Privacy Policy

The data controller is ATRIA TRADES LTD, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17431674, whose registered office is at 97 Broad Oaks, Sheffield, England, S9 3HH.

You can contact us about anything in this policy at support@atriatrades.com, and our contact page says what to expect.

Our data protection contact is Ilyas Artan, a director of Atria Trades Ltd, reachable at the same address. We are registering with the Information Commissioner's Office and will publish the registration number here as soon as it is issued.

Everything below is information the system actually stores today.

We do not knowingly collect special category data — information about health, ethnicity, religion, sexual life, political opinions, trade union membership, genetics or biometrics. Please do not put such information into a job description, property note or message. If a job genuinely requires it — access arrangements relating to a disability, for example — give only what is needed.

Almost all of it comes from you: what you type when you register, build your profile, add a property, post a job or submit a quote.

Some is generated by the system — timestamps, job references, the record of who accepted what. Some comes from the other party to a job: a quote written about your job is written by the tradesperson, not by you.

Photographs you upload are re-encoded by our server before they are stored. That process removes the metadata cameras attach to a file, including GPS coordinates. The original file you chose is never stored.

We do not send marketing today. If we start, we will ask for your consent first where the law requires it, and you will be able to withdraw it at any time without affecting the service.

This is enforced by the software, not only stated here.

What a tradesperson sees about a job before you accept their quote: the trade, the title and description you wrote, the photographs you attached, the urgency and timing, any budget indication, the property type, the town, and the outward part of the postcode only — S10 rather than S10 2AB.

What they do not see: your name, your email address, your phone number, the street address, the property's name, or the private notes you keep against the property. Those fields are not sent to their browser at all.

What changes when you accept a quote: the full address becomes available to the tradesperson you chose, because they cannot attend without it. Tradespeople whose quotes were not selected are told only that their quote was declined — not who won, not for how much, and nothing about you.

What a customer sees about a tradesperson: their business name, trade, description, years of experience, services, area covered, photo or logo, verification status, and rating and review count where reviews exist. Their email address, phone number and account status are not shown.

In a payment case, everything either side sends — statements and photographs — is shown to the other side and to our team, because a decision made on evidence one of you never saw would not be fair. Nobody else sees it. A tradesperson who has left the job can still see the case about the payment made to them, and nothing else about the job. Please keep what you send to the work and the money: leave out other people's details, bank details, and anything about anyone's health. Location and camera details are removed from photographs when they are saved.

Photographs of your property are private. They are shown to you, to tradespeople while your job is open for quotes, and to the tradesperson assigned to it. They are never published on a public page and cannot be reached without signing in.

• Other users, as described above.
• Our hosting and infrastructure providers, who store the data on our behalf: Vercel, which runs the site, and Neon, which runs the database.
• Cloudflare, which stores an encrypted backup copy of our database each night. It holds the copy and cannot read it: the key that opens it is not given to Cloudflare, or to the system that makes the backup.
• Resend, which sends our emails, and Twilio, which sends and receives our text messages. Each is given the address or number it is sending to and the message itself.
• Sentry, which records technical details when something goes wrong on the site, so it can be fixed. It is deliberately configured not to collect IP addresses or the contents of what you were doing.
• Our payment provider, once payments are introduced: Stripe. When a payment case is decided, the provider is told how much to refund and how much to release — the amounts and its own references. It is not sent anything either side wrote or any photograph.
• Professional advisers — accountants, lawyers, insurers — where needed.
• Authorities, where the law requires it or to establish or defend legal claims.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

The site and the database are hosted in the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area, and that is where your jobs, properties, messages and photographs are stored.

Some of our providers are American companies or process some information in the United States. Twilio, which handles our text messages, runs our account there, so the numbers we text and the contents of those messages are processed there. Resend, which sends our emails, does the same for the addresses we write to and the emails themselves. Stripe and Sentry may also process data in the United States, and Vercel and Cloudflare are American companies, although the site runs in London and the backup is held in Western Europe.

Each of these companies is certified under the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework — the “UK–US data bridge” — which UK law recognises as giving your information the protection it has here. Where a transfer is not covered by that, we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, which each of them offers as part of its own data protection terms.

When you close your account your name, email address, phone number and photo are removed straight away and you can no longer sign in. Records of jobs, quotes and reviews stay, with your name taken off them: they are a record of dealings between two people rather than only about you, and a review is a customer's words about a tradesperson's work.

After that, things expire on the timetable below. The periods here are the ones the software actually uses — they are read from the same place — and most of them are applied by a sweep that runs automatically every day rather than when somebody remembers. Two of the rows below are not yet on that sweep; they are marked, and you can ask us to apply them sooner.

Under UK data protection law you can ask us to:

• give you a copy of the personal information we hold about you;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete information, where we no longer have a good reason to keep it;
• restrict how we use it while a question about it is resolved;
• give you your information in a portable form, or send it to someone else, where that applies;
• stop using it where we rely on legitimate interests and you object.

