Privacy Notice

TradeScoper is a trading name of Lombard Management Limited (company number 12125021), 20-22 Wenlock Road, London, N1 7GU.

In data protection law, the organisation that decides how information is used is called the data controller— the one in charge of it. For almost everything on TradeScoper, that's us.

That includes the interview. Even when a tradesperson sends you the link, we run the questions, we decide what gets asked, and we turn your answers into a brief. So we are in charge of that information, not the tradesperson.

Once a tradesperson receives your brief, they also become responsible for how they use your details in their own business — for example, keeping your address in their own records to come and do the work. We can't control that part, and this notice doesn't cover it.

When you complete an interview and we build your brief, we collect:

• Your name
• Your email address and phone number
• The address and postcode where the work is happening
• What you tell us about your project, including the whole interview conversation
• Photos you upload of the job
• Links you paste to products you want used

About your photos.Photos are stored in a way that means anyone who has the direct web address of a photo can open it. The addresses are long and random, so they aren't guessable and they aren't listed anywhere public — but they aren't password-protected either. Please don't upload anything you wouldn't want seen, such as documents, or photos with people in them.

• Your name and business name
• Your email address and phone number
• Your business address and postcode
• Your website, if you give us one
• Whether you're VAT registered, and your VAT number
• The trades you work in
• Your business logo, if you upload one
• Your subscription: which plan you're on and whether it's active

We never see your card or bank details. Payments and payouts are handled entirely by Stripe. When you pay us, or get paid through us, you deal with Stripe directly. We only ever get told whether a payment worked — never the numbers themselves.

The law says we need a reason for using your information. Ours are:

• To do what you asked us to do. We need your details to run the interview, build your brief, pass it to your chosen tradesperson, and handle quotes and invoices. Without them there is no service. (In legal terms: we need this to perform our contract with you.)
• To keep the service running and safe. We use basic records to fix faults, stop people abusing the platform, and keep accounts secure. (In legal terms: our legitimate interests.)
• To meet the law. We have to keep records of money that changes hands. (In legal terms: a legal obligation.)
• Where we ask permission.If we ever want to use your information for something you'd not expect — like marketing emails — we'll ask first, and you can change your mind whenever you like. (In legal terms: consent.)

This is central to how TradeScoper works, so we want to be direct about it rather than bury it.

The interview is run by an AI. When you answer a question, what you typed is sent to a company called Anthropic, which makes the AI model we use (Claude). Anthropic's system reads your answers and helps us work out what to ask next. At the end, your whole conversation and your project description are sent to Anthropic once more, to be turned into the structured brief a tradesperson can quote from.

So: anything you type into the interview goes to Anthropic.Please don't type anything you wouldn't want shared — bank details, passwords, medical information, or anything about other people that isn't yours to share.

A tradesperson can also add their own extra questions for the AI to ask you. Those go to Anthropic too.

The brief the AI writes is a starting point, not a survey. It can get things wrong or miss things out. Always read it before you rely on it.

We don't sell your information. We do use other companies to run the service:

• Anthropic — runs the AI that asks the questions and writes your brief
• Stripe — handles all payments and payouts. They see card and bank details; we don't
• Resend — sends our emails, like “your quote has arrived”
• Supabase — stores our database and your uploaded photos
• Vercel — runs the website itself

Each of these is only allowed to use your information to do the job we've asked them to do.

And of course: when you share your brief with a tradesperson, they see what's in it. That's the point of it.

We may also share information if the law requires it — for example, a court order.

Some of the companies above are based in the United States, so your information sometimes travels outside the UK.

When that happens, the law says we must make sure it's still protected. We rely on the standard legal agreements designed for this — the UK's International Data Transfer Agreement, or the UK Addendum to the EU's standard clauses, depending on the company.

Being straight with you:we haven't yet finished checking exactly which of those agreements applies to each individual company, and we haven't confirmed which country our database itself sits in. We're working through it. If this matters to you, email us and we'll tell you where we've got to.

• Quotes and invoices: 6 years. UK tax rules require us to keep records of money for six years after the end of the tax year they relate to.
• Your account and your briefs:while your account is open. If you close it, we delete or anonymise what we don't have to keep.
• Practice interviews a tradesperson never finished: we clear these out within 30 days.
• Photos: kept with the brief they belong to, and deleted with it.

Being straight with you:apart from the 6-year rule, these are the periods we intend to work to. We haven't yet built the automatic clean-up that enforces them. Ask us to delete something and we'll do it by hand.

You have the right to:

• See it — ask for a copy of what we hold about you
• Fix it — tell us to correct anything wrong
• Delete it — ask us to erase it, unless we're legally required to keep it
• Pause it — ask us to stop using it while something is being sorted out
• Move it — ask for it in a format you can take elsewhere
• Object — tell us to stop using it for a particular purpose
• Change your mind — withdraw permission you gave us earlier

To do any of these, email hello@tradescoper.co.uk. It's free, and we'll reply within one month. We may ask you to confirm who you are first, so we don't hand your information to someone else.

If you're unhappy with how we've handled it, you can complain to the UK's data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office, at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. We'd rather you came to us first so we can put it right.

We only use the cookies needed to keep you signed in. We don't track you, and we don't use advertising cookies. Full detail is in our Cookie Policy.

Your information is stored in a database where accounts are walled off from each other, so one person can't read another's. Information is encrypted while travelling to and from our website. No system is perfectly safe, but we take sensible steps and we'll tell you and the ICO if something goes seriously wrong.

TradeScoper is for adults. We don't knowingly collect information about under-18s.

If we change this notice, we'll update the date at the top. If the change is significant, we'll tell you.

Questions about anything here? Email hello@tradescoper.co.uk or write to us at Lombard Management Limited, 20-22 Wenlock Road, London, N1 7GU.