Privacy notice

nestr holds your home address, your cats and, during a booking, photographs taken inside your home. Each of these is shown to as few people as the job allows. Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared for advertising.

nestr is run by Nestr Pets Ltd, company number 17091543, registered at 3rd Floor, 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE. We are the data controller for the information described here. To ask anything about your data, write to hello@nestrpets.com.

For everyone with an account:

• your name, email address, phone number and photo, and a scrambled form of your password (never the password itself), or your Google account if you sign in with Google
• which emails you have asked for, and the link you joined from, if it carried one (for example a fair)
• messages you send through nestr, and anything you send us for help

For cat owners:

• your postcode, and your full address when you book
• an emergency contact: their name, phone and relationship to you
• your cats: names, photos, routine, food, health and medication, and anything else you choose to tell a sitter
• how a sitter gets in, for a booking

For sitters:

• your profile: about you, your price, the areas you cover, your free days, the cats you are comfortable with, and an optional video
• your date of birth, which is never shown to owners
• the outcome of your identity and right to work check, and your payout account

When bookings are open, we also hold each booking, its payments and refunds, and the record of each visit: the times, a location reading taken on the sitter’s phone when they arrive, and the photographs they take.

• To run nestr for you (our contract with you): your account, your profile, matching owners and sitters, bookings, payments and messages.
• Because the law requires it: checking a sitter may work in the UK, and keeping payment records for tax.
• Because we have a legitimate interest in keeping nestr safe and working: preventing fraud, fixing errors, keeping a record of what happened at a visit in case of a dispute, and knowing how people found us.
• Because you asked (your consent): news and offers from nestr, and an email when bookings open. You can change your mind at any time in your settings or from the link in any of those emails.

You see it, and so do administrators at nestr. A sitter sees it once you have confirmed a booking with them, because they have to get to your door. Everyone else, including a sitter reading your request before accepting it, sees only the first part of your postcode: SE15, never SE15 4QY.

Photographs are resized on your own phone before they are sent, which also removes the location the camera records in the file. They are stored privately, with no public web address. When one is shown to you or to your sitter, it is through a link that stops working after a few minutes.

A sitter’s identity and right to work in the UK are checked by TrustID, who see the documents and tell us the outcome. We keep the outcome and when it was decided, not the documents. This is not a criminal record check, and nestr does not describe it as one.

Card details are entered directly with Stripe, our payment provider, and never reach nestr. Sitters set up their payout account with Stripe too. We hold the amounts, the dates and the outcome of each payment, because that is the record of who is owed what.

Other people on nestr see only what they need: an owner sees a sitter’s profile; a sitter sees an owner’s cat and, once booked, their address and access details.

These companies run parts of nestr for us, and each sees only what its part needs:

• Vercel, which hosts nestr, in London
• Neon, the database, in London
• Cloudflare, which stores photographs, in Western Europe
• Resend, which sends nestr’s emails, in Ireland
• Brevo, nestr’s mailing list, in the EU
• Sentry, which reports errors so we can fix them, in Germany
• Stripe, for payments and payouts
• TrustID, for identity and right to work checks, in the UK
• Google, if you choose to sign in with Google

Some of these companies are based in the United States. Where your data can be reached from outside the UK, it is protected by the safeguards UK law requires, such as the UK’s data transfer agreements. More on where everything is kept is on the data and backups page.

We would also share information if the law required it, for example with the police.

• How a sitter gets in is deleted as soon as the booking is over.
• Payment and booking records are kept for six years, as tax rules require.
• The record of a visit, its photographs included, is kept with the booking it belongs to.
• Everything else is kept while you have an account, and deleted when you ask us to close it, apart from the records above.
• Your place on the mailing list lasts until you unsubscribe.

nestr uses only the cookies it needs to work: one that keeps you signed in, and a few that remember small choices, such as which side of nestr you are using, a notice you closed, or the link you joined from (for 30 days). There are no advertising or tracking cookies, so there is nothing to accept or decline.

You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, delete it, or stop using it, and ask for it in a form you can take elsewhere. Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time. Write to hello@nestrpets.com and we will answer within a month. Some records have to survive deletion for legal reasons; where that is so, we will tell you which and why.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk. We would like the chance to put it right first.

If this notice changes in a way that matters, we will tell you by email before it takes effect. The date at the top says when it last changed.