Privacy

The short version

We store what the service needs to work and nothing beyond it. There is no advertising on Ruvella, no third-party tracking, and nothing about you is sold or passed to data brokers. If you are signed out, nothing you browse is recorded anywhere.

The inventory below is written against the application’s own database schema rather than from a template, so it describes what the system genuinely holds.

What we store

If you create an account

• Your name, email address and - if you give one - a phone number.
• A password, stored only as a hash. If you sign in with Google we store the Google account identifier instead, never a password.
• Session records so you stay signed in, including IP address and browser user agent.
• Whether you have opted in to email notifications.
• A profile photograph, if you upload one.

If you use the site

• Properties you save, and when you saved them.
• Viewing requests: which property, which time slot, any note you added, and the outcome.
• Messages you send to agents, and when each was read.
• Reviews and testimonials you write, including those not yet published.
• Saved searches and the alert frequency you chose.
• Notifications generated for you.
• Which listings you have opened and when you last opened each one, so the site can show you where you left off. One record per property rather than a log of every visit, visible only to you, and clearable in one click from account settings.
• Property enquiries you send through the “find me a property” form, including the contact details you put on it.

If you are an agent or landlord

• Your public profile: photograph, job title, biography, office and mobile numbers.
• The listings you manage, your viewing availability, and enquiries assigned to you.
• A record of the people who have shown interest in your listings - their name, contact details, which listing it was, and any private notes you write about following them up.

About listings, not about people

• How many times each listing was opened, per day. A number and nothing else: it carries no identifier, no cookie and no address, and cannot be traced back to a visit or to you. It is what lets an agent see whether interest in a property is rising or falling.

If you contact an agent

• The agent handling that listing keeps a record of the enquiry - your name and contact details, which property it concerned, and their own notes on it. Those notes are private to the agency and are never shown to you or to anybody else.

What we do not store

• Payment card details. The platform does not take payments.
• Any per-person record of browsing done while signed out. There is no tracking cookie and no fingerprinting, so nothing identifies you or follows you between visits. We do count how many times each listing is opened - see below - but that is a number, not a record of who opened it.
• Shortlists built with the compare tool. Those live in your own browser for the length of the session and are never sent to us.
• Uploaded files in the database. Photographs live in object storage, referenced by key.
• Metadata inside photographs you upload. Images are re-encoded on upload, which strips EXIF - including any GPS coordinates your camera recorded.

Why we store it

Everything above does one of four jobs, and we do not keep data that does none of them:

• To provide what you asked for - showing your saved properties, delivering a message to an agent, confirming a viewing. This is the performance of our agreement with you.
• To keep the service safe - session and sign-in records that let us detect and stop account takeover, and the moderation records behind published reviews.
• To send what you opted into - saved-search alerts and notification emails, on the basis of your consent, withdrawable at any time.
• To meet legal obligations - records we are required to keep.

We do use what you save and open to decide which listings to show you. If you have opted into listings email, that shapes the weekly picks we send, and whether we tell you when a home you were watching leaves the market. It is worked out from your saved properties and your browsing history at the moment the email is written - there is no separate profile of you kept anywhere, and clearing your history in account settings genuinely stops it.

None of it leaves us. We do not sell it, we do not share it with advertisers, there are no third-party advertising or tracking cookies on this site, and nothing you do here follows you to another one. Three things stop these emails, any of which is enough: untick listings email in your settings, clear your browsing history, or use the unsubscribe link that every one of them carries.

We do not make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects.

Who else sees it

• The agent handling a property sees your name, your message, and - once a viewing is confirmed - the contact details needed to reach you about it.
• Everyone sees a review or testimonial you have had published, with your name and profile photograph. Nothing else you write is public.
• Our administrators can read conversations for moderation and support. They cannot post into them.

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. We disclose it to a public authority only where the law requires, and we will tell you when we are permitted to.

Services we use

A handful of suppliers process data on our behalf, under contract, and only on our instructions:

• Hosting and database - to run the application and store the records described above.
• Object storage - photographs of properties, profiles and articles.
• Email delivery - verification, password reset, booking and alert emails.
• Background job processing - reminders and digests, sent without holding up your request.
• Error reporting - to tell us when something breaks, and what broke.

None of them may use your data for their own purposes.

How long we keep it

• While your account is open - profile, saved properties, saved searches and browsing history, until you delete them or close the account.
• Sessions - until they expire, then deleted automatically each night.
• Messages and viewings - kept while both parties have accounts, because a conversation belongs to both of them.
• Published reviews and testimonials- kept after an account closes, shown without the author’s name.
• After you close your account - personal data is deleted, except records we are legally required to keep.

Your rights

You can ask us to:

• Show you what we hold about you, as a copy you can keep.
• Correct anything wrong - most of it you can edit yourself.
• Delete your account and the personal data attached to it.
• Export your data in a portable, machine-readable format.
• Stop a particular use - most usefully email. Turn off notifications in account settings, or set any saved search to Never.
• Object to processing, or ask us to restrict it while a disagreement is resolved.

Several need no request at all: your profile, saved properties, saved searches and browsing history are editable and deletable from account settings. For the rest, write to us and we will respond within 30 days, at no charge. If you think we have got it wrong, you are entitled to complain to your local data protection authority.

Where the data lives

Our database and object storage are hosted in the United States, and our email and job processing suppliers operate internationally. Listings on Ruvella span Uganda and the United States, so data crosses borders by design. Where it does, it moves under contractual safeguards with each supplier requiring them to protect it to the standard described here.

How it is protected

• Traffic is encrypted in transit, and the database connection is verified rather than merely encrypted.
• Passwords are hashed, never stored or logged in a readable form.
• Permission is checked on the server for every action, against the account’s current role rather than a cached copy - so access revoked is access gone immediately.
• Uploads are validated by inspecting the file itself rather than trusting what the browser claims, then re-encoded, which discards anything hidden inside.
• Anything written by a user is rendered as text, never as markup, so nothing anybody types can execute in someone else’s browser.

If something goes wrong

If a breach occurs that is likely to put your rights at risk, we will tell you directly and without undue delay, and notify the relevant authority within 72 hours of becoming aware. We will say what happened, what it means for you and what we are doing about it - as plainly as we can and as soon as we know, rather than waiting until we know everything.

Contacting us

Email hello@ruvella.exampleand put “data request” in the subject line. A person reads it. See also our terms of service.