Privacy Policy

How a job request is handled today

Completing the "Post a Job" wizard creates a real job request: it is stored securely, it triggers one internal email notification to houseclearance.co's own team mailbox, and staff manually pass suitable details on to licensed carriers. Here is exactly what happens today if you fill it in:

Steps 1-7 of the wizard create a server-side draft as you go, one step at a time.
Contact details (name, email, phone) are stored with that draft once you reach Step 7, before any final submission exists.
A draft is kept for up to 7 days from your last activity on it (its "TTL"), after which it becomes eligible for deletion and is removed the next time our manual data-cleanup process is run (see "Retention" below for how that process currently works) -- unless you complete final submission first (see "Email verification and final submission" below), at which point the record is kept as a submitted job record instead of expiring.
Before you can submit, we ask you to verify your email address with a 6-digit code, sent to the email address you entered. Only a keyed one-way hash of the code is ever stored; the plaintext code is never written to any log, screenshot, or page you can see.
Submitting the wizard, after email verification, creates a job record inside our system, sends one internal email notification to houseclearance.co's own team mailbox, and creates a lightweight customer identity (an opaque reference tied to your verified email -- no password, no account dashboard, no profile page). A member of our team then manually reviews the request and decides which suitable licensed carriers to pass relevant details to, by email or phone/SMS outside this website -- see "Consent to share your job request" below for exactly what's shared and with whom.
No payment data is collected anywhere on this site. No photo upload exists anywhere in the wizard.

There is no automated in-platform carrier dashboard or bidding system: carrier-sharing is a staff-mediated process, done by a person reviewing your request and contacting suitable carriers directly. Automated carrier-matching tools are a possible future addition, not part of the current service.

What we collect

Collected in the job-request wizard

Filling in the "Post a Job" wizard stores exactly this, and nothing else, with your draft:

Postcode
Clearance category (e.g. house clearance, garden clearance)
Property type and scope (whole property or selected rooms)
Rooms, item categories, and approximate volume
Access and logistics details (floor level, lift, stairs, parking, communal entrance, concierge/managing-agent notes)
Dismantling and special-item information (hazardous items, donation/reuse preference)
Date and urgency preferences
Contact name, email and phone, entered at Step 7
Authority confirmation and note, where applicable (only asked when you tell us you're booking on someone else's behalf)
An email-verification record: a note that your (normalized) email address was verified, when, and against which version of this policy -- never the verification code itself, and never a second copy of your email address kept only for this purpose (see "Email verification and final submission" below)
If you complete final submission: an opaque, randomly-generated public job reference; the submission timestamp; and a lightweight customer identity record (an opaque reference derived from your verified email, holding no password and no separate copy of your email)

Explicitly, none of the following exists today: we do not collect your full street address (only the postcode above); there is no photo upload anywhere in the wizard; no password-based account or dashboard is ever created; and no payment information is collected anywhere on this site. A submitted job request does create one internal notification event for our own team mailbox (test-only delivery today -- no real email is ever sent for it), and no carrier ever receives your job automatically or directly from this website: our staff do share suitable job details with licensed carriers by email or phone/SMS, manually, after reviewing that notification -- see "Consent to share your job request" below for exactly what that involves.

Email verification and final submission

Before a draft can be finally submitted, Step 9 asks you to verify the email address on it with a 6-digit code, sent to that email address. Only a keyed one-way hash of the code is ever stored; the code itself is never written to the database, a log file, or any page. Verifying links your draft to a normalized-email blind index (a one-way, keyed hash of your email used only for matching and abuse prevention) rather than to your plaintext or encrypted email, so verification, rate-limiting, and deduplication never need to decrypt your email to work.

Once verified, Step 10 lets you confirm final submission. Submitting changes the draft's status to "submitted", assigns it the opaque public reference mentioned above, creates (or reuses, if you've submitted before with the same verified email) a lightweight customer identity linked to the job, and sends one internal email notification to houseclearance.co's own team mailbox so a member of staff can review it. No booking or payment is created by submission itself, and no carrier is contacted automatically -- carrier-sharing is the separate, staff-mediated step described under "Consent to share your job request" below. A submitted job does not become eligible for deletion under the 7-day draft rule (only drafts do); see "Retention" below for how long verification records and submitted job records are kept, and how "eligible for deletion" currently becomes an actual deletion.

