Privacy Policy – The Young Dentist

Version 2026-08-23. Last updated 23 August 2026. This is the version of our Privacy Policy currently in force. If you have registered for an account, we have recorded which version of this policy was live on the day you registered.

1. Who we are

The Young Dentist (“TYD”, “we”, “us”, “our”) is a dental education platform: a podcast, free video Masterclasses, a weekly newsletter, news and research content, and events for dental students and young dentists.

The Young Dentist is operated by TYD NEXUS LTD, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 16905466. TYD NEXUS LTD is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy, and is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) as a data controller.

If you have any question about this policy, about the data we hold on you, or if you want to exercise any of the rights in section 10, contact us at content@theyoungdentist.net. We will respond within one month.

2. What this policy covers

This policy covers personal data we collect through the TYD website at theyoungdentist.net and any subdomain we use to send email, and through the features on it: the newsletter, free account registration for the Masterclasses, event interest and booking, research submissions, the contact form, and partner enquiries. It also covers the emails we send you.

It does not cover third party platforms that host our content and have their own privacy policies, such as YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn. If you interact with us there, that platform’s policy applies to that interaction.

3. The short version

We only send marketing email to people who actively asked for it by ticking an unticked box.
Newsletter sign-ups made through the newsletter form are confirmed by email before we send anything (double opt-in).
Every marketing email has a working unsubscribe link. One click, no login, takes effect straight away.
We never buy, rent, scrape, append or otherwise acquire email addresses from anywhere but our own forms.
We do not sell your personal data, and we do not run advertising or retargeting trackers.
Your details go to a course sponsor or partner only if you separately, specifically opted in to that. Otherwise sponsors see anonymised, aggregated numbers only.

4. What we collect, why, and on what lawful basis

4.1 Newsletter sign-up

What: your first name (optional), your email address, your marketing opt-in, the page you signed up from, and the date, time and IP address of the submission.
Why: to send you the weekly TYD newsletter you asked for, and to keep a record that you asked for it.
Lawful basis: your consent. You give it by ticking a box that is never pre-ticked, and confirming by email. You can withdraw it at any time (section 5).

4.2 Free account and Masterclass registration

What: your first and last name, your email address, and where you are in your career (student, foundation dentist, young dentist, dentist, other). We also record: the date and time you accepted our Terms of Use, the version of this Privacy Policy that was live at that moment, whether you ticked the optional newsletter box (and when), and whether you ticked the optional partner sharing box (and when). If you set a password, we store it in hashed form and never in plain text.
Why: to create and operate your free account, to give you access to the Masterclasses, to send you the service emails that go with an account (sign-in links, password resets, confirmations), and to be able to evidence exactly what you agreed to and when.
Lawful basis: performance of the free service you asked us to provide, for the account itself and its service emails. Consent, separately recorded, for the optional newsletter and partner sharing choices.

4.3 Event interest and bookings

What: your name, your email address, optionally your career stage, which event or event page your interest came from, and an optional marketing opt-in.
Why: to tell you when that event opens for booking, to manage your place, and to plan capacity.
Lawful basis: our legitimate interest in responding to you about the event you asked about, and your consent for any marketing beyond that event.

4.4 Research submissions

What: your name, email address, institution, career stage, the title and summary of your research, your confirmation that it is your own work and that you are happy for us to review and publish it credited to you, and an optional marketing opt-in.
Why: to review your submission, contact you about it, and publish it with your credit if we accept it.
Lawful basis: your consent to publish, and our legitimate interest in running an editorial review process. Nothing is published automatically.

4.5 Contact form and partner enquiries

What: your name, email address, the subject and the content of your message. For partner enquiries, also your organisation.
Why: to answer you.
Lawful basis: our legitimate interest in responding to enquiries. A message sent through the contact form does not add you to any mailing list.

