Privacy policy

This policy explains what personal data we process when you visit i5forum.org or use one of its forms, why we process it, and what rights you have.

Who is responsible

The website i5forum.org and the World Industry 5.0 Forum are run by Sustainable Intelligence ASBL, a non-profit association under Belgian law, which is the data controller.

Registered office: Chaussée de Charleroi 110, 1060 Saint-Gilles, Belgium
Enterprise number (BCE/KBO): 0778.915.938, RPM Bruxelles
Contact for privacy questions: info [at] i5forum.org

The website and its AI features, including i5Guide, are developed and maintained by SUSTIN C.I.C. (United Kingdom) on behalf of Sustainable Intelligence ASBL.

The forms on this site

Each form asks only for what we need to answer you. Fields marked optional can be left empty.

Data: your email address.
Purpose: sending programme news, host city updates and the call for contributions, a few times a year.
Legal basis: your consent (Article 6(1)(a) GDPR). You can withdraw it at any time by writing to info [at] i5forum.org; withdrawing does not affect anything sent before.
Retention: Until you unsubscribe. Your address is deleted within 30 days after that.

Host city expression of interest

Data: city or region, country, contact name, role, email address, preferred edition year and your message.
Purpose: answering your enquiry, sending the host city prospectus, arranging an introductory call and running the host city selection.
Legal basis: steps taken at your request before a possible agreement (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR) and our legitimate interest in answering enquiries and organising the host city selection (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).
Retention: 24 months after our last contact. If an agreement follows, for the duration of that agreement and any period required by law.

Partner pack request

Data: name, role, organisation, country, email address, the partnership you are interested in and your message.
Purpose: sending you the partner pack and following up on your request.
Legal basis: steps taken at your request before a possible agreement (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR) and our legitimate interest in answering enquiries (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).
Retention: 24 months after our last contact. If an agreement follows, for the duration of that agreement and any period required by law.

Academic partner expression of interest

Data: name, role, institution, country, email address, areas of interest, preferred roles and your message.
Purpose: answering your enquiry, arranging an introductory call and agreeing a possible role in the Forum.
Legal basis: steps taken at your request before a possible agreement (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR) and our legitimate interest in answering enquiries (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).
Retention: 24 months after our last contact. If an agreement follows, for the duration of that agreement and any period required by law.

Challenge, solution, speaker and paper submissions

The three submission forms on the Take part pages (submit a challenge, submit a solution or innovation, propose a speaker or session) and the Call for Papers form on the Research page help us build the programme of i5Dialogues 2027 and i5Forum 2028.

Data: name, role, organisation, email address, country and the details of your submission (for challenges: type of organisation, related tracks, title, description, the outcome you are looking for, timeframe and whether we may contact you about matching solutions; for solutions: type of organisation, related tracks, solution name, description, stage, evidence of results, website and what you are interested in; for speaker proposals: whether you propose yourself or someone else, format, topic, track, description and a link; for papers: affiliation, co-authors, theme, submission type, title, abstract, keywords and a link to the preprint or full paper). Please don’t include confidential information.
Purpose: curating the programme (circles, reverse pitches, labs, the deal room, the i5Awards and sessions) and matching challenges with solutions. Papers are also reviewed by the Forum’s scientific advisory group.
Legal basis: your consent (Article 6(1)(a) GDPR), given with the checkbox on the form. You can withdraw it at any time by writing to info [at] i5forum.org; withdrawing does not affect anything done before.
Sharing with participants: only if you tick the separate box on the form, we may share your submission and contact details with participants whose challenge or solution matches it, or with the organisers of a matching session. Without that tick, your submission stays with the organising team.
Retention: 24 months after our last contact. If your submission becomes part of the programme, the programme details we publish stay online for as long as the edition’s pages do.

Each form is delivered by email to the Forum mailbox for that kind of request: the general mailbox for the updates sign-up, the host city mailbox for host city enquiries the partnerships mailbox for partner pack and academic partner requests, the pilots mailbox for challenge and solution submissions and the speakers mailbox for speaker proposals and paper submissions. These mailboxes are run by Sustainable Intelligence ASBL. Submissions are not stored in a database on this website, and nothing you type is kept in your browser.

