What is held about you, and why

1. Two organisations, and which of them decides

Almost everything on this page involves two organisations, and it matters a great deal which is which.

• The agency. The letting agent, estate manager or developer you dealt with. They decide what to record about you and why. They entered it, they use it, and they decide when it is corrected or removed.
• Us. The operator of RentorNG, [operating company: registered name and address]. We make and run the software the agency uses. We hold the information on their behalf and act on their instructions. We do not decide what is collected about you, we do not use it for anything of our own, and we do not sell it or pass it to anybody who wants to advertise to you.

Where this page says we, it means the operator. Where it says the agency, it means whoever you dealt with. If you do not know which agency holds your details, ask us and we will find out and tell you.

2. What is held, and where it came from

Not all of this applies to everybody. Somebody who sent one enquiry appears in the first line and nowhere else; a tenant of several years appears throughout.

• What you sent through this site. If you filled in the form on a property advert: your name, your telephone number, your email address if you gave one, what you wrote, which property it was about, and when you sent it.
• What an agency recorded about you. Your name, telephone numbers, email address, home or business address, and — depending on what that agency asks for — your employer, referees, next of kin, identification numbers and notes taken during a conversation. You will usually not have given any of this to us. It comes from an application form, an agreement, an identity check, or a meeting with the agency.
• A record of money. What has been charged to you, what you have paid, when and by what method, receipt and invoice numbers, anything outstanding, and any payment you have declared that has not yet been confirmed.
• A record of the property. Which unit you rent, lease or bought, the dates, the deposit, repairs you reported, inspections, and documents attached to any of those.
• Messages. Every reminder, receipt or notice sent to you through this software, stored with the exact wording that went out and the date it went.
• A sign-in, if you have one. Staff at an agency have accounts: a name, an email address, a telephone number, and a scrambled form of a password that cannot be turned back into the password.
• A record of what was done. Every change made in the software is logged — who made it, when, and what the record looked like before and after.

3. Why it is held

An agency holds your details because it cannot otherwise do the thing you are both involved in: let you a property, sell you one, collect what is due, repair what is broken, or answer the enquiry you sent. We hold it because the agency uses this software to do those things — and because a record of what was charged, paid and sent is what protects both sides of any argument about it later.

None of it is used for advertising. Nothing here builds a profile of you, scores you, or makes an automated decision about you. No agency can see another agency's records — that separation is the strictest rule in how this product is built, and it is attacked by a test suite on every change.

4. Who can see it

• Staff at the agency that recorded it — and only that agency. Some of their staff are restricted further, to the buildings they look after.
• A small number of our own staff, where it is necessary to keep the service running or to answer a support request the agency has made. Access of that kind is logged.
• Suppliers who run parts of the service — the machines the software runs on, the service that delivers email and text messages, the payment provider. They may use it only to provide that service, and for nothing else.
• Anybody the agency itself sends it to — a landlord receiving a statement, an accountant, a lawyer, a court. That is the agency's decision and its responsibility, not ours.

It is not sold. It is not rented. It is not exchanged with another agency, and it is not given to anybody who wants to market something to you.

5. Messages sent in an agency's name

A rent reminder, a receipt or a notice you receive is composed by this software, sent through our systems, and arrives in the agency's name. That is deliberate: your agreement is with them, not with us.

These messages are operational. They are about the tenancy, the invoice or the repair they name, and they are the ordinary running of an arrangement you are already part of. Sending is restricted so that nothing arrives in the middle of the night, and repeated chasing about the same debt is not sent twice.

If you are being contacted about something that is not yours, or you would rather be contacted a different way, tell the agency. Every message is stored with exactly what was sent and when, so that a complaint can be checked rather than argued about.

6. What happens when you send an enquiry

Every property advert on this site carries a form. Sending it creates a record in the book of the agency that published that advert, holding what you typed and which property it was about. That is the only way this site collects anything about a member of the public, and it happens only when you press the button.

The record goes to that one agency and nowhere else. It cannot be aimed elsewhere by you or by anybody else — the agency is worked out from the property itself, never sent along with the form. It exists so that somebody can call you back.

When you have your answer and would rather it were not kept, ask the agency, or ask us and we will pass it on.

7. Cookies, and what this site loads

Browsing these adverts sets nothing at all. There is one cookie, and it is set only for somebody who has signed in to the agency application: it identifies the session, so that the site can show that person their own saved properties. It holds an unguessable reference and nothing about you. Signing out ends it.

8. How long it is kept

Most of what is described above belongs to an agency's record of a tenancy or a sale, and is kept for as long as the agency needs it — while the arrangement runs, and afterwards for as long as that agency's own accounting and legal obligations require. The agency sets that period, because it is their record. The rest is set by the software itself.

Where a period above is a ceiling rather than a timetable, it is applied when the account closes or when somebody asks for it. We are working towards each of them running on its own; until a given one does, asking is what makes it happen, and asking always works.

9. How it is protected

• One agency can never read another's records. It is enforced in four separate places rather than one, and a test suite attacks it from outside on every change.
• Passwords are stored scrambled, by a method designed to be slow to attack, and cannot be read back — not by us either.
• A sign-in session is stored only as a fingerprint, so that a copy of the database does not hand anybody a way in.
• Everything travels encrypted between your device and us.
• Every change is logged with who made it and what the record looked like before, so nothing can be quietly altered.
• Our development systems cannot reach a real person. Messages written while the software is being built are recorded and printed, never sent.

No system is perfect and we will not claim otherwise. If something goes wrong in a way that puts anybody at risk, we tell the affected agencies without delay, so that they can tell the people concerned.

10. What you can ask for

You may ask, at any time, for any of the following.

• A copy of what is held about you, in a form you can read and keep.
• A correction, where something recorded about you is wrong.
• Deletion, where there is no longer a reason to keep it. An agency may have to keep part of it for its own accounting or legal obligations; if so, it should tell you which part, and why.
• An end to messages that are not necessary to an arrangement you are part of.
• An explanation of anything on this page that is not clear.

Ask the agency first. They decided to hold it, so they are the people who can act on it straight away. If you do not know who they are, if they do not answer, or if your question is about the software rather than about the record, write to us at [an address for privacy requests]: we will identify the agency, pass it on, and act ourselves where it is ours to act on. We answer as quickly as we can, and in any event within [the period within which requests are answered].

You will never be charged for asking, and asking will never affect how you are treated.

If you are not satisfied with the answer, you may complain to the data-protection authority responsible for the place you live: [the authority a complaint can be taken to].

11. Changes to this notice

When this page changes, the date at the foot of it changes with it. Where a change materially affects what is held about people, or who can see it, we tell the agencies using the software, so that they can tell the people whose records they hold.

Questions about anything here go to [an address for privacy requests]. See also our terms of use, which cover the site itself.