Privacy Policy

NI Trades is an online directory and introduction platform serving homeowners and tradespeople in Northern Ireland. For the purposes of UK data protection law, NI Trades is the data controller for personal data collected through the platform.

For any privacy enquiry or to exercise your rights, contact us at privacy@nitrades.co.uk. For general support, contact hello@nitrades.co.uk.

Homeowners: name, email address, phone number, town/postcode, job details (trade, description, timing, photos optionally uploaded with the job), account credentials (securely hashed password), and records of activity on the platform (jobs posted, tradespeople hired, reviews left).

Tradespeople: name, business name, trading address, business email, phone, trade, area of operation, bio, profile photo, work photos, trade credentials, insurance certificate, photo identity document, referee names and phone numbers, company registration or VAT numbers where provided, subscription plan and billing records, and records of activity on the platform.

Advertisers: company name, contact name, contact email and phone, brand assets (logo, colours), campaign content, billing records and campaign performance data.

Everyone: technical data necessary to operate the platform, including IP address, browser type, session identifiers, and basic usage logs for security and abuse prevention. We also record a record of your acceptance of these terms (date, time, policy version) and your marketing-consent preference.

We process your personal data on the following legal bases under Article 6 of the UK GDPR:

• Contract (Article 6(1)(b)): to create and operate your account, to facilitate introductions between homeowners and tradespeople, to process tradesperson subscription payments, and to provide customer support.
• Legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)): to verify tradesperson credentials and carry out vetting, to moderate reviews and content, to prevent fraud and misuse, to maintain platform security, to analyse platform usage to improve our service, and to communicate with users about their account. We have balanced these interests against your rights and are satisfied that they do not override them.
• Legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c)): to retain financial records, to respond to lawful requests from regulators or law enforcement, and to comply with tax, consumer protection and anti-money-laundering law.
• Consent (Article 6(1)(a)): where we rely on consent (for example, marketing communications), you may withdraw consent at any time without affecting the lawfulness of processing based on consent before withdrawal.

Photo identity documents are used only to verify a tradesperson’s identity at application stage and are stored in an access-restricted location accessible only to authorised administrators.

NI Trades operates on a privacy-first model. The specific flow of personal data between users is as follows:

• Before a homeowner chooses to hire: a tradesperson sees only the job description, trade required, general area, and optional job photos. The homeowner’s name, phone and email are not shared with any tradesperson at this stage.
• After a homeowner confirms hire: the homeowner’s name, phone and email are shared with the one tradesperson they have hired, for the sole purpose of arranging and completing the work. Details are not shared with any other tradesperson.
• Tradesperson profiles: full tradesperson profiles (including business name, bio, photos, credentials and displayed contact details where provided) are visible to a homeowner only after that tradesperson has expressed interest in one of the homeowner’s jobs. Profiles are not openly publicly searchable.
• Reviews: reviews are published on a tradesperson’s profile together with the reviewer’s first name and last initial, rating, review text and approximate date. We do not publish a reviewer’s full contact details.

We do not sell your personal data to third parties. We do not share your personal data with third parties for their own marketing purposes.

We use carefully selected third-party service providers to operate the platform. These providers process your data only on our instructions and under written data-processing terms. Current categories of processor include:

• Cloud hosting and database: Supabase (data and authentication)
• Payment processing: Stripe (tradesperson subscription payments and advertiser billing)
• Email delivery: transactional email provider for account notifications

Each of these providers has its own privacy policy and applies industry-standard security measures. Payment card details are collected and processed directly by Stripe and are not seen or stored by NI Trades.

We prefer to keep personal data within the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area. Where data is transferred outside the UK/EEA (for example, by a service provider with global infrastructure), we ensure the transfer is covered by an appropriate safeguard under UK GDPR, such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or an adequacy decision. You can request details of the safeguards in place by emailing privacy@nitrades.co.uk.

We retain personal data only for as long as we need it for the purposes described in this policy:

• Active account data: for the duration of your account
• After account closure or deletion: personal data is deleted within 30 days, save for records required by law
• Financial and tax records (invoices, subscription payments): retained for 7 years in line with HMRC requirements
• Tradesperson identity documents and insurance certificates: retained while the tradesperson is active and for up to 12 months after removal, for audit and dispute-handling purposes
• Reviews and platform integrity records: retained in line with our legitimate interest in maintaining an accurate history of the platform, anonymised where appropriate
• Consent records (terms acceptance, marketing consent): retained for the lifetime of your account plus 3 years to evidence compliance with UK GDPR

You have the right to:

• Be informed about how your data is processed (this policy)
• Access a copy of the personal data we hold about you
• Rectification of inaccurate or incomplete personal data
• Erasure of your personal data (“right to be forgotten”) in certain circumstances
• Restriction of processing in certain circumstances
• Data portability — to receive your data in a common, machine-readable format
• Object to processing based on legitimate interests, including profiling
• Withdraw consent at any time, where processing is based on consent

To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@nitrades.co.uk. We will respond within 30 days. There is no fee, save in exceptional circumstances where a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your personal data, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection:

Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF
Helpline: 0303 123 1113 · ico.org.uk

We would, however, appreciate the chance to address your concerns directly first — please email us before contacting the ICO.

