Privacy

MyLocalPlumbers is a trading name of Property Architecture Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 17536132, registered office 90 Hendon Lane, London N3 3SL (“we”). Property Architecture Ltd runs mylocalplumbers.uk and is the controller of the personal data described here: we decide how it is used. Contact us at [email protected].

When you send an enquiry from a profile we collect your name, email address, telephone number (if you give one), the service you are asking about and your message. We store it in our database.

The enquiry is emailed to the one plumber you wrote to, and to no other business. A separate copy is emailed to us at [email protected] so that we can deal with problems and misuse and see whether the plumber’s email was delivered. You also receive a receipt by email. We do not sell enquiries or share them with other businesses.

We also count the enquiries sent from your email address to limit repeated or abusive messages.

The form on our articles and guides collects the job you choose, your postcode or town, your name, email address, phone number if you give one, and your message. We store it in our database and email it to us at [email protected] so that we can reply to you. It is not sent to any plumber, and we will not pass it on without asking you first. We normally email you a short confirmation. A salted hash of your IP address is kept with it to limit repeated or automated requests.

To leave a review we collect your email address, rating, the text of the review, the kind of work and, if you give it, the month it was done. We use your email address to send you a link to confirm the review is yours and to tell you the outcome (published, or the reason it was not). If the plumber has claimed its listing we then ask it to confirm you were its customer; it sees the kind of work and the month, never your text, rating or email address. Otherwise a moderator checks. Your email address is never shown publicly, and published reviews show your first name only. When your review is published we email you a link to change or withdraw it; it works for 30 days, or until we delete your email address if that is sooner, and you can ask for a new one from the link page while we still hold your address. A moderator checks a change before it replaces your published review. If you withdraw your review we delete it and any changes to it; we keep a record that a review was withdrawn, with its rating and dates, but not its text.

You sign in with a link sent to your email address; there are no passwords. We store your email address, your sign-in sessions, and anything you save to your shortlist, which is private to you. We set one session cookie to keep you signed in. The code of this site sets no advertising cookies, and analytics cookies only if you accept them (see Cookies).

To claim a listing we collect the registration number you enter and your sign-in email. We email you a code and compare your email's domain with the website on the listing; nothing is posted. Paid listings are processed by Stripe; we store the amount, Stripe reference and invoice number, not your card details. Details of listed businesses come from the public register, or from public trade directories (APHC, CIPHE) and Companies House for firms we added ourselves. We list limited companies only, keep business details only (name, trading address, landline, website, services), and remove any firm that asks.

A plumber on a paid listing may add a WhatsApp number to its profile. We store the number, whether the plumber wants the button shown and when it confirmed the number is its business number and may be shown publicly. We show it only while the plumber wants it shown and the listing is a paid listing that a moderator has not hidden; the plumber can remove it at any time, and then we delete the number. Until the plumber removes it we keep it, also while the button is not shown (for example after the listing stops being a paid listing).

If a plumber adds a WhatsApp number, we show it on their profile because the plumber asked us to. Tapping Message on WhatsApp takes you to WhatsApp, a service owned by Meta: what you send there goes from you to the plumber through WhatsApp, under WhatsApp’s own terms and privacy policy, and we do not see it. We keep a count of taps per plumber per day for 13 months and then delete it; the count does not record who tapped. To count each connection once a day, our server keeps a scrambled form of your internet address in memory for the rest of that day; it is never written down.

We send email through Resend, so the content of those emails (enquiry copies, receipts, sign-in links and review confirmations) passes through their service. Payments go through Stripe. Our application and database run on servers we rent from a hosting provider, with Cloudflare in front of the site. Our logs record ids and outcomes, not names, email addresses or message text.

We keep enquiries that do not lead to work for up to 24 months, then delete them. We review enquiries and delete them by hand; deletion is not automated. Listing and review data are kept while the listing is live, plus any further period we need to meet legal or accounting obligations.

A reviewer’s email address is deleted automatically 90 days after the review is published, rejected or removed; the review itself stays. We keep it longer only while a change you sent is waiting for a moderator, or while your link to change the review still works. A review whose author never confirmed it is deleted 30 days after the confirmation link was sent. The text of an earlier, refused or withdrawn change to a review is deleted 90 days after it was replaced, refused or withdrawn; its rating and dates stay.

Under UK data protection law you can ask us for a copy of your personal data, to correct it, to delete it, or to restrict or object to how we use it. Email [email protected] and we will respond. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

See also our review policy.