Privacy

Accounts hold an email address, a display name, and optionally a phone number, a city and a profile image.

Provider listings hold a business name, description, years of experience, the city and region they work from, contact phone, address line and postal code — and, only if the provider sets one from their own device, an approximate location rounded to about a kilometre — along with the services offered, indicative prices and weekly availability.

If you choose “Use my current location” to search, your browser’s reading of where you are is rounded to about a kilometre and kept for 30 minutes in a cookie on your own device, which only the provider directory reads. It is used to work out which providers are near you; it is never stored in the database or added to a link. Stopping, or entering a village or city instead, deletes it.

Bookings hold the service requested, the scheduled time, the service address, any notes the customer adds, and a snapshot of the customer’s name and phone number taken at the time of booking so the record stays accurate if the profile later changes.

The platform also stores messages between a customer and a provider, reviews and ratings, notifications, and — for administrative decisions about provider listings — a record of who made the decision, when, and why.

Access is enforced by the database itself rather than by the application asking politely. In practice that means:

Anonymous visitors see only approved provider listings whose owner’s account is active, and then only the public parts: business name, description, city and region, experience, indicative prices, weekly availability, published reviews and the rating calculated from them.

Location is published as city and region only. A provider’s phone number, street address and postal code are not readable without signing in — the postal code was removed from public access before launch, because for someone working from home it amounts to a home address.

A provider’s approximate location is readable by no one through the platform, the provider included. It is used only inside the database, to work out how far a provider is from someone searching near themselves, and only that distance — rounded up to the next half kilometre — is ever shown.

Customers and providers see their own bookings, their own message threads, their own notifications and their own reviews. A message thread is readable only by its two participants.

Administrators can see provider listings under review and the record of administrative decisions, which is what allows listings to be approved or rejected.

The platform does not process payments, so it holds no card details, bank details or transaction records.

There is no advertising on this platform and no advertising or analytics tracking of any kind. No third-party trackers are embedded, and no profiling is carried out for advertising purposes.

The application does not set cookies for tracking. The cookies it does use are the ones required to keep you signed in.

There is no self-service deletion yet, and it is worth being precise about what deletion would currently do rather than describing something tidier than the truth.

Where an account can be deleted, the profile goes and so does the data that belongs only to it — notifications, message threads, and a provider listing with its services and availability.

Some records stop an account being deleted outright rather than being quietly removed with it. A booking is a shared record between two people, and an administrative decision records who made it; deleting one side would damage the other side’s record. So an account involved in bookings cannot simply be erased — the deletion is refused rather than partially performed. This is a real limitation, not a policy choice dressed up as one, and any deletion request would have to be handled with it in mind.

How deletion is requested and handled — including what happens to an account that cannot be deleted — needs to be defined, documented here and reviewed before launch.

The following are genuinely undecided rather than omitted by oversight, and must be settled before this platform operates publicly: the operating entity and its contact route, retention periods, the lawful basis for each kind of processing, named sub-processors including the hosting and database provider, international transfer arrangements, and the process for access and deletion requests.