NI Trades uses a small number of strictly necessary cookies and browser storage items to keep you signed in and to remember basic preferences. These are essential for the platform to function and do not require consent under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR).

Our payment processor (Stripe) and our authentication provider (Supabase) may set their own cookies when you interact with their components. These are covered by their respective privacy policies.

We do not currently use third-party advertising cookies or cross-site tracking. If this changes in future, we will update this policy and, where required, ask for your consent via an in-platform banner.

Service emails (transactional notifications). We send a limited set of service emails about activity on your NI Trades account. These are necessary to operate the platform and to deliver the service you have signed up for. They are not marketing communications and fall outside the scope of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR).

The categories of service email we send are:

• Job activity (homeowners): a tradesperson has expressed interest in your job; you have shared your contact details with a tradesperson (delivered to that tradesperson); a job you marked complete has prompted us to invite you to leave a review; you have closed your account.
• Job activity (tradespeople): a new job matching your trade and area has been posted; a homeowner has shared their contact details with you; a homeowner has hired you; a homeowner has chosen another tradesperson; a homeowner has unhired you; a moderated review has gone live on your public profile.
• Featured-tier profile content (tradespeople): a testimonial you submitted for your public profile has been approved and is now live; or a testimonial you submitted has been rejected during moderation, with the reason and any guidance for re-submission.
• Application and account lifecycle (tradespeople): your application has been approved or rejected; your listing has been suspended; an administrator has removed a credential from your profile; a supporting document (e.g. insurance certificate, Gas Safe registration) is missing or due to expire; your starter free trial is expiring (sent 7 days and 1 day before expiry).
• Billing and subscription (tradespeople): your subscription payment has failed; your subscription has been cancelled or downgraded.
• Authentication (everyone): account confirmation, password reset and email-change confirmation emails sent on our behalf by our authentication provider.

Lawful basis. We rely on the following Article 6 bases under UK GDPR:

• Article 6(1)(b) — performance of a contract for the majority of service emails listed above, including all job-activity, application-lifecycle, billing, authentication and account-safety messages. These emails are necessary to deliver the platform to you and to administer your account.
• Article 6(1)(f) — legitimate interests for emails that support but are not strictly required by the contract, specifically the post-completion invitation to leave a review and the notification to a tradesperson when one of their reviews has gone live. Our legitimate interest is in maintaining a useful, trustworthy directory; we have balanced this against your rights and consider the processing proportionate. You have an absolute right to object to these specific emails under Article 21 by emailing privacy@nitrades.co.uk; we will stop sending them on request.

Opting out of service emails. Service emails sent under Article 6(1)(b) are essential to running an account on NI Trades and cannot be individually disabled. If you do not wish to receive them, you can close your account at any time from your dashboard, after which all service emails will stop within 24 hours (subject to any final billing or legally required notices). Emails sent under legitimate interests can be stopped on request without closing your account, as described above.

Sender identification and security. All NI Trades emails are sent from a verified @nitrades.co.uk domain by our transactional email provider acting on our written instructions under a data-processing agreement. Every email identifies NI Trades as the sender, links to this privacy policy, and provides privacy@nitrades.co.uk as a route for data-protection enquiries. We will never ask for your password, payment-card details or other sensitive credentials by email.

Marketing emails. We will only send you marketing emails about new features, offers or promotions with your prior consent, given through a clear opt-in at signup or in your account settings. Marketing consent is recorded separately from acceptance of these terms. You can withdraw consent at any time by clicking “unsubscribe” in any marketing email or by emailing privacy@nitrades.co.uk; withdrawing marketing consent does not affect your service emails.

We apply appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal data, including encrypted data transfer (HTTPS/TLS), access controls on admin tools, hashed passwords, restricted-access buckets for sensitive documents (photo ID, insurance certificates), and regular review of our processor arrangements. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, but we work to industry standards and will notify affected users and the ICO without undue delay if a personal-data breach is likely to result in a risk to your rights.

We do not make decisions about you using solely automated means that produce legal or similarly significant effects. Listing decisions (approval, suspension) are made by a human administrator.

NI Trades is not intended for use by anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal data from minors. If you believe a minor has provided data through the platform, contact us and we will remove it.

We may update this policy from time to time. Where changes are material, we will notify registered users by email or in-platform notice. The “Last updated” date at the top of this policy reflects the current version.