Privacy

Sponsored businesses have paid for placement. Payment is what makes a business eligible to appear in a Sponsored section — it is never a claim that Trades Hub has checked, recommended, endorsed, or Featured that business. Featured is a separate, evidence-based check; a business can be Sponsored, Featured, both, or neither.

Personalisation is entirely optional. By default, Trades Hub shows Sponsored businesses using only your current page (the category or town you’re browsing) and a fair daily rotation among eligible paid listings. Nothing about your browsing is remembered unless you explicitly accept the “Personalised sponsored suggestions” option, shown next to every Sponsored section.

Trades Hub never remembers your name, email, phone number, exact search text, IP address, device fingerprint, or anything about your health, beliefs, background, or finances. If you type a search term, Trades Hub only ever tries to match it to an existing category name (for example, matching “plumber” to the “Plumbing & Heating” category) to decide what’s relevant right now — the words you typed are never stored or sent anywhere.

Where this is stored. These categories, towns, and business ids are stored only in your own browser (using standard browser local storage), never on a Trades Hub server, and never shared between your devices. Trades Hub does not build or keep a server-side profile of your behaviour for this feature. Anything remembered is automatically deleted after 30 days without you needing to do anything.

What’s sent to Trades Hub’s server. To work out which paid listings might be relevant to you, your browser sends a small, bounded set of ids — the category, town, and recently-shown-business ids listed above, nothing else — to calculate a recommendation. That request is used only to compute the result you see; it does not create or add to a stored profile.

Trades Hub does not sell or share this data. None of the information described on this page is sold, rented, or shared with advertising networks or any other third party.

Declining changes nothing else. If you decline or never respond, Sponsored sections, search, and every other part of Trades Hub work exactly the same — you simply see the current-page and rotation-based Sponsored selection instead of a personalised one.

Changing your mind. The control at the top of this section always reflects and lets you change your current choice, even on a visit where no Sponsored section happens to be showing anywhere on the site. The same “Clear personalisation data” and “Turn off personalisation” options also appear next to every Sponsored section itself. Clearing data erases everything remembered while keeping personalisation switched on; turning it off withdraws consent and erases everything remembered immediately, in every open browser tab. You can turn it back on at any time from either place.

What’s sent, and to whom. The name, email address and message you enter on the Contact us page are sent directly to the Trades Hub team by email, using Resend, a transactional email provider. That content — your name, email address and message — is never written to a Trades Hub database or table; the only record of it is the resulting email in the team’s own inbox.

Abuse-prevention metadata (not your message). Separately from the message itself, Trades Hub briefly stores a small amount of technical metadata to stop the form being spammed: a random submission id, and a one-way, pseudonymous, keyed hash of your IP address (not the address itself, and not reversible back to it). Neither your name, email address, nor message is ever part of this record. It’s kept for at most one day, after which it is deleted automatically.

Retention. Trades Hub keeps the email itself for as long as it keeps any other business correspondence, and deletes it when it’s no longer needed. Resend briefly processes the message in order to deliver it and may retain its own short-term delivery logs under its own policy — see Resend’s privacy policy for how they handle that.

Who this doesn’t cover. This is separate from owner-notification emails (listing approvals, rejections, and similar account emails), which are sent automatically about your own listing and are a durable, auditable record tied to that listing — not something you submit through a form.

What you give us. When you ask for quotes we collect your name, email address, your town, the type of service, a description of the job, when you need it, and optionally a phone number, a budget range and how you prefer to be contacted. We also record which version of the wording above the confirmation box you agreed to, and when.

Nothing is shared until you confirm. We email you a link and your request is held until you click it; the link works for 24 hours. If you don’t confirm, nothing is shared and we delete the request after about a week.

Who sees it. After you confirm, we send your name, contact details, town and job description to up to 3 approved local businesses that offer the service in your area, and show you which ones on your request page. Which businesses we choose does not depend on whether they pay for promotion or are Featured. Businesses may use your details only to answer your request and must not add you to a marketing list. We do not sell your details or share them with anyone else. We email each business to tell them they have a new request, and they can see the details by logging in to their account.

Why we use your details. We use them to pass on the request you asked us to send, once you have confirmed it. You can stop this at any time by withdrawing your request.

Your control. You can withdraw your request at any time from your request page. Businesses can then no longer see your details and are asked to delete them. You can also report a business, or ask us to delete your details immediately by contacting us.

Your rights. You can ask to see the details we hold about your request, have them corrected or deleted, or object to how we use them. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your details you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

How long we keep it. Your personal details are removed 90 days after a request is closed or withdrawn. A request that is still open after 30 days is closed automatically. We keep a record of what happened (for example that a request was sent and replied to) without your personal details, to run and improve the service.

Emails. We send you only the emails about your request (to confirm it, to tell you a business has replied, and to confirm a withdrawal), using Resend, a transactional email provider. We send marketing emails only if you tick the separate, optional box — and you can still get quotes without it.

Abuse prevention. To stop the form being misused we briefly keep one-way, keyed hashes of your IP address and email address — not the addresses themselves, and not reversible to them — for at most one day.