What we know about you

What we hold

If you have an account: your email address, the name you chose to be known by, and whether you are a customer or a tradesperson. Your password is never stored — only a scrambled version that cannot be turned back into your password, even by us.

If you post a job: what you wrote about it, the neighbourhood, the address, a phone number, any photographs, and when you need it finished.

If you give a price: the price, what you said was included, and when you could start and finish.

After a job: the rating and the words, if the customer leaves them.

Who sees your address

One person, and only after they have paid us. Nobody bidding on your job is shown your address or your phone number. They see the neighbourhood, which is enough to work out the drive.

When you choose somebody, they pay our fee, and only then are they given your address and number. The people who did not win are never given either, and neither is anybody else.

Your photographs

A phone writes into every photo where it was taken. We throw that away before storing the picture — what we keep is the image and nothing else. We also make large photos smaller.

Photographs are shown to people who have an account and are looking at your job. They are not shown to the open internet.

What a tradesperson's record shows

Ratings and reviews are public to anyone weighing them up. The record deliberately carries no job, no price, and no customer’s name — a list of what somebody charged, house by house, is a trail back to your home, and we will not build one.

Prices, once a job is finished

We keep what a finished job was priced at so we can eventually say what work like yours really costs. Those figures carry no name, no address and no way back to a particular household, and we do not publish any of it until enough jobs have finished that no single one can be picked out.

Cookies

One, and only when you sign in. It keeps you signed in for 30 days and cannot be read by the page’s own scripts. There is no advertising cookie, no analytics cookie and no tracker, so there is no banner to click.

Who else gets it

Nobody. We do not sell it, share it, or hand it to advertisers. The only people who see any of it are the ones this page has already named.

We send email — confirmations, password resets, and word of work worth knowing about — which means your address passes through the service that carries it, as every email does.

Asking us to stop

Write to us and we will tell you everything we hold about you, correct anything wrong, or delete your account. Jobs that have already finished keep their price in the anonymous figures described above, because those can no longer be traced to you.

Being straight with you

The Bid Room is new and is being built by one person. This page describes what the software actually does today, not what a lawyer would advise us to promise. If something here turns out to be wrong, we would rather be told than not.