Our Digital Commitment

We are based in Ireland. We believe Europe is our country.

 

That conviction shapes not just how we teach, but how we run. The tools we choose, the servers we use, the companies we pay — these are not neutral decisions. At Travelling Languages, we are building our infrastructure on European values: transparency, data sovereignty, and genuine independence from jurisdictions that do not share them.

This is a long-term commitment, not a marketing claim. Here is exactly where we stand and where we are going.

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Our infrastructure is European

Our primary servers run on Hetzner, a German provider, with data held entirely within the EU and governed by European law. Additional services run on Euronodes in Lisbon, Portugal. Domain registration and DNS services are managed through OVH in France.

We do not use US hyperscalers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud — for any core infrastructure. We are aware that even when these providers host data in Europe, it remains subject to the US CLOUD Act, which grants American authorities the right to access that data regardless of where it physically sits. That is not acceptable to us.

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Our software is open

We are migrating our workstations from Windows to Ubuntu Linux, and replacing Microsoft Office with LibreOffice across the school. Our file sharing, collaboration, and document management runs on Microsoft365 but we are moving it soon on Nextcloud, an open-source platform developed in Germany: this will be self hosted as well.

For web analytics, we have abandoned Google Analytics in favour of a self-hosted Matomo instance. We track our own data, on our own server, under our own control — and none of it leaves Europe.

We are also moving away from Microsoft 365 and Microsoft staff accounts. Our email is self-hosted. Our identity management will follow.

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Our AI is principled

Our AI-powered platforms — including our English placement assessor and student-facing tools — are planned to transition to Mistral AI as their primary engine. Mistral is a French company building open-source large language models that are genuinely world-class, and whose architecture allows for transparent, auditable, on-premise deployment. We believe this is the right model for AI in education.

We do keep one door open. We continue to work with Anthropic and their Claude models, and we are honest about why: their approach to AI safety and ethics is, in our view, genuinely serious in a way that is rare in the industry. Their published commitments to responsible AI development, their transparency about model behaviour, and their focus on alignment over capability-racing reflect values we respect. We will continue to evaluate this as the landscape evolves.

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Where we are now

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A note on honesty

We are not yet fully there. Some tools we use today are proprietary or involve non-European providers because the alternative is not yet mature enough for our operational needs. We will say so plainly rather than claim a sovereignty we have not fully achieved.

But the direction is clear, and we are not turning back. Every renewal decision, every new tool evaluation, every infrastructure choice runs through the same question: is there a European, open-source alternative that meets our needs?

Usually, the answer is yes.