4.6 How you use our content, once you have an account

What: if you are signed in to a TYD account, we record how you engage with our content: which articles, episodes, research posts and Masterclass modules you open, how far you scroll, how long you actively spend reading, which Masterclass modules you start and complete and roughly how much of each video you watch, which resource files you download, which events you attend, and whether you open and click our emails. From this we build a ranked “interest profile” (for example, implantology ahead of practice ownership) and an overall engagement score.
Why: to decide what content to make next, to send you the parts of the newsletter most relevant to you, and to report to sponsors in aggregate on what our audience cares about.
Lawful basis: our legitimate interest in understanding our own audience and improving what we publish. We have assessed this against your rights and think it is proportionate because it is limited to your own account, it stays within our own systems, and it drives editorial decisions rather than automated decisions about you. You have an absolute right to object to it: email us and we will switch it off for your account.
What we do not do: we do not profile anonymous visitors as individuals, we do not record keystrokes, mouse movement or screen sessions, and we do not make any decision that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you by automated means.

4.7 Technical and security data

What: IP address, browser and device type, and server and security logs.
Why: to keep the site running, to prevent abuse, spam submissions and fraud, and to investigate problems.
Lawful basis: our legitimate interest in the security and availability of our own service.

5. Email: how you get on our list, and how you get off it

5.1 How you get on our list

The only way to join our mailing list is to put yourself on it, by ticking a box on one of our own forms. Every marketing box is optional, is unticked when the page loads, and sits separately from any required box, so agreeing to our Terms of Use never signs you up for email.

We do not buy, rent, hire, append, scrape or exchange email addresses. We do not add people from conference badge scans, business cards, social media connections, or because they appeared on the podcast. There is no other route on to our list.

Sign-ups through the newsletter form are double opt-in. When you subscribe through the newsletter form, we email you a confirmation link. You are not subscribed, and we send you nothing else, until you click it.

Sign-ups made while creating an account (the optional newsletter box on the registration form) are added on the strength of that tick, which is an affirmative, specific act of consent. We store the tick, the date and time, and the version of this policy that was live at that moment. The first email you receive is a welcome email carrying the same unsubscribe link as every other email we send.

5.2 What we send, and how often

The weekly TYD newsletter, one email a week. Occasional announcements about new Masterclasses, events and webinars, including webinar and event reminders where you have registered. We do not send third party advertising email, and we do not email our list on behalf of a sponsor.

Service emails are separate: confirmations, sign-in links, password resets, event or registration details, and replies to your own messages. These are not marketing, so they are sent whether or not you have opted in to the newsletter, and they do not carry a marketing unsubscribe link.

5.3 How you get off it

Every marketing email we send carries an unsubscribe link in its footer. Clicking it takes effect immediately, needs no login and no reason, and there is no delay. You can also manage your email preferences from your account page, or email content@theyoungdentist.net and ask us to stop, and we will.

5.4 Keeping our list clean

Addresses that hard bounce are removed automatically. Addresses that soft bounce repeatedly are suppressed. Anyone who marks an email as spam is unsubscribed at once and permanently suppressed. Contacts who have not engaged for 12 months receive a re-engagement email, and contacts who have not engaged for 24 months are suppressed from all marketing sending.

6. Cookies and similar technologies

We keep this deliberately small.

Strictly necessary cookies. A sign-in cookie so you stay logged in to your account (a rolling 12 month session, refreshed when you visit, cleared when you sign out), and security tokens that stop our forms being abused. These are required for the site to work and are set without consent, as the law permits.
Engagement measurement. First party identifiers used to attach the content engagement described in section 4.6 to your own contact record. This applies to signed-in and known contacts only.
Embedded video. Masterclass and episode videos are embedded from YouTube in privacy enhanced (“no-cookie”) mode, so YouTube sets no tracking cookies until you press play. Once you play a video, Google’s own privacy policy applies to that interaction.

We do not run advertising, retargeting or cross site tracking cookies, and we do not share data with ad networks. If we ever add a third party analytics or advertising technology, we will put a consent banner in front of it first and update this policy before it goes live.

7. Who else sees your data

7.1 Our service providers

We use a small number of processors, who act only on our instructions and under a written data processing agreement:

Kinsta, our managed website hosting provider. Your data sits in our WordPress database on their infrastructure.
Postmark (Wildbit, LLC, part of ActiveCampaign), our email delivery provider, based in the United States. Postmark delivers our confirmation emails, account and service emails, form notifications and newsletters, and holds message metadata, and message content for a limited period, in its activity log.

