Your data & your rights

Under UK data-protection law, depending on the circumstances and the lawful basis on which we process your information, you may have the right to:

• See what we hold about you and get a copy of it (Article 15, right of access).
• Have inaccurate information corrected (Article 16, right to rectification).
• Ask us to erase your information (Article 17, right to erasure).
• Restrict how we use it in specific circumstances (Article 18).
• Receive certain information in a portable format so you can move it elsewhere (Article 20).
• Object to processing that we carry out on the basis of our legitimate interests (Article 21).
• Withdraw consent for anything we do on the basis of consent, at any time, without affecting processing that already took place.
• Complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (the UK regulator) without having to contact us first.

The rest of this page explains the two rights people ask about most, access and erasure, and how to exercise the others. None of these rights are absolute: there are limited exceptions set out in the UK GDPR, most commonly where we have to keep information to meet a legal obligation or to defend a legal claim.

Go to Settings → Data & privacy and click Request export. We build a JSON file with your profile, listings, offers, orders, messages you have sent, reviews, reports, identity-check history and tax information: everything we hold that is personally about you, including items on legal hold that we cannot delete.

The file is ready immediately and the download link stays live for 72 hours, after which it expires and the file is removed from our storage. You can request a fresh export at any time.

The format is “structured, commonly used and machine-readable”, which also satisfies the data-portability right in Article 20, so you can import the file into another tool or pass it to a privacy adviser.

If you cannot sign in, email support@prerode.com and we will handle identity verification by email before releasing an export.

From the same Data & privacy page, click Delete my account and confirm by typing DELETE. We then:

• Hide your profile immediately. You appear as “Deleted user” on listings, reviews and messages the same moment.
• Start a 30-day grace window. You can sign back in during that window and click Cancel deletion to restore your account exactly as it was.
• After 30 days, permanently erase the categories listed under “Erased” below.

Article 17 is not absolute. UK law lets us keep certain information for specific purposes, described in the next section.

Erased

Removed entirely after the 30-day grace window: drafts, saved listings, personal settings, push notification tokens, ID verification metadata, marketing consents and email send logs.

Anonymised, then kept

Replaced with “Deleted user” while the underlying record stays so the other party retains their copy of the interaction:

• Completed orders (amounts, dates, items).
• Reviews you left or received.
• Messages you exchanged with other riders (the other party's side of the conversation).
• Public records of listings you sold.

Kept in full, under legal hold

Some records cannot be erased on request because UK law, or the defence of legal claims under Article 17(3), requires we keep them:

• Tax information, kept for 5 years from the end of the relevant reporting year under the Reporting Rules for Digital Platforms (the UK implementation of the OECD Model Rules, often called DAC7).
• Records of moderator actions, kept for 7 years for accountability and dispute defence.
• Reports filed about you, kept for 7 years so we can recognise repeat patterns if the same person re-registers, and so we can defend claims within the applicable limitation period.
• Open disputes or investigations, paused until they resolve. We show you the hold date in the deletion confirmation.

Items on legal hold still appear in your data export, because you have the right to see them under Article 15 even where we cannot delete them under Article 17(3).

Retention timetable

Section 9 of the Privacy Policy lists every fixed retention period we operate, including the 2-year rolling window on direct messages, the 6-year window on orders, reviews and sold listings, and the 14-day cleanup of signups that never confirm an email address. Those windows are enforced by automated jobs that run on a schedule.

You can update most of your profile and account information yourself in Settings. For anything you cannot change from your account, email support@prerode.com and describe what needs to change and why.

To object to processing we carry out on the basis of legitimate interests (for example, our fraud and safety checks), or to restrict processing while we look into a request, use the same email address. We will consider each request against the balancing test in Article 21 and will explain the outcome.

To withdraw consent for optional cookies and analytics, use the Manage cookie preferences button on our Cookie Policy or clear the prerode_consent cookie in your browser. Withdrawal takes effect immediately for future processing.

UK GDPR (Article 12(3)) gives us one month to respond to access, erasure or other rights requests. We can extend that by up to two further months for complex or high-volume requests, in which case we will tell you within the first month, explain why, and confirm the new deadline.

In practice, both the data export and the deletion request happen at the moment you click the button in Settings: the export is built there and then, and the deletion flag is set immediately with the 30-day grace window running from that moment.

Where you use the buttons in Data & privacy, being signed in to your account acts as your identity check. If you have lost access, email support@prerode.com and we will verify your identity by email under Article 12(6) before acting on the request.

Messages between buyers and sellers are private and stored so the other party can read them. They are not used for marketing, for training models, or for anything other than the conversation itself.

We run an automated safety check on every message. It looks for known marketplace-scam patterns (off-platform contact attempts, payment circumvention, phrases associated with common scams) and can show a warning to the recipient if anything trips. The sender does not see the warning, so scammers cannot iterate against the detector.

This automated check does not, on its own, produce a decision about you that has legal or similarly significant effects within the meaning of Article 22.

A Prerode moderator can only open a private conversation where there is a specific triggering event (a report on the conversation, an automated flag, or an explicit “open for investigation” action recorded in our admin audit trail with a stated reason). There is no general “read any DM” button. Section 3 of the Privacy Policy lists the full set of grounds on which a moderator may open a conversation.

We try to keep the list short. The categories of provider we use (hosting, database, email delivery, analytics that only run with your consent, and error monitoring) are set out in Section 7 of the Privacy Policy. Any specific third parties active at any point in time are named in that section and in the Cookie Policy. If you would like the current provider list for a specific category, email support@prerode.com.

When you delete your account, we forward the deletion request to every processor that holds copies of your data, subject to the same legal-hold exceptions above.

Some of our providers are based outside the United Kingdom, in the European Economic Area or the United States. Where personal information is transferred internationally, we rely on the safeguards required by UK data-protection law: UK adequacy regulations, the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (the UK-US Data Bridge), the International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, as appropriate. Section 8 of the Privacy Policy has the detail.

Our hosting provider keeps encrypted database snapshots for up to 30 days, together with 7 days of point-in-time recovery data. Erasure applied to the live database propagates through to backups within that window.