HausGeniusHAUSGENIUS

Your data

How HausGenius handles your information

This page explains what we hold, why, for how long, and how to have it corrected or removed. It’s written in plain English rather than legal language, and sits alongside our Terms of Service, which covers the rules of using the site itself. Neither page is a substitute for professional legal advice, and some areas noted below have not yet had a formal legal review.

Using HausGenius without an account

You don’t need to sign up to describe a job and see results - this is a guest session. Behind the scenes, a guest is a real but anonymous account: we don’t know who you are, only that the same session sent the messages that make up your job.

We keep a guest session’s job data (your description, the clarification conversation, the specification, and any contact actions you took) for up to 30 daysfrom your last activity on it, then it’s deleted automatically. This is a provisional figure while the product is early - see “What’s not yet finalised” below.

Creating an account

Signing up (email or Google) upgrades your existing guest session rather than starting a new one - any job you’d already started is still there afterwards, now kept for as long as you want it rather than the 30-day guest window.

What we store, and why

  • Your job description - what you typed, so we can work out what you need and match you with relevant businesses.
  • The clarification conversation and specification - so the details you’ve confirmed aren’t lost and don’t need re-asking.
  • Contact actions- when you click to call, email or visit a business’s website, we record that the action happened (not its content) so we can tell whether the service is actually useful.
  • A coarse postcode district (e.g. “E4”, not your full address) - used to find businesses near you. We don’t ask for or store your full address.

Cookies

Signing in - including as a guest - uses one essential cookie to keep your session working; without it, guest sessions and sign-in wouldn’t function at all. We don’t use cookies for advertising or cross-site tracking, and we don’t ask for cookie consent for this one: UK cookie law (PECR) doesn’t require consent for a cookie that’s strictly necessary to provide the service you’ve asked for.

AI processing

Your job description is sent to an AI model to help turn it into a structured specification. By default this runs through Google Gemini; every request and its outcome is logged internally (for reliability and cost monitoring, not published or shared) - see docs/AI_BEHAVIOUR.mdin the project repository for the full technical detail. On Gemini’s free tier, Google’s own terms permit using prompts to improve their products; this stops on a paid tier.

Business information

Businesses shown in results come from public sources - principally Companies House (open data), a business’s own website where they’ve published one, and, where a business has a Google Business Profile, its public star rating, review count, and photos - fetched live from Google Places each time you view a business’s page, never stored on our side. We show what was actually checked and when, rather than presenting every listing as equally vetted.

Some of this - a company’s registered name, number, and officer details for sole traders/small companies - is personal data about a business owner or director, not just “business” data. That the underlying record is publicly available (e.g. on the Companies House register) does not by itself remove our obligations around how we display and process it - this is a genuine, open question the team is aware of, not one we’re asserting is resolved.

If you believe a business listing about you or your company is inaccurate, or you’d like it corrected or removed: use our contact form (or email info@hausgenius.com directly) and we’ll look into it.

Location lookups

To show you businesses genuinely near you, the postcode or area you give us is turned into a rough location using two free, open-data services: postcodes.io for a real postcode, or OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors) when you give us a general area instead of a postcode. Only the coarse location is stored - never your full postcode or exact address.

Error monitoring

If something breaks while you’re using the site, technical details (what went wrong, which page, your browser type) are sent to Sentry, an error-tracking service, so we can find and fix it. This is deliberately configured to never capture the content of what you typed, your account details, or the full text of any request - just the technical error itself.

What we never do

  • We never send your contact details to a business automatically. Calling, emailing, or visiting a website is always something you choose to do yourself.
  • We never contact a business on your behalf, or generate messages that appear to come from you without your action.

Deleting your data

You can delete a job at any time from its conversation screen (“Delete this job”) - this removes the description, the conversation, the specification, and any contact-action records tied to it immediately, whether you’re a guest or signed in. Guest data is also deleted automatically after 30 days of inactivity, without you needing to do anything.

What’s not yet finalised

This product is early-stage. The following have not had a professional legal review: ICO registration status, a written Legitimate Interests Assessment for the business-listing and contact-draft flow, a PECR characterisation of that flow, and whether 30 days is the right retention period long-term (rather than just the provisional figure decided during product discovery). Separately, the automatic 30-day deletion has been thoroughly tested in development but not yet independently confirmed as running correctly on our live database - we’re flagging that rather than assuming it from how well it worked in testing. The same “not yet legally reviewed” caveat applies to our Terms of Service. None of the copy on this page, or the Terms, should be read as resolving any of those.