Privacy policy

Last updated 14 July 2026

House Chapter helps you move home and look after the home you land in. Doing that well means you trust us with genuinely personal information — where you live, where you're going, and documents that matter. This page explains plainly what we collect, why, and what we will never do with it.

Who we are

House Chapter is operated by Claire Duffield, trading as Folio Ventures — a sole trader based in the United Kingdom. Claire Duffield is the data controller for the personal data described here. You can reach us at 4 Borstal Hill, Whitstable, CT5 4LX, or hello@housechapter.co.uk.

What we collect

• Account details — your email address and password (stored as a cryptographic hash; we never see the password itself).
• Your move and home data — what you choose to put in: move type and dates, transaction stages, budgets and costs, quotes, maintenance records, renewal dates, compliance records, snags, and similar journey information.
• Vault documents and photos — files you upload (surveys, certificates, quotes, photos of your home). These can contain sensitive information. They are stored in a private, access-controlled bucket that only your account can read; we do not open, review or analyse them.
• Sharing and referral data— if you invite someone to your move we store the email you invited; if you share a referral or handover link we record when it's claimed.
• Technical basics — the essential cookies needed to keep you signed in, and standard server logs (IP address, request time) kept briefly for security.

Our free property-check tools work on postcodes alone and can be used without an account — postcode lookups are sent to public data services (listed below) and are not linked to you.

Why we use it (and the legal bases)

• To provide the service (contract): everything above exists so your dashboard, tracker, vault and reminders work.
• To keep the service safe and improve it (legitimate interests): security logs, fixing errors.
• To send you marketing(consent): only if you opt in, and every message will have an unsubscribe link. We don't send marketing today.

What we never do

• We never sell your personal data.
• We never share your vault contents with anyone — not partners, not advertisers, not analytics. Sharing happens only when you explicitly use a sharing feature (household invites, handover packs), and then only the specific data those features describe.
• We never make automated decisions about you with legal or similarly significant effects.

Where your data lives

Your account data, journey data and vault files are stored with our database provider Supabase on infrastructure in London, United Kingdom (AWS eu-west-2). The website is served by Vercel, whose edge network may process requests outside the UK with appropriate safeguards. When we add payment, email or analytics providers we will name them here first.

Public data services we query

Property checks send the postcode (never your identity) to: Postcodes.io, HM Land Registry, planning.data.gov.uk, the Police UK API, and the Department for Levelling Up's EPC service. Links to comparison services (for quotes) go to third-party sites with their own privacy policies.

How long we keep it

For as long as your account is active — the entire point of House Chapter is that your home's history stays useful for years. If you delete your account, your data and vault files are deleted within 30 days, except minimal records we must keep for legal reasons. You can also delete individual items (documents, records, quotes) at any time and deletion is immediate.

Security

Every table is protected by row-level security — your data is readable only by your authenticated account (and people you explicitly invite). Vault files live in a private bucket, are served only via short-lived signed links, and uploads are integrity-checked with SHA-256 hashes. Connections are encrypted in transit.

Cookies

We currently set only the essential cookies that keep you signed in. No advertising cookies, no cross-site tracking. If we add analytics we will update this page and ask for consent where required.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you can ask us for a copy of your data, ask us to correct or delete it, object to or restrict processing, and take your data elsewhere. Email hello@housechapter.co.uk and we'll respond within one month. If you're unhappy with how we handle your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Children

House Chapter is for adults involved in moving or running a home and isn't intended for anyone under 18.

Changes

If we change this policy in any meaningful way we'll note it here with a new date, and tell signed-in users about significant changes before they take effect.