Privacy Policy
Last updated 8 October 2026
Who we are
This website and The BISS Fellowship (the "Fellowship") are operated by North Canaan AB, a company registered in Sweden ("North Canaan", "we", "us"). The Fellowship is an alumni initiative connected to the British International School of Stockholm ("BISS"). For the purposes of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), North Canaan AB is the controller of the personal data described here.
Questions or requests about your data can be sent to hello@north-canaan.com.
Whose data we hold, and what
- If you fill in the form on our home page: your name, email address, class year, what you're asking for (a specific opportunity or a mentor) and what you tell us about it.
- If you're a BISS alum or current student we added from the school's records, with your agreement: your name, email address, class year, and where you study or work if we know it. Some current students are under 18.
- If you join as a Friend of the Fellowship or offer to help with a request: your name, email address, your LinkedIn profile link if you give it, what you can help with, and any message you send.
- If we introduce you to someone, or you're introduced to a member, even if you've never used this site: your name, email address, and when the introduction happened and how it went. If you're not a member, we got your details from the member or the person making the introduction.
- For everyone we work with: the Fellowship team's own notes about how we can help you, the cases we open for you and the messages in them, emails you exchange with us that we file against your case, and where you study, work or live, if you or we record it.
- If you answer our yearly check-in: whether you're at school, at university or working, where, the field you're in or heading towards, what you could help other members with, your LinkedIn profile link if you give it, and anything you choose to add.
We do not ask for special categories of data (such as health, religion, or political opinions). Please don't include such information in free-text notes or comments.
Why we use it, and on what basis
- To connect you with people who can help, and to follow up — including cases, introductions, and a short email about a week after an introduction asking how it went.
- To send you occasional Fellowship emails — practical guides, and a yearly check-in asking what the year will bring. Every one has an unsubscribe link.
- To work out who a message is relevant to. We estimate whether you're at school, at university or working — from your class year, where you study or work, or what you tell us in the check-in — so, for example, a university student isn't sent an email about job interviews. This decides which of our emails you get and nothing else.
- To run a mentorship — if you're paired with a mentor or a mentee, we email the two of you together when it starts and about every three months to ask how it's going. That means you will see each other's name and email address. Our team keeps a record of who is paired, the dates, and any note we make.
- To suggest who might help, and who you might like to meet. When you ask for help, our team sees a list of members and Friends whose background fits your request, and who we've already asked recently. We may also use what you've told us to suggest an introduction you didn't ask for. A person always makes the decision, and we always ask you before passing on anything about you.
Our legal basis is your consent (Article 6(1)(a) GDPR). For the form on this site, ticking the consent box is the first half of that; the second is confirming your email address. We send you a short email with a link to a page with a confirm button, and we don't record your consent — or send you anything else — until you press it. This is deliberate: anyone can type anyone's address into a public form, and we don't want to hold a consent record for someone who never gave one. We keep a note of when you confirmed and which version of the consent wording you agreed to.
For people who are not members but are named in an introduction, our basis is our legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) in keeping an accurate record of introductions we made, so we don't ask the same person too often and can follow up. You can object at any time, and we'll delete your details.
You can withdraw your consent at any time — see "Your rights" below — and doing so won't affect anything we did with your data before you withdrew it.
The Friends of the Fellowship board
With a member's agreement, we may publish a short, anonymous summary of what they're looking for on our Friends page, so parents and friends of the school can offer to help. We never publish a name, an email address, or the member's own words, and we write each summary so it doesn't point to one person. You can ask us to take a summary down at any time.
Your private links
If we open a case for you, we email you a private link containing a unique, unguessable token. Anyone who has that link can view the case and add comments, so please keep it to yourself and don't forward it. If you think your link has been exposed, contact us and we'll issue a new one — the old link stops working immediately.
Case links expire on their own a year after they were last used; opening one resets that clock. Our yearly check-in email also carries a private link, which only lets you update your own answers.
Who we share it with
Your details are seen only by the BISS Fellowship team, and by the person we introduce you to (only what's needed for the introduction). We also use service providers who process data on our behalf and only as we instruct:
- Vercel, to host the website. The code that handles your data runs in Frankfurt, Germany.
- Neon, to store your details in a database in Frankfurt, Germany.
- Resend (with Amazon Web Services), to send and receive our email, through servers in Ireland.
- Google Workspace, which hosts our team's email. Notifications about new requests, messages on cases and a weekly summary go to our team mailbox there.
- Google Analytics, only if you accept it (see "Cookies & tracking" below).
We don't sell your data, and we don't share it with anyone for their own marketing purposes. We keep your data in the European Union wherever we can. These providers are US companies, though, so some data — email handled by Google, support access, service logs — may be processed outside the European Economic Area. Where that happens, it is covered by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or by Standard Contractual Clauses.
How long we keep it
- If you never confirm your email address, we erase what you sent us after 30 days.
- Your profile, cases, notes and introductions: for as long as you're part of the Fellowship, or until you ask us to delete them.
- The technical detail our email provider reports about each email (delivered, opened, clicked) is cleared after 180 days; we keep only the fact that it happened.
- Copies of emails filed against a case are cleared after 90 days (the text stays in the case), and after 30 days if we decided not to keep them.
- Records of attempts to use our public forms are deleted after 30 days.
When you ask us to delete your data, we overwrite your name, email address and everything you told us across our records, including cases and notes, and wherever you appear as someone else's helper. Our providers' backups expire on their own schedule, and emails already delivered to our team's mailboxes are deleted by hand.
How we keep it safe
Everything travels over encrypted connections, and our providers encrypt the data they store. Only named members of the Fellowship team can open the admin console, each with their own account, password and a code from an authenticator app. We log who looks at which records, so we can tell if access was ever misused.
Your rights
Under GDPR, you have the right to:
- Ask what personal data we hold about you, and get a copy of it (access).
- Ask us to correct inaccurate data (rectification). The yearly check-in also lets you update where you are yourself.
- Ask us to delete your data (erasure).
- Ask us to restrict or object to how we use it, including the estimate of your stage in life described above (restriction / objection).
- Ask for a portable copy of the data you gave us (portability).
- Withdraw your consent at any time.
Unsubscribing is immediate and needs no account. Every email we send carries an unsubscribe link in its footer, which takes you to a page with a single confirm button; your email app's own "Unsubscribe" button works too, and takes effect straight away. Either way it stops all email from us — no login, no reply, no waiting on us.
To exercise any of the other rights above, email hello@north-canaan.com. We'll answer within one month. If you're unhappy with how we've handled your data, you also have the right to complain to Sweden's data protection authority, the Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten (IMY).
Cookies & tracking
This site doesn't use advertising cookies. Our fonts are served from our own website, so loading a page doesn't contact any third party.
On the public pages (home, Friends of the Fellowship, and our three guides) we ask if you're willing to let us use Google Analytics to understand how visitors use the site — page views and general traffic patterns, not anything you type into a form. A banner asks for your permission first; nothing loads, and no analytics cookies are set, until you click "Accept." If you click "Decline," or just close the banner, Google Analytics never loads on your visit. We ask again after 12 months, and you can change your mind at any time via the "Cookie preferences" link in the footer of those pages. Our legal basis for this is your consent (Article 6(1)(a) GDPR). We don't use Google Analytics on the admin console, the check-in page or your private case page.
Our emails record whether they were opened and which links were clicked, through our email provider. We use this to see whether our emails are reaching people, and it is cleared after 180 days as described above.
This policy may change from time to time as the Fellowship grows; the date above tells you when it was last updated. See also our Terms of Service.