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Trades Hub

Privacy

What Trades Hub remembers about you when you browse, search, and use Sponsored recommendations — and how to control it.

Personalised sponsored suggestions

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.

If you accept, Trades Hub may remember, on this device only:

  • categories of business you view or search for;
  • towns you view or search for;
  • the categories and towns of businesses whose profile you view;
  • which businesses you click to call, email, or visit the website of;
  • the ids of Sponsored businesses recently shown to you, so the same one isn’t repeated every visit.

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.