Privacy Notice
Last updated: 30 October 2026
This notice explains what personal data Gingerwall collects, why, who it goes to, how long we keep it, and your rights. It covers Gingerwall (app.gingerwall.uk) and the Gingerwall beta (beta.gingerwall.uk). The two keep separate accounts and records, and nothing moves between them.
Who we are
Gingerwall is run by RE:SETTLE LTD, company number 17445422, registered office 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. We are the controller of your personal data.
Questions about your data: privacy@gingerwall.uk. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office, registration number ZC285091.
The short version
- We use what you tell us to research your move. We don't sell it, and we don't use it for advertising.
- Chats are deleted six hours after you stop, unless you choose to keep them. Kept chats are locked with a key only your devices hold: we cannot read them.
- What you type is sent to an AI model provider to write the answer. It may be processed outside the UK. You don't need to tell us about health, religion or politics to use Gingerwall.
- You can download, correct or delete your data, and delete your account, at any time.
What we collect, why, and on what basis
| What | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Your email address and password | To create your account and sign you in | Contract |
| Which version of our Terms you agreed to, and when | To show what we agreed with you | Contract |
| What you tell the assistant about your move: budget, bedrooms, who is moving, whether your children need a primary or a secondary school, where you commute to, what matters to you | To find areas that fit and write reports on them | Contract |
| A political preference, a faith-school preference, your child's special educational needs or a care need in your household, only when you raise it | To use it in that search, if you agree | Your explicit consent, asked on the requirements card before the search uses it. For your child, you consent on their behalf |
| Chats you choose to keep, with their results and reports | So you can come back to them on any of your devices | Contract; your explicit consent for anything sensitive you wrote in them |
| Your answer to "Keep this chat?" and when you gave it | To show what you agreed to | Legal obligation (record of consent) |
| Areas you get updates on (Basic and Pro), their reports, and what changed | To keep them up to date every weekday | Contract |
| Whether you want emails about those areas | To send only the emails you asked for | Contract |
| Reports you share by link | So the people you send the link to can read it | Contract |
| Your plan, credits bought, used and refunded, and voucher or invite codes | To bill you, refund you and keep accounts | Contract; legal obligation (accounting records) |
| For each payment: the country of your billing address, of your card and of your IP address | We sell only in the UK, and tax law requires us to show where customers are | Legal obligation (tax records) |
| Invites you joined with or sent | To run the invite-only beta | Legitimate interests |
| Emails you send us, and our replies | To answer you | Legitimate interests; contract when it is about your account; legal obligation for a request about your data |
| Feedback you send, and the conversation if you choose to attach it | To fix faults and improve the app | Legitimate interests |
| Records of problems we look into for you (a fault, a payment dispute, a correction to your credits) | To put it right and keep a record of what we decided | Legitimate interests; legal obligation where money is involved |
| Your IP address, its country, and the pages your device asks for | To keep the service secure, limit abuse and offer it only in the UK | Legitimate interests |
| Error reports from the app (where it failed, the page, your browser type), with no account and no text you wrote | To find and fix faults | Legitimate interests |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, our interests are running and supporting the service, keeping it secure, and keeping a record of what we did. We have weighed them against yours, and you can object (see "Your rights").
People you tell us about
To find areas that fit, you tell us about the people moving with you: a partner's commute, or whether your children need a primary or a secondary school. We use that only for your search, in the same way and for the same time as your own data. We don't contact them, and we have no way to tell them ourselves, so please let them know if you think they'd want to. Names and ages are never needed: "my partner" or "our eldest" works just as well.
Sensitive information
The assistant never asks about your health, religion or politics, and you don't need to mention them.
- If you ask for a search that uses one of these (for example "a Labour council", "a Catholic school", "a school that supports my son's autism" or "care homes nearby"), the requirements card asks first: Yes, use it or No, search without it. Without your yes, the search does not use it.
- We use it for that search only. Unless you keep the chat, it is not kept after the conversation. Areas you get updates on never hold it.
- Anything you type, sensitive or not, is sent to our AI model provider while your message is answered. If you would rather not share something, leave it out: the search works without it.
Chats
- Chats you don't keep are deleted from our server six hours after your last message. Between messages they are locked with a key your browser holds. Your browser keeps its own copy until you start a new chat or sign out.
- Chats you keep are locked with a key only your own devices hold: a passkey, a device you've linked, or a recovery code we show you once. We store them locked, under a code only your browser can work out, so we can neither read them nor tell whose they are. If you lose all three, nobody can open them, including us.
- While a message is being answered, the chat is readable on our server and by the AI model provider, because the assistant has to read it to answer.
Who we share it with
We don't sell your data. These companies process it for us, under contracts that let them use it only to provide their service to us:
- Amazon Web Services, in London: hosting, storage, sign-in, and our emails to you. Its Amazon Bedrock service, in the EU, runs the AI model that helps us read support emails (see "Support").
- AI model providers: run the AI models that write the assistant's replies and the reports. They see what you tell the assistant, an area you get updates on when you ask about it, and a kept chat's earlier messages when you carry it on. We send them nothing that names you or your account.
- Stripe: takes payments. We send it your email address and an account code; you give your card details to Stripe directly, and we never see your card number. Stripe also uses payment information for its own purposes, such as preventing fraud, as a separate controller under its own privacy policy.