Our contact database and our forms (FluentCRM and Fluent Forms) run inside our own WordPress installation, so your contact record is not passed out to a separate third party CRM.

We may also share data with our professional advisers where necessary, or with a regulator, court or law enforcement where we are legally required to.

7.2 Sponsors and partners, only if you opted in

When you register for an account you are offered a separate, optional, unticked box allowing us to share your details with our course sponsors and dental education partners so they can contact you directly.

If you tick it, we share your name, email address, and which Masterclass or Masterclasses you registered for with the following categories of recipient, and no others:

course and Masterclass sponsors;
dental education and training providers; and
event partners.

The consent box on the registration form describes these recipients in short as our “course sponsors and dental education partners”. That phrase means exactly the three categories above and nothing wider. If we ever want to share your details with a recipient outside them, we will ask you again rather than rely on the consent you have already given.

Each recipient becomes a controller of that data in its own right and is responsible for how it contacts you, under its own privacy policy.

If you do not tick it, or if you later untick it, nothing that identifies you is ever passed to a sponsor or partner. They receive anonymised, aggregated figures only, of the kind “40% of attendees were final year students”.

You can withdraw this consent at any time from your account page or by emailing us. Withdrawal stops any further sharing from that point.

7.3 What we never do

We do not sell your personal data. We do not rent or trade our list. We do not pass your data to data brokers.

8. Sending data outside the UK

Postmark, our email delivery provider, is based in the United States, so your email address and the content of the emails we send you are transferred there. That transfer is covered by the standard contractual clauses and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum within Postmark’s data processing agreement, which is the safeguard UK GDPR requires.

If you play an embedded YouTube video, that interaction is with Google and may involve a transfer under Google’s own arrangements.

9. How long we keep it

Your contact record. Kept while you are subscribed or hold an account. If you unsubscribe, we suppress rather than delete: we keep the minimum record needed to make sure we never email you again. If you would rather be erased entirely, ask us and we will erase you.
Inactive contacts. Re-engagement email at 12 months of no engagement, suppression from all marketing at 24 months. The profile is then retained under our legitimate interest and reviewed annually.
Form submission records. Kept as our record of consent, because we need to be able to show who ticked what, when, from which page, and against which version of this policy. These are our audit trail and are not deleted on a schedule, though they are erased on a valid erasure request.
Email delivery logs. Our sending plugin keeps a short term log of sent messages for debugging, kept for no more than 30 days. Postmark separately retains message metadata, and content for a limited period, under its own retention policy.
Your account. Kept while it is open. Closing it removes the account and its sign-in credentials.
Security and server logs. Kept for a short period for security investigation, then discarded.

10. Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to:

ask what we hold about you, and get a copy of it;
have inaccurate data corrected;
have your data erased;
restrict how we use it;
object to processing based on our legitimate interests, including the content engagement and interest profiling described in section 4.6, which we will stop for your account on request;
receive your data in a portable, machine readable format;
withdraw any consent at any time, without affecting anything we did lawfully before you withdrew it.

To exercise any of these, email content@theyoungdentist.net. We will respond within one month, and it costs you nothing.

If you are not happy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. We would rather you came to us first so we can put it right.

11. Age

The TYD website is aimed at dental students and dental professionals, and accounts are for people aged 18 or over. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has given us their data, tell us and we will delete it.

12. Security

Your data is transmitted over an encrypted connection (HTTPS). Passwords are stored hashed, never in readable form. Access to the contact database is limited to the small number of people who need it, on individual accounts. Our hosting is managed, backed up and patched.

13. Changes to this policy

We version this policy by its publication date, shown at the top of the page. When you register for an account we record which version was in force, so we always know exactly what each person agreed to.

If we make a change that affects how we use your data, we will publish the new version here and flag it in the newsletter or on the site. If we ever want to use your data for a genuinely new purpose that is not described here, we will ask you for fresh consent for that purpose rather than relying on the consent you have already given.

14. Contact

TYD NEXUS LTD (company number 16905466), registered in England and Wales, trading as The Young Dentist.
Data protection contact: content@theyoungdentist.net