Privacy Policy

Who we are

The Qigong Academy Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales (company number 14138106). Registered office: C/O MJB Avanti, Office 12 Epsilon House, West Road, Ipswich, Suffolk, IP3 9FJ, United Kingdom.

We are the controller of your personal data. For anything in this policy, write to us info@qigongacademy.org.

What this website does not do

We do not use advertising or tracking tools that follow you across websites, and we do not set cookies for visitors. To understand which pages are useful, we use a cookie-free visitor statistic, described below. Our fonts, images and videos in page headers are served from our own server, so no third party learns about your visit when you open a page.

Visiting the website

When you open a page, our hosting provider automatically processes the technical data your browser sends: IP address, date and time, the page requested, the referring page, browser and operating system. This is necessary to deliver the website and keep it secure.

• Legal basis: our legitimate interest in running a secure, working website (Art. 6(1)(f) UK GDPR / GDPR).
• Hosting: Raidboxes GmbH, Germany, processes this data on our behalf under a data processing agreement.
• Retention: server logs are kept only as long as needed for security and are then deleted automatically.

Contact form and email

If you write to us through the contact form or by email, we receive your name, email address, your message and the page you sent it from. We use them only to answer you. The form sends your message to our inbox through Brevo (Sendinblue SAS, France), which delivers it on our behalf under a data processing agreement; it is not stored in the website’s database.

• Legal basis: your consent, which you give with the checkbox (Art. 6(1)(a)), and our legitimate interest in answering enquiries (Art. 6(1)(f)).
• Retention: we keep correspondence for as long as we need it to deal with your enquiry, and longer only where it becomes part of a contract or the law requires it.

Community, courses and payments (Circle)

Our community, live classes, courses and membership run on Circle at community.qigongacademy.org. When you sign up, log in or buy there, you are using Circle, and Circle’s own privacy policy also applies. Payments are processed by Stripe within Circle; we never see your full card details.

• Legal basis: performance of a contract with you (Art. 6(1)(b)) and our legal obligations, for example tax records (Art. 6(1)(c)).
• Providers: Circle Network, Inc., USA, and Stripe.
• Retention: account data for as long as your account exists; payment and tax records for six years, as UK law requires.

Visitor statistics (Pirsch)

To see which pages and offers are useful, we count visits with Pirsch, a cookie-free analytics service by Emvi Software GmbH, Germany. Pirsch does not set cookies and does not store your IP address. From the IP address, browser and a daily changing secret it calculates an anonymous identifier that cannot be traced back to you and changes every day. We see totals only: how many people visited, from which website they came, which pages they read, and how many clicked certain buttons, for example a link to a booking page, the podcast or a video. When you complete a purchase in our community, we also count that purchase and which offer it was, without any details about you. On this website, Pirsch reads nothing from your device: no cookies, no local storage and not even your screen size. We cannot see who you are.

• Legal basis: our legitimate interest in understanding and improving our website (Art. 6(1)(f) UK GDPR / GDPR).
• Processor: Emvi Software GmbH, Germany, under a data processing agreement. Data is stored on servers in Germany.
• The same statistic runs on our community pages at community.qigongacademy.org.

You can object at any time. The button below stops the statistic from counting your visits to this website in this browser (it stores a single setting in your browser’s local storage). You will need to set it again in other browsers or after clearing your browser data.

Newsletter (Brevo)

If you subscribe to our newsletter, we store your email address, and your name if you give it, with Brevo (Sendinblue SAS, France). You first receive an email asking you to confirm (double opt-in). Our emails may record whether they were opened and which links were clicked, so we can see what is useful to readers. You can unsubscribe at any time with the link in every email.

• Legal basis: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a)).
• Retention: until you unsubscribe.

Videos (YouTube)

Our videos are hosted on YouTube. No video is loaded when you open a page. Only when you click play do we load the video from youtube-nocookie.com. At that point Google receives your IP address and information about the video. Google Ireland Limited and Google LLC are responsible for that processing; Google’s privacy policy applies.

• Legal basis: your consent, given by starting the video (Art. 6(1)(a)).

Podcast (Podigee)

Podcast episodes are streamed from Podigee GmbH, Germany. Nothing is loaded until you press play; then Podigee receives your IP address and the technical data needed to deliver the audio.

• Legal basis: our legitimate interest in offering the podcast on our own website (Art. 6(1)(f)).

Teacher map (OpenStreetMap)

The map of our teachers on the About page shows map tiles from OpenStreetMap (OpenStreetMap Foundation, United Kingdom). Nothing is loaded until you open the map; then OpenStreetMap receives your IP address and the technical data needed to deliver the map tiles. The map program itself is served from our own server.

• Legal basis: our legitimate interest in showing where our teachers are, at your request (Art. 6(1)(f)).

Your currency

Prices are shown in pounds, euros or US dollars. Your browser picks a sensible default from its time zone and language settings. This happens entirely on your device; nothing is sent to us. If you switch currency, your browser remembers the choice in its local storage. It never leaves your device, and you can clear it in your browser settings at any time.

Links to other websites

We link to other websites, for example Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Facebook and the websites of our partners. Once you follow a link, the privacy policy of that website applies.

International transfers

Our hosting provider, Pirsch, Brevo and Podigee are based in the EU, which the UK recognises as providing adequate protection. The OpenStreetMap Foundation is based in the UK. Where providers in the USA receive data (Circle, Stripe, Google), transfers rely on the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses.

Your rights

You have the right to access your data, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to its processing, to data portability, and to withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future. Write to info@qigongacademy.org.

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, please tell us first at info@qigongacademy.org. We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days and let you know the outcome.

You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), ico.org.uk, telephone 0303 123 1113. If you live in the EU, you can contact the data protection authority in your country.

Changes to this policy

We update this policy when our website or services change. The date below shows the current version.

Last updated: 22 October 2026