Trader app privacy policy

The short version

The HailVan trader app shares your van's location only while you are on shift, and the public only ever sees an approximate position — never exactly where you are. You start it, you can hide instantly, and ending your shift stops it completely.

What we collect

• Location, only while on shift. When you tap “Go on shift”, the app sends your position (roughly every 30 seconds while moving, every few minutes while parked) with your speed and heading. While this is happening, Android shows a persistent notification — location is never collected silently, and never when you are off shift.
• Account details: your email address and your business profile (name, trade, contact details, business address) as provided during onboarding.
• Your gender, only if you choose to give it. Customers can filter their search to female or male tradespeople; your answer is used solely to decide whether you appear in that filtered search. It is never shown on the map, on your profile, or anywhere else, and you can change or remove it at any time in the app or portal. “Prefer not to say” is the default.

What the public sees — and what they never see

• Customers see your van as a pin on the live map at an approximate position: every published location is deliberately offset by 120–280 metres. Your exact position is never shown to anyone using the website.
• Your pin is hidden automatically when you are near your own business address, and freezes when you've been stationary a while (so being parked at a customer's home for a long job doesn't advertise their address).
• If you stop sending (phone off, no signal, end of shift), your pin goes stale within minutes and is removed entirely after 12 minutes.
• Panic hide removes your pin from the map immediately, any time, with one tap.

How location is used and kept

• Location is used for one purpose: showing your availability on the HailVan map so nearby customers can call you. It is not used for advertising, not sold, and not shared with third parties beyond the service providers who host HailVan (our database and hosting providers, processing it on our behalf).
• We keep your current precise position (each new report replaces the last) and your shift history (when you were on shift, not where you were moment-to-moment). Published map positions are approximate and are deleted as they go stale.

Your choices

• Location sharing is entirely opt-in per shift — nothing is sent until you go on shift.
• Panic hide removes you from the map instantly; ending your shift stops all collection.
• You can ask us to correct your business details, or to close your account and delete your data, at any time — write to hello@hailvan.com.

How long we keep it

• Your published position is deleted as soon as it goes stale — 12 minutes without an update and it is gone.
• Your current precise position is overwritten by the next one. Only the latest is held, and it is deleted when your account closes.
• Shift records (when you were on call) are kept while you are a customer, and deleted when your account closes.
• Your account and business details are kept while you are a customer. Invoices and payment records are kept for six years after that, because UK tax law requires it.

If we had your details before you signed up

We build lists of tradespeople by area and trade from publicly available business listings — the same directory entries anyone can look up, including Google's business listings. So we may hold your business name, trade, address and phone number without you having given them to us.

Two things follow from that, and we would rather you heard them from us:

• Your business may already appear on our map as a fixed pin, showing the address from that public listing. It is not a live position and there is no van moving — that only ever happens once you install the app and go on call.
• We may ring you about joining. If you tell us not to call again we record that against your business, and we don't — it is not something a member of our team can undo.

We rely on legitimate interests for this, and you can object at any time. Write to hello@hailvan.com and we will remove your pin and your details, or keep only enough to make sure we never contact you again — whichever you prefer.

Why we're allowed to hold it

We process your location and business details because it is necessary to provide the service you signed up for — showing your van to nearby customers. Where we keep financial records, we do so to meet legal obligations. Before you are a customer, the basis is legitimate interests, as described above.

Who else is involved

We do not sell your data. These companies process it on our behalf:

• 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

Offers from other companies

The app shows occasional discount offers from suppliers — trade counters, tool merchants and the like. We choose these ourselves; they are not supplied by an advertising network, and nothing about you is used to decide which you see beyond the trade you are listed under. We may earn a commission if you use one.

The link is the same for every trader and carries nothing that identifies you. Tapping one opens that company's own website in your browser, and from that point their privacy policy applies rather than ours.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of everything we hold about you, have it corrected or deleted, object to how we use it, or ask for it in a portable form. Write to hello@hailvan.com and we'll respond within a month.

If you're not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Who we are

HailVan is 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 any privacy question, contact hello@hailvan.com.