Planned future data (not collected today)

The following are planned for a future, more built-out version of this service and are described here so this policy stays accurate once they exist -- none of them are current functionality:

Full street address (beyond the postcode collected today)
Photographs of the items/property -- if this is added, uploaded photos will be handled through secure, private access rather than public links or unencrypted email attachments, so only the people who need to see a specific job (our team, and the carriers we share that job with) can view them
A password-based account, login, or dashboard (today: no password ever exists, only an opaque identity reference)
Booking and payment information

How we use it

This information is used to generate your price estimate, and to let our team review your submitted job and share the relevant details with suitable licensed carriers so that interested carriers can provide a quote. This sharing is carried out manually by our staff, by email or phone/SMS to carriers, rather than through an automated in-platform carrier dashboard or bidding system. If you accept a carrier's quote, we'll pass on what's needed for them to get in touch and arrange the work. We won't use the details you submit for anything beyond getting your job quoted and, if you choose to proceed, booked. See "Current status" above for exactly what happens to a draft before it's submitted, and "Consent to share your job request" below for what's shared once it is.

Who it's shared with

By submitting a job, you consent to us sharing the details needed to price it (postcode, description, access notes, and photos where provided) with suitable licensed carriers, since that's what lets them quote accurately. This sharing is done manually by our staff -- your job details are sent to suitable carriers by email or phone/SMS outside this website, not shown on a live carrier dashboard or bidding board inside the site. We only share what a carrier needs to quote and do the job; we don't share more than that. Direct contact details are shared with a carrier once you've accepted their quote, so the job can be arranged. We won't sell or share your data with third parties for marketing purposes. Before any of that carrier-sharing happens, submitting a job also sends one internal email notification to houseclearance.co's own team mailbox, so a member of staff can review the request first -- see "Consent to share your job request" below for the full detail. A draft that is never finally submitted is not shared with anyone: it stays in our database, described under "Current status" above, until it becomes eligible for deletion under the 7-day draft rule and is removed by our manual data-cleanup process.

By completing and submitting the "Post a Job" wizard, you consent to houseclearance.co sharing the details you provide -- your contact name, email and phone, your postcode, your job description, and the other job details captured across the wizard (clearance category, property type and scope, rooms and item categories, approximate volume, access and logistics notes, dismantling and special-handling information, and your date/urgency preferences) -- with suitable licensed waste carriers, for the purpose of obtaining a quote for your job. This is the same staff-mediated sharing described under "Who it's shared with" above: at initial launch, a member of our internal team reviews your submitted request and manually passes the relevant details to carriers by email or phone/SMS outside this website, rather than through an automated in-platform bidding or dashboard system.

On submission, a copy of your job details is also sent to houseclearance.co's own internal team mailbox, so a member of staff can review the request and decide which carriers it's suitable to pass on to -- this internal notification is a different step from, and happens before, the carrier-sharing described above.

Retention and deletion of a submitted job request: a submitted job request is kept as a job record for up to 30 days after submission, after which it becomes eligible for deletion; it is then actually removed the next time our manual data-cleanup process is run, the same mechanism and the same 30-day period described under "Retention" above for any submitted job -- there is no separate or different retention period for a job you submit through this wizard. As noted under "Retention" above, there is currently no automatic, unattended schedule running that cleanup on a recurring basis, so an eligible record is only actually removed the next time someone runs it by hand; we intend to put an automatic schedule in place.

Tracking and analytics

This site does not currently run analytics, advertising, or third-party tracking scripts of any kind. We make no claims here about tracking beyond what's actually running - see the Cookie Policy for the current, honest state of that and what would change if this is added in future.

Retention

Today:

A draft that is never submitted (including any contact details on it) is kept for up to 7 days from your last activity on it, then becomes eligible for deletion.
An unverified email-verification code (a "challenge") expires 10 minutes after it's requested; only a keyed one-way hash of it is ever stored. Once it reaches a final state -- expired, superseded by a newer code, or already used -- it becomes eligible for deletion 24 hours later.
A verified email-verification record (the fact of verification, not the code) is kept alongside the draft or submitted job it belongs to for as long as that record exists, and is invalidated immediately (though not immediately deleted) if you change the email on that draft or if this notice's wording changes materially -- either way, you'd need to verify again before submitting. Once invalidated, it becomes eligible for deletion 30 days later.
A submitted job does not become eligible for deletion under the 7-day draft rule -- it instead becomes eligible for deletion 30 days after submission, since there is no live booking or dispute process yet for it to be kept alongside.
A lightweight customer identity created on submission is kept only as long as at least one job references it, and becomes eligible for deletion once none does (in practice, once every job linked to it has itself been deleted after its own 30-day period above).
A temporary abuse-prevention counter (how many verification codes or submission attempts have recently come from the same draft, session, email, or a pseudonymous, separately-keyed representation of your IP address -- never your raw IP address itself, and never stored on your job or customer-identity record) is kept only for the short counting window it protects (minutes to a day, depending on what it's counting), plus a short safety margin, then becomes eligible for deletion.

Today, records become eligible for deletion after the stated period and are removed when our data-cleanup process (npm run cleanup-drafts) is run -- there is currently no automatic, unattended schedule running that process on a recurring basis, so an eligible record is only actually removed the next time someone runs it by hand. We intend to put an automatic schedule in place.

