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Privacy Policy

Last updated · 13 November 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how Settlebuddy Technologies ("SettleBuddy", "we", "us") handles personal data collected through this website, settlebuddy.io (the "Site").

SettleBuddy is a relocation platform: this website, the housing notice board at settlebuddy.io/housing, and the SettleBuddy app for Android and the web. This policy covers all of them. One account works on the website and in the app. Where the Site links to our separately operated product, Language Lab (language-lab.io), that product has its own privacy policy; this policy does not cover it.

Who we are (Data Controller)

The controller responsible for your personal data is Settlebuddy Technologies. Contact for all privacy matters: hello@settlebuddy.io. This policy reflects the standards of the EU GDPR, UK GDPR, and other applicable data-protection laws, which can apply because visitors from those regions may use the Site.

What personal data we collect, why, and our legal basis

a) Email address you submit for news. When you enter your email in our news-and-updates form, we collect that email address. Purpose: to send you occasional news and updates about SettleBuddy. Legal basis: your consent. You can withdraw consent at any time by unsubscribing or emailing us. We do not ask for your name or any other detail.

b) Analytics and advertising data via cookies and pixels — only with your consent. If, and only if, you accept analytics/marketing cookies in our consent banner, we load:

If you decline, these tools are not loaded and none of this data is collected. See our Cookie Policy for full details.

c) Server logs kept by our hosting provider. Like almost all websites, our hosting/CDN provider automatically records standard technical log data (such as IP address, timestamp, requested URL, user-agent). Purpose: to operate the Site securely and diagnose faults. Legal basis: our legitimate interests in the security and proper functioning of the Site.

On the marketing pages we collect nothing else. What the app and the housing board keep is described in the next section.

The SettleBuddy app and the housing notice board

This section applies when you use the SettleBuddy app or the housing pages of the Site (settlebuddy.io/housing). The controller is the same: Settlebuddy Technologies, hello@settlebuddy.io.

a) Account. Email address, name, password (stored as a salted hash) or your Google account's email, and the time your email was confirmed by a code we sent you. Purpose: to run your account. Legal basis: performance of a contract (our terms). We never ask for a phone number to verify you; a phone number is an optional field you may fill in. When you accept the Terms and Conditions we record the version, the time, your IP address and your device description as proof of the acceptance; one acceptance per browser or account is enough until the Terms change.

b) The housing notice board. Landlords post listings themselves (text, photos, prices, dates, the energy certificate details and the requirements they set) and confirm, by ticking, that they are the owner or authorised, that the details are correct and that they accept the listing rules. We store each tick with its time, your IP address, country and device description as evidence of what was confirmed. Tenants apply with a message; landlord and tenant write to each other in the app; viewing times, bookings, offers and decisions are stored with the application. SettleBuddy is a notice board and not a party to any tenancy: we do not forward profiles, do not contact landlords about applicants, do not arrange viewings and do not recommend homes. Our staff cannot read your conversations, applications or shared documents; they see a listing while it waits for review and a single message when one of the two parties reports it. Legal basis: performance of a contract; for the stored ticks and reports, our legitimate interest in running a safe board and defending legal claims.

c) Documents. Documents you add to the vault are encrypted and kept on your phone, not on our servers. If you switch on the optional backup, your phone seals the vault with a passphrase you choose and uploads only the locked file; we cannot open it, and if you lose the passphrase nobody can. When you share a document with a landlord for one application, a sealed copy sits on our server, read-only for that landlord, and is deleted when that listing closes (let, expired or withdrawn) or when you remove it.

d) AI features and our AI provider. The scam check, the lease & letter explainer, the listing draft, the application draft, the reading of a document you shared against a landlord's requirement, the automatic screening of listing texts and the support assistant are performed with large language models run by our AI provider, NVIDIA Corporation (United States), through its hosted model API. Whatever you submit to one of these features is sent to that provider to produce the result: pasted text, screenshots, photos of letters or documents, listing photos and text, your application message, your support-chat conversation, and, when you run a scam check on a conversation, the messages of the other person in that conversation. When you share a document with a landlord for a requirement, an image of that document is sent to the provider to read it against that one requirement. We send no account identifiers with it. We do not control what the provider retains; its own terms apply. If you do not want this, do not use the AI features: the board itself, saved searches and the vault work without them. Legal basis: your request to run the feature (contract) and, where the law requires it, your consent given by using the feature after this notice. Transfers to the United States rest on the Standard Contractual Clauses and, where the provider is certified, the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

e) AI actions per day. We count how many AI actions your account uses each day (a number, not the content) to apply the free daily limit and the members' fair-use limit.

f) Membership and payments. The Membership costs EUR 199 for every 30-day period and renews until you cancel it (Terms section 14). The payment itself is processed by the payment provider named at checkout (Dodo Payments) under its own privacy policy; we never see or store card details. We store what we need to run and prove the contract: your email, the subscription status, the dates of each paid period and of the next charge, the amounts charged and refunded, a payment reference, a coupon code you used, and, when you ticked the checkout box, the text of that box with the time, your IP address and your device description. A coupon you used stays recorded against a one-way code of your email address, also after you delete your account, so that a one-per-person code cannot be used twice. Visibility options for listings (Highlight, Top) are recorded the same way. Payment records are kept for as long as tax and accounting law requires.

g) Ratings. After a viewing that both sides confirmed took place, landlord and tenant may rate each other (numbers and a short text, screened for discriminatory or abusive content). Ratings are shown as an average with the number of ratings; a person's own rating of you is not shown to you by name.

