Privacy policy

The short version

You don't need an account to use HailVan, and we don't ask for your name, your address or your phone number. We record roughly where a search came from — to about the nearest 100 metres — so we can show you who's nearby and tell tradespeople which areas people are searching from. We don't sell anything to advertisers.

Who we are

HailVan is a service operated by HailVan Ltd (company number 17408648), of 27 Barnfield Crescent, Manchester, M33 6WJ. We are the data controller for the information described here.

For anything about your data, or to exercise any of the rights below, contact hello@hailvan.com.

What we record

When you search, and when you tap a trader's details, we store:

• Roughly where the search came from. If you type a postcode we use the centre of that postcode. If you let your browser share your location, we round it to about 100 metres before storing it — enough to know which area is busy, not enough to identify a house.
• What you were looking for and what you did — the trade, which trader you looked at, how far away they were, and whether you tapped to call, opened their website, or asked for directions.
• A short-lived visit code. A cookie called hailvan_sid holds a random number for 24 hours so that tapping the same trader twice in a few minutes isn't counted as two separate enquiries. It is not linked to you, and it isn't used for advertising.
• A scrambled version of your IP address. We never store the address itself. It is put through a one-way scramble with a secret that changes daily, so records cannot be linked together from one day to the next.
• Whether you were on a phone or a computer — that broad, and no more. We do not fingerprint your device.

We don't know whether a call connected, so anything we show a trader says “tapped to call” rather than “called”.

Why we record it

To run the service — showing you tradespeople near you is not possible without knowing roughly where “near you” is. And to tell a tradesperson how much interest they are getting, which is what they are paying us for.

Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: operating the service and giving traders an honest count of the enquiries they receive. We've kept what we store to the minimum that achieves that — no names, no accounts, no advertising profiles.

If you leave a review

The name you type is published alongside your review once a member of our team has checked it. The review itself may be edited or refused — every review is moderated by a person before it appears.

To keep reviews honest, we also record a scrambled version of your network address and, only if you tick the box offering it, your approximate location (rounded to about 100 m — a neighbourhood, never an address). These details are visible only to our moderation team, are used only to spot fake reviews, and are deleted automatically after 180 days. Your published review and the name on it remain until you ask us to remove them.

How long we keep it

Search and enquiry records — and the review-checking details above — are deleted automatically after 180 days. Nothing is kept indefinitely except published reviews, which you can ask us to remove at any time.

Who else is involved

We do not sell your data and we do not share it with advertisers. These companies process data on our behalf so the service can run:

• Supabase — Database and authentication hosting
• Vercel — Website hosting
• Cloudflare — Domain, DNS and traffic protection
• Expo — Delivering updates to the trader app
• Resend — Sending our automatic emails (invitations, sign-in and password links) — your email address passes through them to be delivered
• Twilio — Sending our text messages to tradespeople who have agreed to hear from us — the mobile number passes through them to be delivered, and a STOP reply comes back through them
• postcodes.io — Turning a postcode into an approximate location
• OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine) — Working out a road route and travel time between your approximate location and a tradesperson's approximate map position when you open their details
• CARTO and OpenStreetMap — Map images, loaded directly by your browser or the app — so CARTO sees the IP address of your device and the map area viewed, as with any image on any website; we send them nothing about you

Traders see counts and areas, never individual visitors. Some of these providers operate outside the UK; where that happens, transfers are covered by the safeguards in their standard data protection terms.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or object to us holding it. Write to hello@hailvan.com.

One honest limitation: because we don't know who you are, we usually can't find your records without something to match on — the visit code from your browser, or the rough time and place of a search. If you can give us that, we can act on it.

If you're unhappy with how we've handled it, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Tradespeople

If you use the HailVan app to share your van's location, a separate policy covers that: trader app privacy policy.