved. Before sign-in it leaves your device only to ask our own server for those listings so the saved page can show them. If you sign in, the device list is merged into your account and later changes are kept in both places so the list follows you between devices. Clearing browser storage removes the device copy but not an account copy. Device-only saved ideas expire 12 months after the most recent idea was added. Your answer to the analytics question is remembered separately under fdo.consent.
If — and only if — you agree to analytics, one more value is kept under fdo.visitor: a random identifier with no meaning outside this site, used for a single figure, whether people come back within a week, a month or three. It is what makes that question answerable at all, since the daily hash described above deliberately cannot follow anybody across days. Withdrawing your agreement deletes it immediately.
What our server sees
Searching sends the place, dates and preferences you chose to our own server so it can answer. Our hosting keeps ordinary web server logs, which include IP addresses, for security and troubleshooting. We do not use those logs to identify anyone or to follow visitors between pages.
When you use an account, the server also receives the account and review information described above. A strictly necessary, signed session cookie keeps you signed in for up to 30 days. It is unreadable to page scripts and carries no advertising identifier.
Who else receives anything
Some parts of a page are fetched by your browser directly from other organisations, which means those organisations can see your IP address and that you asked for that file:
- Photographs are served from the tourism providers who publish them, on EU infrastructure.
- Map tiles come from CARTO and OpenStreetMap, and only once you open the map view. If you never open it, nothing is requested from them.
- Directions and official websites are ordinary links. Nothing is sent to Google or to a venue until you choose to follow one.
- Google or Facebook receives an ordinary OAuth sign-in request only if you choose its button. The provider then tells us your stable account id and email address under its own privacy terms. Neither provider is contacted merely because you opened our sign-in window.
- Cloudflare Turnstile receives technical browser, device and network signals only when you create an account or submit a review. Cloudflare returns a short-lived security result; we do not receive a browsing profile or use the check for advertising. Turnstile works independently of whether this site is hosted or proxied by Cloudflare.
- Ticketmaster booking links pass through Impact, Ticketmaster’s affiliate network, so the referral can be credited. Only if you follow one, and only for those listings.
- Viator and GetYourGuide booking links take you to the relevant provider with our partner identifiers in the link so a referral or booking can be attributed. Nothing is sent to either provider unless you choose to follow one of its links, apart from GetYourGuide’s consent-controlled analytics tag described above.
Typefaces are served from this site rather than from Google, so reading a page contacts nobody else by itself.
Where the listings come from
Listings are gathered from a range of feeds and sources. Examples include Fáilte Ireland, Heritage Ireland, Ticketmaster, Viator, local authorities and event organisers. This is not a complete or fixed list: we may add, replace or remove sources over time to keep the site useful, current and relevant. Short descriptions of who a place suits may be written by Google’s Gemini model from the listing text. None of that involves you: those requests carry information about places and events, never about visitors.
How long anything is kept
Device-only saved ideas stay in your browser for 12 months after the most recent idea was added, unless you remove them or clear your storage sooner. Account details, dated plans, visit history and account-saved ideas remain until you delete them or ask us to close the account. Review-reminder delivery dates remain attached to the relevant visit so the same reminder is not sent twice. A private email used for a signed-out review remains with that review until it is claimed by a verified account or removed. Reviews and photos remain public until removed by you or by us. Account-linked suggestions and ownership-verification records remain with the account or listing until they are removed by you or by us. Listing-claim records, including work emails used to prove control of an official website, remain with the account or listing until they are removed. Expired and used email-verification tokens are removed as part of routine maintenance. Server logs are kept only as long as they are useful for security and troubleshooting. The search-quality records described above are deleted after 180 days, and the daily hash that groups them stops meaning anything at midnight in any case. There is no visitor database beyond that.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you may ask for access to personal data we hold about you, and for it to be corrected, erased or restricted, and you may object to processing. If you use an account, this can include your name, town or city, email, saved ideas and reviews. If you submitted a review while signed out, this can include the private email attached to it; saved ideas made without an account remain on your device. Write to privacy@familydayout.ie and we will answer within one month.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Irish Data Protection Commission at dataprotection.ie.
Children
This site is written for parents and carers planning a day out, not for children to use on their own. Accounts and reviews are intended for adults. Do not identify a child in a comment or upload a recognisable photo of a child unless you are their parent or guardian and are comfortable publishing it.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. We do not use account email addresses for a newsletter.