Privacy Policy

What we collect

• Account details: your name, email address, town or city, country, and a password (stored only as a one-way hash, so we never see it).
• Profile: your photo and short introduction, if you add them.
• Home listing: photos and the details you choose to publish about your home.
• Messages: the private messages you send other members.
• Membership: your membership status and payment history. Card details are handled entirely by our payment provider. They never reach our servers.
• Usage: basic events such as “search performed” so we can understand what’s working.

What other members can see

Members who are signed in can see:

• Your first name
• Your profile photo and introduction
• Your town/city, region and country
• The month and year you joined
• Your published home listing

Members cannot see:

• Your street address
• Your email address
• Your phone number
• Your last name
• Your messages with anyone else

Your listing shows a general area, never an exact address. You decide when, and whether, to share precise details privately.

What’s visible to the public

Published home listings can be viewed by people who are not signed in, so that homes can be found through search engines. Those pages show the same general information members see. Never your email, your last name, your street address, or any message content.

How we use your information

• To run your membership and your listing.
• To let members contact each other privately.
• To send transactional email: welcome, new message, listing published, password reset, membership confirmation and renewal reminders.
• To keep the community safe and investigate reports.
• To understand how the site is used, in aggregate.

We do not sell your personal information.

Who we share it with

Only the service providers needed to run the site: our hosting provider, our database provider, our file storage provider, our email provider and our payment provider. Each processes data on our instructions.

• Vercel, hosting and file storage. Privacy policy
• Neon, the database. Privacy policy
• Stripe, payments. Stripe handles card details directly; they never reach our servers. Privacy policy
• Resend, sending email. Privacy policy
• Cloudflare, our domain registrar and DNS. Privacy policy

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers.

How long we keep it

While your account is open. When you delete your account we remove your name, email address, photo, introduction, location, password, saved homes, travel plans and your home listing with its photos, and we remove reviews other members wrote about you.

Two things deliberately survive, and both belong to somebody else. Messages you sent stay in the other member’s conversation, and reviews you wrote about other members stay on their profiles with your name removed. Deleting those would be editing another person’s record of their own experience rather than erasing yours.

Records of payments are kept for as long as tax and accounting law requires, tied to an anonymous record rather than to you.

One more thing survives, and it is worth explaining rather than burying. If you take the 30 day guarantee, we keep a note that a refund was given. That note holds no name, no email address and no card number: only two scrambled values that we can compare against a future refund request and nothing else. It cannot be turned back into your details, and it cannot be used to find you. It exists because the guarantee is one per person, and without something that outlives a deleted account the promise would only be enforceable against honest people.

Your rights

You can correct your information yourself at any time from your profile, and you can delete your account yourself from the account page without asking anyone. You do not need our permission or our cooperation to leave.

You can also ask us for a copy of everything we hold about you, ask us to correct something you cannot change yourself, ask us to delete something, object to a particular use, or ask us to stop emailing you. Write to support@homeswapclub.com and we will answer within 30 days. We will not charge you and we will not treat you any differently for asking.

If you are in the UK or the EU

We rely on three lawful bases, and it is worth being specific about which applies to what.

• Performing our contract with you covers your account, your listing, your messages, your travel plans and taking payment. None of this is optional: it is the service you paid for.
• Our legitimate interests cover keeping the club safe and honest. That means acting on reports, suspending accounts that break the rules, rate limiting to stop brute-force attempts, and the refund record described above. We have weighed each of these against your privacy: they use the least information that works, and the refund record in particular is deliberately built so it cannot identify anybody.
• Legal obligation covers keeping records of payments for as long as tax law requires.

We do not rely on consent for anything, because we do not do anything with your information that would need it. There is no advertising, no profiling, no automated decision-making and no selling of data.

Your information is stored in the United States, and your listing is visible to members anywhere. Where we transfer information out of the UK or the EU we rely on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses with our suppliers. You can complain to your national data protection authority, and in the UK to the Information Commissioner’s Office, though we would rather you told us first so we can put it right.

If you are in California

In the past twelve months we have collected the categories of personal information set out at the top of this page: identifiers, your account details, your listing and its photos, your messages, and internet activity limited to what the site needs to work. We collect it for the purposes described above and we keep it for the periods described above.

We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have not done so in the past twelve months, and we have no plans to. There is therefore nothing for you to opt out of, which is why you will not find a “do not sell” link on this site.

You have the right to know what we hold, to have it deleted, to have it corrected, and to receive a copy in a portable form. Correction and deletion are built into the site so you never have to ask. For anything else, write to support@homeswapclub.com. We will verify it is really you by checking that you can receive email at the address on the account, and an authorised agent may ask on your behalf with your written permission. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights.

Cookies

We use one essential cookie to keep you signed in. We do not use advertising cookies. If you add a third-party analytics provider later, update this section and add a consent banner where the law requires one.

Security

Passwords are hashed with bcrypt. Sessions use signed, http-only cookies. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Access to conversations and profile editing is checked on the server for every request. No system is perfect, so please use a strong, unique password.

Contact

Privacy questions, and any of the requests above: support@homeswapclub.com

The data controller is [TO BE COMPLETED: your registered name and address].