Privacy policy

Last updated: September 24, 2025

This privacy policy explains how Goose ("we", "us", or "our") collects, uses, and protects your personal data when you use our AI assistant service for heritage professionals.

Who we are

Goose is a specialist AI assistant designed to help museums, historic sites, and cultural organisations create audience-ready content and develop practical marketing strategies. It has been created by the Arts Marketing Association with funding by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Developers at Make Sense Of It created the code running the Service.

What data we collect

We collect and process the following types of personal data:

Account information

Your email address and password for account creation and authentication.
Basic profile information you choose to provide in Settings

Conversation data

All conversations you have with the Goose AI assistant.
Questions you ask and responses provided by the service.
Any files or documents you upload during conversations.

Technical data

Authentication cookies that keep you logged in to the service.
Basic technical information about how you access the service (such as browser type, device information and IP address).
We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18 years of age.

How we use your data

We use your personal data for the following purposes:

Service provision

To provide you with access to the Goose AI assistant.
To maintain your account and conversation history.
To authenticate your access to the service.
To provide thinking partner recommendations and functionality
To create anonymised insights from interview mode responses that help other heritage professionals.
To match users with relevant peer experiences when they search for similar challenges.
To build a collective knowledge base for the heritage sector.

Service improvement

To analyse aggregated, anonymised themes from conversations to improve the service.
To understand common topics and challenges faced by heritage professionals.
To report on service usage and impact to our funders (in anonymised, aggregated form only).

Legal basis for processing

We process your personal data under the following legal bases:

Legitimate interests

Service provision and account management: necessary to deliver the service you've requested.
Service improvement through anonymised analysis: helps us develop better tools for heritage professionals.
For launch we will conduct a legitimate interests assessment (LIA) balancing our interests against your privacy rights.

Consent

Interview mode participation: you will need to provide informed consent when entering interview mode and you will be asked to consent to your anonymised experiences being shared to help others if you choose.
You can withdraw consent at any time, though this won't affect processing that occurred before withdrawal.

Legal obligation

Retaining certain data where required by law
Responding to valid legal requests

How we protect your data

Database security

We use a PostgreSQL database with row-level security, which means only you can access your own data.
Other users cannot see or access your conversations or account information.

Access controls

Only you can access your personal conversations and data through the service.
Our technical support staff may access the database solely to resolve bugs or technical problems.

Third-party processors and data sharing

We use Anthropic's Claude API to power the AI assistant functionality.
Your conversation data is sent to Anthropic for processing but is not used to train their models.
This may involve transfer of data to the United States under appropriate safeguards.
Your data is not shared with any large language model provider for their improvement purposes.
Our technical development partner, Make Sense Of It, may access data solely to resolve bugs or technical problems.
They act as a data processor under our instructions.

Other users (anonymised insights only)
When you participate in interview mode, anonymised insights may be shared with other heritage professionals seeking relevant peer experiences.
All identifying information is removed before sharing.

Funders (aggregated reporting only)
We may share anonymised, aggregated statistics about service usage with the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
No personal data or individual responses are shared.

Data retention

Active accounts

We retain your data indefinitely whilst your account remains active.

Inactive accounts

If you do not log in to your account for 18 months, we will send you an email warning.
If you do not log in within 24 months of your last activity, we will automatically delete your account and all associated data.

Interview mode contributions

Original interview responses are retained whilst the user’s account is active.
Anonymised insights derived from your contributions may be retained indefinitely to benefit the heritage community.
You can delete your original responses at any time.
Deletion of anonymised insights may not be technically feasible once integrated into the knowledge base.

Account deletion

You can delete your account at any time through your settings page.
When you delete your account, we immediately remove all your personal data and conversation content. This data cannot be restored once deleted.
Anonymised, aggregated insights may be retained for service improvement but cannot be linked back to you.

Cookies

We use strictly necessary cookies to keep you logged in to the service. These cookies are essential for the service to function and do not require your consent. We do not currently use any analytics or tracking cookies.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law, you have the following rights:

Access

You can request copies of your personal data through your account dashboard or by contacting us.

Rectification

You can correct inaccurate personal data through your account settings or by contacting us.

Erasure

You can delete your account and all data through your settings page.

Portability

You can request your conversation data in a portable format.

Objection

You can object to processing based on legitimate interests.

Restriction

You can request we restrict processing in certain circumstances.

To exercise these rights, please contact us using the details below.

Contact us

If you have any questions about this privacy policy or how we handle your data, please contact us at info@higoose.co.uk.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk.

Changes to this policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify you of any significant changes by email and update the "last updated" date at the top of this page.