As the service develops further, we intend to keep job and contact data only for as long as it's needed to complete a booking and handle any follow-up (such as a dispute), and to delete or anonymise it after that; the exact long-term retention periods are still being finalised.

Your rights

A draft you never submit, including any contact details on it, is not kept indefinitely: it expires 7 days after your last activity on it and becomes eligible for deletion (see "Retention" above for what "eligible" currently means in practice). A draft you finally submit is instead kept as a submitted job record (see "Retention" above) -- there is no operational deletion request route for a submitted job yet (see below).

There is currently no dedicated privacy-request inbox -- we are not yet able to action a data access, correction, or deletion request sent to us through a self-service route. If you want to make such a request today, email office@houseclearance.co and we'll handle it manually; a dedicated privacy contact route is planned and will be published on this page once it exists.

Carrier registration

Separately from the customer "Post a Job" wizard described above, Work with Us lets someone start a carrier registration application. This section describes exactly what that flow collects and does with it today -- it is a different system from the customer wizard, with its own session, its own database table, and its own encryption context; nothing on this page about the customer wizard applies to it and vice versa.

Today, a carrier registration application:

remains a draft application throughout -- no carrier account is created or approved by any part of this flow yet;
is never independently verified: Environment Agency (EA) waste-carrier registration information is entirely self-declared by the applicant and is not automatically checked against the EA's public register;
is never published and is not shown to any customer -- there are no live jobs, no bidding, and no carrier/customer matching yet;
collects no payment or payout information of any kind.

What the carrier registration flow collects, once you reach the point in the form that asks for it:

Full name, email address, and telephone number
Acceptance of this carrier-specific privacy notice, and which version of it you accepted
Business structure (sole trader, limited company, or partnership), trading name, and legal business name where different
Companies House number, where the business is a limited company
Business address (address lines, town/city, postcode)
Confirmation that you're authorised to act for the business
Environment Agency waste-carrier registration declaration: registration number, tier, the name shown on the registration, expiry date where known, and your confirmation that this information is accurate
Coverage boroughs and, optionally, postcode prefixes you can cover
Operating radius or travel preference, which days you normally work, and any other availability notes
The state of your email-verification OTP challenge (whether one is active, expired, or verified) -- never the verification code itself, which is generated by the same test-only delivery adapter as the customer wizard's and is never sent to a real inbox

Contact details, business identity, and EA-registration and availability free text are encrypted at rest, the same authenticated encryption approach used for the customer wizard's contact details (see "What we collect" above), under this application's own encryption context so a carrier ciphertext can never be confused with a customer job's. Business structure, EA registration tier, coverage boroughs, postcode prefixes, and working days are stored as structured values from a fixed list rather than free text.

A carrier application in draft or email-verified status is kept for up to 7 days from your last meaningful activity on it, then becomes eligible for deletion; a carrier email-verification challenge that has reached a final state (expired, invalidated, or already used) becomes eligible for deletion 24 hours later. As with the rest of this page, "eligible for deletion" becomes an actual deletion the next time our manual data-cleanup process is run (see "Retention" above) -- there is no automatic, unattended schedule running it yet.

If this carrier-specific privacy notice is updated, you'll be asked to review and accept the current version again before continuing past account and contact identity -- your other, unrelated answers are kept, not cleared, when that happens.

Changes to this policy

This policy reflects the service as it operates today and will be reviewed and updated as it develops further, particularly if analytics, payment processing, or new data flows are introduced.

Frequently asked questions

Do you share my phone number with every carrier?

No. An unsubmitted draft is never shared with anyone, so nobody sees its phone number. Once you submit a job, the carriers we share it with, so they can quote, see the job details needed to price it -- postcode, description, access notes, and any photos -- but not your name or direct contact details. Direct contact details are shared only with the carrier whose quote you accept.

Can I delete my data after a job is done?

Today: an unsubmitted draft becomes eligible for deletion 7 days after your last activity on it, and a submitted job record becomes eligible for deletion 30 days after submission -- both are then actually removed the next time our data-cleanup process is run (see "Retention" above; there is currently no automatic schedule running that process, only a manual one), with no action needed from you either way. There is no dedicated self-service privacy-request route to ask for earlier deletion of either one yet (see "Your rights" above for the email address to use instead). We intend to put a dedicated privacy-request route and a regularly-run cleanup schedule in place, subject to anything we're required to retain for legal or dispute purposes.

Do you use my data for marketing?

No. Your data isn't used for anything beyond keeping your draft while you fill in the wizard, producing your price estimate, and -- once you submit a job -- letting our team review it and connect you with suitable carriers for a quote. We never use it for third-party marketing.