h) Support chat. Messages you write in support chat are answered first by the SettleBuddy Assistant, an AI, which is labelled as such; your conversation (and nothing else of your account) is sent to our AI provider to produce the answer. A member of our team may read support chats and answer you.

i) Notifications and usage counts. Your in-app notifications are stored in your inbox. If your phone registered for push notifications, its push token is stored, and the notification text is delivered through Google Firebase Cloud Messaging. Notifications name people by first name only and never contain the text of a message (they say "New message" instead). We count which screens are opened and which features are used (names and numbers, never content).

k) Error reports. When a screen fails to load or our server answers with an error, the app or the Site records a short technical report: the error message, the screen, the app version, the platform and browser, the country and, if you are signed in, your account id. It never contains your messages, documents or photos. Purpose: to find and fix faults. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a working service. Reports are deleted after 90 days.

l) Your cookie and privacy choices. When you accept or decline analytics or ads measurement (on the Site or in the app), we store the choice with its time, a random device code, your IP address, country and device description, so that we can show which choice you made. Kept for 3 years.

m) Verification badges (optional). If you ask for a verified-identity badge, you take a photo of your ID and a short selfie; a verified-property badge needs one page of a lease, a bill or an ownership document. The check runs on SettleBuddy's own server; the images are deleted as soon as the check is complete. What we keep is described under "How long" below. Every feature works without a badge.

j) Analytics and ads measurement in the app (only with your consent). When you first open the app on a phone, it asks two questions: whether we may use usage analytics and whether we may use personalised ads measurement. Nothing is sent to Google before you answer, and you can change your answer any time under More → Account → Privacy choices. If you say yes, the app uses Google Analytics for Firebase (Google Ireland Limited / Google LLC). What it receives: event names (for example "search", "view_listing", "contact_pressed", "sign_up"), screen names, rough bands instead of exact values (a budget band such as "700–899", a move-in month, a district name), your account's numeric id, the device model, language, app version and an approximate location derived from the IP address, plus, only if you allowed personalised ads, the device's advertising ID. It never receives message texts, documents, photos, addresses, names or email addresses, and your applications and threads are not part of it. Purpose: to understand which parts of the app are used and to measure and aim SettleBuddy's own advertising (for example, showing our ad to people who search for rooms and learning which ads led to an account). No third-party ads are shown inside the app. Legal basis: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, § 25 TTDSG), withdrawable at any time. Retention: 14 months in Google Analytics (the default), after which it is deleted or aggregated. Google processes this data under its own terms, including transfers to the United States under the safeguards described below.

How long. Account data until you delete your account. Listings until the landlord deletes them or they expire; when a landlord deletes the account, all of their listings and listing photos are deleted with it. Applications, threads, bookings and shared documents: deleted 30 days after the listing closed (let, expired or taken down), for every applicant including the one who got the home; shared documents already at closing. Identity and property checks: the images are deleted as soon as the check is complete; the result, the name and date of birth read from the document and the date are kept until you remove the badge or delete your account. IP address and device description stored with ticks, checkouts and Terms acceptances: removed after 12 months; the tick itself stays as the record. Community-rule acceptances, payment records and ban records: kept after account deletion as evidence. Ratings: kept as numbers linked to an account id. Email codes: 2 days. Hidden data in photos (GPS position, phone model, time) is removed from listing photos, documents you share and move-in report photos before they are stored. Deleting your account (app → More → Account → Delete account) removes everything else at once. You can download everything we keep about your account as one file: app → More → Account → Download my data.

Who we share your data with

We do not sell your personal data. We share it only with the providers needed to run the Site and the app: our email provider (news and updates, confirmation codes and emails about your account and payments), our hosting/CDN/database provider Cloudflare (to host the Site, the app's server and its database and files, and generate server logs), our AI provider NVIDIA for the AI features described above, the payment provider named at checkout, Google (which provides GA4 as our processor and sign-in with Google), and Meta (which provides the Meta Pixel). Meta may process Pixel data as an independent controller for its own purposes, including its own advertising; for that processing Meta, not us, determines the purposes and means.

International data transfers

Google and Meta are based in the United States, and our other providers may process data outside your country. Where personal data is transferred from the EU/EEA or UK to the US or elsewhere, that transfer is protected by appropriate safeguards — the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (with the UK Addendum where applicable) — and, for US recipients certified under it, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK Extension. Ask us for more information using the contact below.

How long we keep your data

Your rights

EU/EEA or UK (GDPR / UK GDPR): you have the right to access, correct, or erase your data; to restrict or object to processing; to data portability; and to withdraw consent at any time (which does not affect processing before withdrawal). You may also lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

California and other US states: you may have rights to know, access, delete, and correct your personal information, and to opt out of its "sale" or "sharing" for cross-context advertising. We do not sell your personal information for money. To the extent our consent-gated cookies constitute a "sale" or "share", we enable them only if you opt in, and you can opt out any time via cookie preferences. We honour the Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal as a valid opt-out.

To exercise any right, or withdraw consent, email hello@settlebuddy.io. You can also withdraw cookie consent via the "Manage preferences" control, and unsubscribe from news and updates using the link in those emails (emails about your own account, such as codes, payments and decisions about your listings, are part of the service and are the only ones the app sends). We do not discriminate against you for exercising your rights.

Children

SettleBuddy is not for children: you must be at least 18 to create an account (Terms 2.2). We do not knowingly collect data of anyone younger. If you believe a child gave us their data, contact hello@settlebuddy.io and we will delete it.

Changes & contact

We may update this policy; the "Last updated" date above will change and material updates appear on this page. Questions or requests: hello@settlebuddy.io.