Emails you send us

If you write to one of the addresses listed on the contact page, we use your email address, your message and anything you attach to answer you, on the basis of our legitimate interest in answering enquiries (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR), or to take steps you ask for before a possible agreement (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR). We keep this correspondence for 24 months after our last contact, or longer if an agreement follows and the law requires it.

i5Guide, the site assistant

When the site offers i5Guide, you can ask it questions about the Forum. i5Guide is an AI assistant: your messages, the page you are on and your language are sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, to generate a reply. We do not store your conversations; the conversation is kept only in your browser tab and is deleted when you close the tab or choose “Clear”. Our server logs never contain the text of your messages. Please don’t enter personal or confidential information. Before your first message you confirm, with a checkbox, that you understand this; the confirmation is kept only in your browser tab. Your first message is checked by Cloudflare Turnstile (see below). Messages with obvious explicit terms are blocked in your browser and never sent. As part of each reply, the AI assistant also checks whether your message is about the Forum; after repeated off-topic or inappropriate messages the conversation ends. To prevent misuse, we count conversations and messages per IP address and day; the counters hold a one-way code instead of your IP address, expire within a day and never contain your messages. We offer the assistant on the basis of our legitimate interest in answering visitors’ questions (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Protection against spam

When you start filling in a form, the page loads Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that the submission comes from a person rather than an automated script. Turnstile is not loaded on pages you only read. To do its check it processes browser, device and network signals, including your IP address, and it may set a cookie or similar storage when a check is needed. We use it on the basis of our legitimate interest in protecting the forms against abuse (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). Cloudflare explains its cookies on its cookie policy page.

Visits to the site

The site is hosted by Cloudflare. To deliver pages and keep the site secure, Cloudflare processes technical data such as your IP address, the page requested and your browser type. This is based on our legitimate interest in running a secure website (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Visits are measured with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which uses no cookies; the script is not loaded for visitors in the EU. It does not follow you across other websites and gives us totals such as the number of page views.

Cookies and local storage

The site sets no cookies of its own. It uses no analytics, advertising or social media cookies and no third-party trackers. Pages are loaded from i5forum.org and the hero video from media.i5forum.org, both run for the Forum; fonts and scripts are served from i5forum.org itself. The one exception is the Cloudflare Web Analytics script, which visitors outside the EU load from static.cloudflareinsights.com; it uses no cookies or storage on your device (see “Visits to the site”).

Your browser may keep the following items on your device. None of them identifies you or follows you across pages or websites, and the site’s own items stay in your browser: they are never sent to us.

theme (local storage, i5forum.org). Remembers light or dark mode, only if you switch it with the theme button. Kept until you clear the site’s data in your browser.
i5-gpu (session storage, i5forum.org). Remembers whether your device can draw the animated graphics smoothly, so this check runs once per visit instead of on every page. Deleted when you close the tab.
i5guide:open, i5guide:consent and i5guide:state (session storage, i5forum.org; only where the site offers i5Guide and only if you open it). Whether the i5Guide panel is open, your confirmation of the notice shown before the first message, and your conversation, so they survive moving between pages. Deleted when you close the tab; “Clear” deletes the conversation.
Cloudflare Turnstile (challenges.cloudflare.com, a third party; only when you start filling in a form or send your first i5Guide message). Turnstile may set a cookie or similar storage of its own when it needs to check that you are a person (see “Protection against spam”). Cloudflare explains its cookies on its cookie policy page.

Each of these items is needed for a feature you use or ask for (the theme you choose, the page you asked to see, the assistant you open, or the protection of a form you send), and none is used for analytics or marketing. We therefore do not ask for consent to store them.

You can inspect, block or clear site storage in your browser settings. Blocking Turnstile may prevent a form or an i5Guide message from being sent.

Who receives your data

We do not sell your data or share it for marketing. These service providers handle it for us:

Hosting and delivery. Cloudflare, Inc. hosts the site and provides spam protection (Turnstile), visit statistics (Web Analytics) and the delivery of form submissions to our mailboxes (Email Service). Cloudflare may process data outside the European Economic Area, including in the United States. Where it does, the transfer relies on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.
Email and workspace. Our email and workspace provider hosts the Forum’s mailboxes and stores submissions and emails in Japan, which the European Commission recognises as providing an adequate level of data protection. Where personal data is transferred outside the European Economic Area, we rely on safeguards recognised under the GDPR, such as adequacy decisions or the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses.
AI assistant. Anthropic generates i5Guide’s replies from the messages you send it, when the site offers the assistant. Anthropic may process them outside the European Economic Area, including in the United States; where it does, we rely on safeguards recognised under the GDPR, such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses.

Your rights

You can ask us to access, correct or delete your personal data, to restrict or object to its use, and to receive it in a portable format. Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time. Write to info [at] i5forum.org; we answer within one month.

If you think we have not handled your data correctly, you can complain to the Belgian Data Protection Authority (dataprotectionauthority.be).

We do not use your data for automated decisions or profiling.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we update this page and the date at the top.