Privacy policy

What we collect, and why

If you read the site without an account

We count page views and clicks so companies can see how their listing performs. We do not store your IP address for this. Instead we derive a one-way hash from your address and a coarse browser family, mixed with the current date, so the value rotates daily and cannot be linked back to you or followed from one day to the next. No cookie is set for analytics. If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, we record nothing at all.

If you create a reader account

Your name, email address and password (stored only as a hash). Your name appears on reviews you write. Your email address is never published and is never shared with the companies you review. We also store the IP address a review was submitted from, which is used for moderation and abuse detection and is never displayed.

If you send a company an enquiry

Your name, email, optional phone number and message are passed to that company so they can reply. They become the recipient of that information. We keep a copy for 24 months and then anonymise it.

If you claim or manage a listing

Account details as above, plus records of what you changed and when. If you claim a listing by uploading a document, that document is stored on a private disk, is visible only to moderators, every viewing is logged, and it is deleted 90 days after the claim is resolved. The decision is kept; the document is not.

If you complain about a company through us

A complaint you send through this site goes to that company and to nobody else. We never publish it — not the text, not the fact that you made one, and not any count or rate derived from it. It does not affect the company’s rating, and it is not a review.

We keep the thread while it is open, because the dates in it are often the evidence an ombudsman asks for. Once it is closed we keep it for 24 months and then anonymise it: the record that a complaint was made and answered survives, your account of it does not. An open complaint is never anonymised however old it is.

Please do not put passwords, card numbers, full account numbers or national insurance and social security numbers into a complaint. You will not need them, and if we find them we will stop carrying the complaint and tell you why — your dispute is unaffected and every other route stays open to you.

If a company invites you to review it

A company that uses this site can ask its own customers to review it. When it does, it gives us an email address it already holds. We delete that address as soon as the invitation email has been sent — we keep only a one-way fingerprint of it, so we can tell that the same person has already been invited without being able to work out who they are. We never use an address given to us this way for anything else: no marketing, no newsletter, no second email. A company gets one invitation per customer, and the record of it is deleted after 180 days unless a review came of it.

The company is the source of that address and remains responsible for having a lawful basis to share it with us. If you were invited and would rather we held nothing at all, write to us and we will remove the fingerprint too.

What we never ask for

We will never ask you for a password to another service, a full card number, a bank login, a national insurance or social security number, or a complete financial statement — not to write a review, not to verify one, not for any reason. If something claiming to be us asks for these, it is not us.

Who else sees your data

• Companies you contact receive the enquiry you sent them.
• Our payment processor handles card details for featured placement. We never see or store a card number.
• Our email provider delivers the messages we send you.
• Nobody buys this data. We do not sell personal information and we do not run third-party advertising trackers.

Your control

• See it. Account settings has an export that downloads everything we hold about you.
• Correct it. You can edit your name and email in account settings.
• Turn off email. Notification settings control every non-essential email. Security and confirmation messages are always sent and cannot be switched off.
• Delete it. Deleting your account removes your personal details. Reviews you wrote keep their text but lose your name and email, because removing published reviews wholesale would let anyone erase criticism by closing an account.

Security

Passwords are hashed and checked against known-breached password lists. Two-factor authentication is available on every account. You can see active sessions and sign other devices out. Uploads are scanned before they are stored, and image uploads have their embedded location data stripped.

Contact

To ask about anything here, to request your data, or to complain about how we have handled it, contact us through the site. If you are not satisfied with our answer you may have the right to complain to a data protection authority in your country.