Terms of service

Online Petition Hosting Service Agreement

Last Updated: 2026-07-14

This Agreement is between PetitionOnline.ie (Petitions.com Group Oy), hereinafter referred to as the Service Provider, and the author of the petition.

Service Description

PetitionOnline.ie provides an online platform for creating and hosting petitions. As the author of a petition, you are considered the Data Controller, and you decide the content of the petition, what is asked from the signatories, the purposes for processing their personal data, and the duration for which the personal data is stored.

Age Requirement

You must be at least 18 years of age.

Account Suspension and Termination

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any current or future use of the service.

Petition author's Responsibilities

The author of the petition agrees to provide all necessary content for the petition and is solely responsible for the accuracy and legality of this content.

Signatures may not be collected anonymously. Under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), signatories have the right to know who is processing their personal data. Provide the full name of the author, or the official name of a registered organization.

The author's name will be displayed publicly on the petition page and in petition listings on the platform.

Your Identity and Disclosure to Complainants

You are responsible for the content you post, including when you post under a nickname. We require you to identify yourself for two reasons. First, when you collect signatures you act as a data controller, and a data controller must always disclose their identity to the people whose data they collect. Second, if you hide behind a nickname and your content is defamatory, the person you accuse cannot reach you and we are left in the middle. For these reasons our Terms require you to appear under your own name, or the official name of a registered organization. A nickname is not permitted.

A nickname does not make you anonymous to us. We log technical data related to your use of the Service, including your IP address, and we hold the name, email address and phone number linked to your account.

No matter how genuine your cause, a nickname does not shield you from responsibility for what you post. It is not for us to judge whether your content is lawful; that is a matter for the parties and, if necessary, a court. What we will not do is stand between you and a person who says your content has harmed them. We are a small provider, and we will not take on legal risk or cost to keep your identity secret. If someone makes a substantiated complaint that your content is unlawful, the affected person has a legitimate interest in pursuing it, and we do not want to be the obstacle that prevents them.

For that reason we do not require a court order before disclosing your identifying data. The decision remains ours, however: we are not obliged to disclose, and we will not act on complaints we consider unfounded.

We may disclose the personal data that identifies you if we receive a written complaint that:

• identifies specific content as potentially unlawful (for example, defamation or the disclosure of private information);
• identifies the petition and the specific part of it concerned, the identity of the complainant, and the legal basis of the claim; and
• establishes the complainant's identity and their connection to the matter.

When we do disclose, we apply these safeguards:

• we assess each case individually;
• we disclose only the minimum data needed, for example your name, email address or phone number, and your IP address and technical logs only where genuinely necessary;
• disclosure may be made to the affected person, their legal representative or a competent authority; and
• we keep a record of each disclosure and the assessment behind it.

Reaching You as Data Controller

Separately from any complaint about unlawful content, a person whose personal data you process — whether they are named or described in the text of your petition, or they have signed it — is a data subject in relation to you, the Data Controller. Under the GDPR such a person has the right to know who the controller is and to be able to reach that controller, for example to exercise their rights of access, rectification or erasure. For that reason we may give your contact details — the name, email address and phone number linked to your account — to a person whose personal data appears in your petition or its signatures, so that they can contact you directly. This is a matter of your obligations as a controller and does not depend on the content being unlawful.

We host your petition and process its signatures on your instructions; we are not an intermediary between you and the people whose data you control. We may, entirely at our own discretion, choose to forward a straightforward message on your behalf, but we are under no obligation to do so and we are not a message-relay service. We do not have the resources to mediate, and in difficult or contested cases we will simply provide your contact details and leave the correspondence to you.

You accept these Terms before you post, so you are informed in advance that this disclosure may take place. As a rule, we do not correspond or negotiate with you before disclosing, and where a complaint meets the conditions above we may disclose your identifying data without prior notice to you. Only in exceptional cases, and entirely at our own discretion, may we choose to contact you and give you an opportunity to respond before we decide. This possibility gives you no right to be contacted and creates no obligation on us, and our decision not to contact you in any particular case does not affect the validity of our decision to disclose. Even where these conditions are met, the decision remains entirely ours, and we may decline to disclose. Removing the content afterwards does not by itself prevent disclosure in relation to a claim that has already arisen. A complainant may also apply to a court for disclosure. The legal basis for any disclosure, and your rights, are set out in our Privacy Policy.

Prohibited Data Collection

It is prohibited to request personal national ID numbers from signatories.

Intellectual Property

The author of the petition retains all rights to the content of their petition, granting the Service Provider a license to host and display the content.

Limitation of Liability

The Service Provider will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, or consequential damages arising out of this Agreement.

In no event shall the total liability of the service provider to the author of the petition for all damages, losses, and causes of action, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), or otherwise, exceed the total amount paid by the author of the petition to the service provider under this agreement.

Applicable law

This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of Finland.

Community Guidelines

By using this service you agree to our Community Guidelines, which form part of these Terms and describe what content is and is not permitted on the platform.

Inactive Petitions

We reserve the right to remove petitions that receive fewer than 5 signatures within 90 days of creation.

Modification of Terms

We reserve the right to change or modify these Terms at any time without prior notice.