- Microsoft: our email (Microsoft 365). It holds emails you send us and our replies, stored in the UK.
The companies we use today, what each one does, where it processes your data and how long it keeps it, are listed on our providers page.
Every AI model provider we use must:
- act for us under a written processor contract;
- be used through its paid business service, never a free one;
- not use what we send it to train its models;
- keep what we send it only as long as it needs to check for misuse, then delete it. The providers page says how long. Deleting a chat in the app deletes it from our servers, but cannot reach a provider's copy;
- protect any transfer outside the UK the way UK law requires.
To build reports we send postcodes, coordinates and place names, never your name, email or account, to data services such as Google Maps (public transport journey times), PropertyData (homes for sale and to rent) and Police.uk. Each report lists its sources.
We may also disclose data where the law requires it, for example to the police with a court order, or to protect someone from serious harm.
Outside the UK
Your data may be processed outside the UK and the EU. Our AI model provider today, Google, may process it in the United States and other countries where it runs its models. Microsoft and Stripe staff outside the UK may have limited access to provide support. Each transfer is protected the way UK law requires: either the country, or the US company, is recognised by UK law as protecting data to an equivalent standard (for the US, companies certified under the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework), or we use the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum. The providers page names the safeguard for each company.
Support
When you email support@gingerwall.uk, your message is kept in our support mailbox at Microsoft 365 so that we can answer it. This section applies whether or not you have an account.
If something needs looking into, we open an internal record of it. It names your account by a short code, never your email address. It can hold your plan, credit balance and invites, and the first few lines of what you wrote, with email addresses, postcodes and long numbers taken out.
An AI model, run through Amazon Bedrock in our own Amazon Web Services account, helps us read support emails and draft replies. It cannot act on your account or send anything: a person checks and approves every change and every reply, and nothing about you is decided automatically. It can read only the support mailbox, which Microsoft's own access controls enforce. What it reads is not used to train any model. You can object by emailing privacy@gingerwall.uk.
How long we keep it
| Data | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account | Until you delete it. If you don't sign in for 24 months, we email you, and delete it 30 days later unless you sign in. We never do this while you have a paid plan or bought credits |
| Chats you don't keep | 6 hours after your last message |
| Chats you keep, and their reports | 365 days after you last opened each one. Delete one, or all, at any time. If you agreed to keep chats before 23 October 2026, your earlier period (30 or 90 days) applies until you tell us a year is fine; we ask once |
| Kept chats, if you delete your account on a device where they are locked | Deleted for us at once: we never had their key, and nothing links them to you. The locked copies left on our server can't be opened by us or by anyone without your passkey, a linked device or your recovery code, and are removed on their own date, at most 365 days later. Unlock them before deleting your account and they are removed at once |
| Areas you get updates on | Until you remove them or delete your account. After a move to a smaller plan, those over its allowance are kept but not updated or opened until you move back up |
| Shared report links | 30 days, or until you withdraw the link |
| Payment, credit and plan records | While you have your account, and 6 years after, for our accounts and for tax. When you delete your account, your name and email are removed from them |
| Emails to us | 2 years after the last message in the conversation |
| Records of problems we looked into | Your details: 90 days after we close the matter, or at once if you ask or delete your account. A record that it happened, without your details: 2 years |
| Feedback | 2 years. A conversation you attach to it: 30 days |
| Security logs, including IP addresses | 14 days |
| Error reports | 30 days |
| Backups | Disk snapshots 7 days; payment-ledger copies 90 days |
When you delete your account we destroy the key your data is locked with, so any copy left in a backup becomes unreadable.
Storage on your device
Gingerwall uses your browser's storage only for things the app needs to work: keeping you signed in, your current chat, the key to your chats, and settings you choose. There are no advertising or analytics cookies. See our storage notice.
Your rights
You can:
- get a copy of your data: Settings → Download my data, or email us. Kept chats are in the download from your own device, because only it can open them;
- correct it: change your requirements in the chat, or tell us;
- delete it: remove an area, delete a chat (or all of them), or Settings → Delete my account;
- withdraw consent at any time: Settings → Chats → Stop keeping chats deletes every kept chat; a sensitive filter is used only in the search you said yes to;
- object to processing based on legitimate interests, or ask us to restrict it;
- stop emails about your areas: Settings → Update emails, or the link in any of them.
We answer within one month. Records the law makes us keep, such as payment records, are kept for their period even if you ask us to delete them.
We do not make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects. The app suggests areas; you decide. One automatic rule: we take payments only from a UK card with a UK billing address.
Gingerwall is for adults (18 and over). We do not knowingly collect data from children, other than what a parent tells us about their own children to find schools and areas.
Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, email privacy@gingerwall.uk with "Complaint" in the subject. We will acknowledge it within 30 days, look into it, keep you informed, and tell you the outcome.
You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, 0303 123 1113.
Changes
We will email you at least 30 days before a material change to this notice applies, for example a new use of your data or a new kind of company receiving it.
AI model providers change more often, so they follow their own rule:
- A new provider that meets every condition above: we add it to the providers page and email you at least 14 days before it receives any of your data.
- A provider already listed on the page, or a different model from the same provider: we may switch at any time; the page says which is in use.
- A provider that cannot meet the conditions would be a change to this notice, so the 30 days apply.
The providers page keeps a dated list of every change.