Privacy Policy

Our commitment to your privacy

At Right Housemate we are committed to protecting your privacy and we comply with the data protection laws applicable to the United Kingdom. This Privacy Policy outlines how your personal information is treated and forms part of our Conditions of Use.

Due to the nature of our business we have a legitimate interest requirement to collect various data about you to complete our services. The use of this data is dependent upon the services we are providing to you.

Guest / Site Visitor

We will capture visitor information to help optimise our services. We will collect analytical data of which pages users visit as outlined in the services provided by Google Analytics. Your visit will involve a cookie on your local computer as detailed in our cookie notice.As part of our site we also partner with various advertisers to offer services to YOU that YOU may be interested in.

The advertisers we work with may store cookies on your machine to better understand your interests to provide suggestions of relevant services to you. Should you not wish to have these cookies on your computer you can use an ad-blocking service to achieve this, a web search could offer you some good suggestions. Some browsers also have this functionality built in. We hope you will allow these cookies as it helps to maintain our site and offer the informative posts, topics and forum content.

Applicant Tenant / Guarantor (ALSO see Guest / Site Visitor for additional information)

We will request and gather all information in relation to your property application on behalf of your new landlord or agent. This data is the property of your new landlord or agent and we will use it for analytical purposes in relation to processing your property application.

The data we hold about YOU is the data YOU provide. The data provided by any third party eg. employer or agent/landlord references and an Equifax Tenant Verification Report (sometimes referred to as a financial report).

The data submitted in relation to your reference is stored in the UK on a dedicated server. The dedicated server has a dedicated Cisco firewall and a software firewall to help keep your data secure. All responses, forms and database information is encrypted to the highest standards. All online forms and data viewing areas are under SSL (padlock in your address bar) connections (to confirm security in transit). All documents submitted are stored in hashed folder locations and URL manipulation is used to hide their location. ALL Data in relation to any references can ONLY be accessed by secure login. It can ONLY be accessed by Right Housemate staff where required.

In order to process your application Right Housemate makes use of the Google Suite of products. Any emails received, emailed documents and internal documents and spreadsheets are used within the Google Suite range of services. Due to this your data may be stored in a location outside of the EU. Google are committed to GDPR compliance and at Right Housemate we take full advantage of their expertise and security procedures, including account monitoring, 2 factor authentication for our team, suspicious login monitoring. File sharing limitations and group administration. Full details can be found in their whitepaper.

Any forms submitted shall be held on our system for a period of 6 years. Any uploaded documents EXCEPT items uploaded to the ID FIELD on your evidence upload form (eg. images, pdfs) submitted in relation to your application shall be removed from our systems 6 months after submission. – This comes into affect as of 6 months from 25th May, applying to ALL historic data.

Right Housemate has always required our users to provide consent and does not believe in opt-out but rather opt-in practice. By supplying your information for your property application you understand and have agreed to the terms and conditions as listed on our application form.

We use 3rd party service providers to fulfill some of our services and to automate our processes.
These services include:

Podio – All information processed through Podio is to enable us to keep information to allow us to carry out referencing and issue reporting. This data is stored for a period of 6 years after a tenant vacates a property – https://www.citrix.com/about/legal/privacy/

Rightsignature – All information process through Rightsignature is in relation to setting out the contractual terms of your tenancy. This data is stored for a period of 6 years after a tenant vacates a property – https://rightsignature.com/privacy-policy

Zapier – All information processed through Zapier is for integrating our services and allowing communication between our systems. This data is stored for a limited period solely for fault identifying purposes and expires from their system and all traces and records removed. – https://zapier.com/help/gdpr/

We may use ALL the data we gather for internal anonymous analytical purposes to identify industry trends and improve our services. We will NEVER sell your data to anyone. No third party will have access to your data. Your data remains the property of Right Housemate.

HERE is a copy of the Terms and Conditions from the Application form you Have/Will have to agree to:

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IMPORTANT – DATA PROTECTION

I agree that you may process, use, record and disclose personal information as detailed. You may make such enquiries as you consider necessary in connection with this or any future application. You may disclose information about any of my applications or agreements to any fraud avoidance scheme in which you participate or any credit reference agency which will keep details of searches and information about any accounts, including defaults, if applicable I recognise a Land Registry check may be conducted to verify home ownership. Such gathered information/documents may be shared with my landlord/agent/agents landlord in relation to the referencing procedure now or in future.

Right Housemate Limited is fully compliant with the data protection act 1998 and a registered member of the Information Commissioners Office with registration number ZA169022 and will only use your information for the purposes set out above.

By clicking submit you understand that automatic forms will be sent to the 3rd parties we require references from. This is taken from the email addresses you have provided. eg. Agent/Landlord, Accountant, Employer.
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Cookies

Cookies are small files that a web site places on your hard disk to enable additional features of the web site to work. Our cookies do not contain any personally identifying information but they do enable us to provide a user-friendly experience. We do not use cookies to gather personal information such as a person’s name or e-mail address. In order to track usage on our web site, we may use cookies to identify repeat visitors to the web site and to determine the path visitors take on our site. Any information gathered by the use of cookies is compiled on an aggregate, anonymous basis.

We use third party advertising services to promote products to our users/visitors. These third parties may also use cookies to store visitor data.

Cookies are used to allow a user to login/logout of our system, these are known as “session” cookies and are present while logged in. Both out operating platform and our forum platform use different session cookies.

Use of cookies is an industry standard and many web sites use them. Most internet browsers automatically accept cookies. If you do not wish to receive cookies, or want to be notified of when they are placed, you can set your internet browser to do so, if your browser so permits. Without cookies enabled you can still use some of the features of our site.

Right Housemate fully complies with the New EU cookie law (e-Privacy Directive). read on.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

If we decide to change our Privacy Policy we will post those changes on this page so that you are always aware of what information we collect and how we use it.