Privacy policy

What we collect

• Your email address and, if you sell, your mobile number.
• The outward part of your postcode only - never the full postcode, and never your address.
• Identity verification results. We delete the documents once a check is complete and keep only the outcome, a reference and the date.
• Your adverts, messages, favourites and saved searches.
• Technical information about how you connect. Your network (IP) address, roughly where that address is, your internet provider, and what your browser reports about itself: screen size, timezone, language and platform. We also set a random identifier in a cookie so we can tell that two sign-ins came from the same browser. This is collected only while you are signed in.

Why we collect the technical information

To find accounts run by the same person. Our welfare rules - minimum ages, licence requirements, the ban on certain breeds, and removing sellers who break them - are enforced against an account. Someone who simply makes a new account each time is not covered by any of it, and the animals are the ones who pay for that.

The lawful basis is our legitimate interest in preventing fraud and protecting animal welfare, which the UK GDPR recognises directly. We have balanced it against your privacy in three ways, and you can hold us to all three:

• We read eight ordinary properties. They distinguish a phone from a laptop, and they leave you indistinguishable from anyone else with the same phone. The techniques that identify a specific machine - canvas, WebGL, audio and font probing - stay out of it.
• A person makes every decision. The tool ranks possible links and shows a person what matched; a suspension comes from the person, not the score.
• We delete it. Connection records are erased after twelve months, unless the account is suspended or subject to an open investigation.

If you think we have wrongly connected you to someone else - people who share a home or an office look alike to this - email {support} and say so. A person looks at it, and a wrong link gets corrected. You can also object to this processing entirely, and we will set out what that means for your account rather than quietly acting on the objection.

When we report someone

If we believe an animal is at risk, or that someone is breaking the law on selling animals, we pass what we hold to the RSPCA, the SSPCA or USPCA, the licensing team at the relevant council, or the police. Any such report says plainly which parts are things we observed and which are things we inferred, because the difference matters to the person on the other end of it.

What stays private

• Microchip numbers.
• Full postcodes or addresses.
• Your phone number, until you choose to share it in a conversation.

Marketing

We only send marketing email if you have opted in, and never by SMS. Most breeders are sole traders, whom PECR treats as individual subscribers - so we do not cold-contact sellers at all.

Your rights

Access, correction, deletion, portability and objection, under the UK GDPR. Email {support}. These requests are handled under the statutory timescales.