Privacy & your data

Who sees what depends on which side of the platform you are on. Customers have no public profile page: your name and photo appear only to people you actually interact with, such as pros you book or message. Pros have a public professional profile by design - being findable is the point. In both cases, your phone number is never shown to anyone.

As a customer, the full picture is short. A pro you have booked sees your name and email in their customer list, so they can recognize you when you return. Your exact address is shared only after an at-home booking is confirmed; before that, a pro sees only your general area. Your phone number stays in your own settings, visible to nobody. Friends on the platform additionally see your activity feed - things like bookings made and reviews written.

As a pro, your professional profile is public: photo, headline, bio, skills, rate, service areas, languages, and your reviews. That is your storefront, and anyone browsing can see it. What stays protected even for pros: your exact home address (for services at your place) is revealed only after a booking is confirmed, and your phone number is never shown - the same rules that protect customers protect you.

One account can be both things at once; each side follows its own visibility rules.

No ad pixels and no tracking cookies. By default, Surrounders sets only essential cookies - the ones required to keep you logged in and the site working. Analytics cookies are added only if you agree through the cookie banner, and you can decline them and use every feature exactly the same.

The distinction matters, so here it is spelled out:

• Essential cookies: always on, because logging in is impossible without them. They do not follow you around the web.
• Analytics cookies: opt-in only, via the banner. They help understand how the product is used. Say no and nothing is set.
• Advertising and tracking cookies: do not exist on Surrounders at all. There is nothing to opt out of, because there is nothing to opt into.

This follows from how the platform makes sense as a business: there are no ads to target, and data is never sold. A services marketplace that charges no fees has no advertising machine behind it collecting profiles - what you see is a booking tool, and the cookies reflect that.

Questions about cookies or anything else data-related can go to [email protected].

Open Settings and use the data download option. Surrounders packages everything it holds about you into a single file you can save: your bookings, the reviews you wrote, the messages you sent, your saved addresses, and your preferences. This is the GDPR right to data portability, built into the product as a button rather than a request you have to email in.

What is inside, concretely:

• Bookings: your booking history across the platform.
• Reviews: the ones you authored.
• Messages: what you sent in conversations.
• Addresses: every address in your address book.
• Preferences: your settings choices.

People typically reach for the export in two moments. One is simple record-keeping - a personal copy of your history with pros you have worked with for years. The other is right before deleting an account: deletion is irreversible, and the export is your last chance to keep a copy of anything you might want later. If deletion is on your mind, download first, delete second - the order cannot be swapped afterwards.

The export covers your data as the platform holds it. If something you expected seems missing, or you have questions about the file, [email protected] handles all data requests.

You hold 4 GDPR rights on Surrounders: access, correction, deletion, and portability. Most of them are built into the product, so exercising them takes minutes in Settings rather than a formal request. For anything the self-service tools do not cover, email [email protected] and it will be handled as a data request.

How each right maps to a tool:

• Access and portability: Settings has a data download that packages everything held about you - bookings, reviews you wrote, messages you sent, addresses, preferences - into a single file you keep.
• Correction: your profile is directly editable. Name, photo, phone, addresses, and preferences can all be fixed yourself, immediately. The one exception is your account email, which currently requires writing to support.
• Deletion: account deletion in Settings, confirmed by typing DELETE. Personal data is deleted or anonymized, you are logged out everywhere, and the action is irreversible.

Building the rights into buttons is deliberate. A right you must write a legal-sounding letter to use is a right most people never exercise; a button in Settings is one everyone does. Your data also lives where GDPR reaches: EU data centers in Frankfurt.

If you believe a request was not handled correctly, or you have a question none of the tools answer, [email protected] is the address - every data request sent there is reviewed.

Yes. Surrounders stores your data in EU data centers located in Frankfurt, Germany. That covers everything the platform holds about you: account details, bookings, messages, saved addresses, and preferences. Surrounders serves Cyprus, an EU country, and operates under GDPR, the EU's data protection law.

What this means for you in practice:

• Your data does not leave EU jurisdiction to sit on servers governed by other countries' rules.
• GDPR rights apply in full: you can access, correct, download, and delete your data, and most of that is built directly into Settings rather than hidden behind a support ticket.
• All traffic between you and the platform travels over HTTPS.

Worth stating plainly what is NOT done with your data, since this is where trust is usually lost: it is not sold, there are no ads on the platform, and there are no advertising or tracking cookies. The only cookies set by default are the essential ones that keep you logged in; analytics runs only if you agree via the cookie banner.

If you have a question the self-service tools do not answer, [email protected] is the address for anything data-related.

Surrounders collects what it needs to run the service and nothing aimed at advertising: your account details (name, email, optional photo and phone), your bookings, the messages you send, any addresses you save, and your settings and preferences. There are no ads on the platform, no tracking pixels, and your data is never sold to anyone.

Each piece has a job. Your email is your login and where notifications go. Bookings and messages are the product itself - the platform could not show you your schedule or your chats without storing them. Saved addresses exist so at-home services know where to go, and they are shared with a pro only after a booking is confirmed. Preferences (language, theme, notification choices) make the app behave the way you set it.

Notably absent from the list: payment details. Surrounders never collects card numbers or bank details, because it never charges anyone - you settle directly with the pro.

How long data is kept is governed by the privacy policy, which is the authoritative document on retention. And none of this is take-it-or-leave-it: Settings lets you download everything the platform holds about you as a file, and delete your account entirely if you choose. All of it lives in EU data centers in Frankfurt.

Reviews you wrote stay on the platform after you delete your account, but they are anonymized: your name is removed from them. The rating and the text remain part of the pro's public history. Your personal data goes; the experience you reported stays available to the customers who come after you.

The reasoning is straightforward. Every review on Surrounders comes from a completed booking - that is what makes the ratings trustworthy. If reviews vanished whenever an author left, a pro's rating could quietly reshape itself over time through no doing of their own, and future customers would be reading a filtered record. Keeping the review while detaching your identity serves both sides: your GDPR right to erasure applies to data about you, and an anonymized review no longer identifies you.

Note that this is consistent with how reviews work generally on the platform: they cannot be edited or deleted by their author after posting even while your account is active. A review is a one-time, permanent record of a completed booking - written once, written carefully.

So if you are deleting your account and wondering whether your honest three-star review will disappear and spare someone awkwardness, or whether your glowing five-star review will stop helping a pro you liked: neither. Both outlive the account, just without your name.