Ask at support@atriatrades.com. We will respond within one month. There is no charge unless a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.

Some information cannot simply be erased on request — a record of a job carried out at a property is also the other party's record. Where that is the case we will explain what we can and cannot remove, and why.

If you are a customer, no automated decision is made about you. Quotes are shown to you in the order they arrived; they are not ranked, scored or recommended, and which tradesperson gets the work is entirely your decision. Nothing about you is scored to decide what you are shown, what you are charged, or who quotes for your work.

You are, however, rated — and you should know it. After a job is finished the tradesperson who did it can rate you out of five for communication, reliability, payment and respect for your property, and add a note. This is the one thing on this page that an earlier version of it denied, and it was wrong to.

What it is used for today is nothing. It is not shown to you in the app, not shown to other tradespeople, not averaged into anything, and not read by any part of the product — it is kept so that if two-sided reputation is ever built, it starts from real history rather than from an empty table. Nothing is decided by it, automatically or otherwise, and if that changes this section changes with it.

You can read yours. It is personal data about you, so it is included in the copy of your data you can download at any time from your settings — the note as well as the scores. Tradespeople are told that when they write one.

If you are a tradesperson, we do rank you, and that is a form of profiling. Search results on our directory of tradespeople are ordered by a score worked out from your own record on Atria Trades. You are entitled to know how it works, so here it is in full.

Three things about you go into it, and nothing else:

• Quality — the ratings customers have left, weighted so that recent work counts for more than old work, and so that a handful of reviews cannot outrank a long record. A new tradesperson starts at an assumed average rather than at zero.
• Reliability — jobs completed against jobs cancelled by you, and no-shows that an administrator has upheld after looking at them. A report on its own never counts.
• Experience — how many jobs you have completed through Atria Trades, up to a point beyond which more makes no difference.

Verification is handled separately and deliberately so. A stronger verification level can only order you above someone whose performance is genuinely comparable — it can never lift you past a tradesperson performing better than you. That is a property of the arithmetic rather than a policy we apply, and it is tested.

None of it can be bought. There is no paid placement, no advertising slot and no subscription that improves your position. Being a good tradesperson is the only input.

Two other things happen automatically, and we would rather set them out than have you discover them.

• A pattern raises a flag for an administrator — repeated cancellations, or several poor reviews close together. The flag is automatic; what follows is decided by a person looking at it, and nothing happens to your account without that.
• An expired certificate stops you quoting for work that needed it, by itself and immediately, and the badge that rested on it disappears at the same time. This is the one automated step here that stops you doing something, so it is deliberately narrow: it applies only to a document you gave us that has since run out, never to one you never sent; only to the trades that require it, so a lapsed gas registration does not stop you quoting for roofing; and never to work you have already been given, which runs to completion. Sending us a current document lifts it at once. If you think it has been applied wrongly, write to support@atriatrades.com and a person will look at it and tell you what they decided.

A payment case is always decided by a person. Where the money goes — back to the customer, to the tradesperson, or split — is decided by a member of our team who has read what both sides sent, and the reasons are given to both of you. No part of that decision is made automatically. The platform does open a case by itself when a job ends with the customer's payment still held, but that step only keeps the money where it is and gives both sides the chance to be heard; it decides nothing about where the money goes.

Messages between customers and tradespeople are also checked automatically before a job is booked, and one containing a phone number, email address or link is not delivered. That is a check on the message, not a judgement about the person, and it is described in what the other side sees.

Ranking decides the order you appear in, not whether you may work: whatever your position in a list, you can quote for any job in your trade and area, and a customer chooses freely from what they see.

Whichever of these concerns you, you can ask us to explain how your own result was reached, ask a person to look at it, and object to it. Write to support@atriatrades.com and a person will answer.

Atria Trades is not for people under 18. We do not knowingly collect information about children. If you believe a child has registered, tell us and we will remove the account.

Specific measures currently in place:

• Passwords are stored only as a slow one-way hash. We never see your password.
• Every page and every action re-checks who you are on the server. Hiding a button is not treated as security.
• Records are looked up scoped to your own account, so another person's job, property or quote is not found rather than being loaded and then hidden.
• Uploaded images are decoded and re-encoded by our server, which removes embedded metadata including GPS coordinates and means a file that is not really an image cannot be stored.
• Photographs of a property require a signed-in session with a reason to see them.
• Pages behind sign-in are not cached by browsers, so pressing Back after signing out does not show them.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights, we will report it to the ICO within 72 hours and tell you where the law requires it.

We use only the cookies needed to keep you signed in and to protect forms. There is no analytics or advertising. The Cookie Policy lists each one.

Every version carries a version number and effective date, shown at the top. We record which version you accepted when you registered. If we make a material change we will tell registered users by email, and show the new version here, at least 14 days before it takes effect.

Please raise anything with us first at support@atriatrades.com.

You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK supervisory authority: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, or 0303 123 1113.