Privacy policy

The short version

• Stop The Mould Ltd runs this service and is responsible for your data (the data controller).
• The Free Case Check does not ask for your name, email or address. It stores your answers, your photographs and the result.
• To produce the free result, your photographs and your answers are sent to Anthropic, whose servers are in the United States. The result is produced automatically and is labelled as such. No decision with a legal effect on you is made by a machine.
• Payments are taken by Stripe. Your card details never reach us.
• Calls to 01695 317777 are answered by an AI phone assistant provided by Retell AI, a US company. The call is transcribed, and we store the transcript, a summary, the numbers involved, anything you give the assistant such as your name, email address or postcode, the time of the call and our own urgency rating, so that a person can call you back. We do not publish or share recordings.
• We do not sell data. We run no advertising cookies and no third-party analytics script.
• Nothing is deleted automatically yet. To get a copy of your data or to have it deleted, email hello@stopthemould.com. We act within one month.

Who is responsible for your data

Stop The Mould Ltd, company number 17316399, registered office 66 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4NA, United Kingdom.

One mailbox handles every question, request and complaint about your data: hello@stopthemould.com. Stop The Mould is run by one founder, who reads that mailbox.

What we collect

The Free Case Check

• Your answers. Whether you rent, own, or are a landlord or letting agent, which UK nation the property is in, the tenure, the safety questions, the type of home, the room and the location of the problem, its extent, when you first noticed it, whether it comes back, whether it has been reported before, whether there is an obvious leak, whether there is condensation, and the ventilation questions. Every answer is a fixed option; there is no free-text box. The check does not ask for a name, an email address, a postcode or an address.
• Your photographs. The photographs you upload. They are stored in a private storage bucket.
• The result. The automated assessment and the safety guidance you were shown.
• Abuse-prevention record. For every automated run we store a salted hash of your IP address (not the address itself), an identifier generated in your browser for that device, the model used and whether the run succeeded, was rate-limited or was blocked. The record also holds the id of the check it relates to and, if you were signed in, your account id.
• A draft on your device. Your answers (not your photographs) are saved in your browser's local storage so you can resume if you leave. That copy stays on your device and is cleared when the check completes.

Health-related answers

The Safety step asks whether someone in the home is struggling to breathe, and whether a baby, an older person or someone with a lung or immune condition lives there. These answers are information about health, which the law treats as special category data.

We use them for two things: to prioritise the result (a breathing emergency changes what the result tells you to do first), and to record that a vulnerable person lives at the property, because that affects how urgently a landlord should respond. They are stored with the check.

Both answers are optional. We rely on your explicit consent, which you give by ticking the answer. Leave it unticked if you would rather not tell us. You can withdraw consent later by asking us to remove those answers from the check.

An account

If you create an account, to keep a case, to respond to a case a resident has shared with you, or to use the Landlord Workspace, we hold your email address, your name, your role (tenant, landlord, agent or similar) and a password. The password is held by our authentication provider as a hash; we cannot read it.

A case

When you buy the Evidence Pack or the Reviewed Report, the check becomes a case. The case holds the photographs, the assessment, the evidence register, the timeline, the dated PDF report, the landlord message, the share link and any follow-up you record. Responses from a landlord, agent or adviser you share the case with are stored in the same case, with the time they were made.

Payments

Card details are entered into Stripe's payment form and go to Stripe only. We receive a payment reference, the amount, the product bought and the email address used at checkout.

Emails you ask us to send

If you send your report to your landlord from the site, we store the landlord's name and email address, your name and email address, and the time the email was sent. The note you write is included in the email but is not stored in our database. The photograph links in that email work for seven days.

Support and complaints

Emails you send to hello@stopthemould.com are kept in that mailbox for as long as needed to deal with them and to show what was agreed.

Telephone enquiries

If you call 01695 317777, we store a record of the call. The full list is under "Telephone enquiries" below, along with who answers the call and what the provider keeps.

Technical data

• Server logs. Our hosting provider records the IP address, browser (user agent), page requested and time for each request, as web servers do.
• First-party usage events. Our own code records, in our own database, an event name (for example, a photograph was uploaded), the page path (pages inside the account, checkout, share and report areas are recorded only as "private"), a random session id created for that browser tab, and, on page views, a coarse referral source such as search or direct. No cookie is set for this and no third-party analytics script is loaded.

Why we use it, and the lawful basis

UK GDPR requires a lawful basis for each purpose. Ours are set out below.

Where we rely on legitimate interests we have considered the effect on you and concluded that it is small and that you would expect the processing. You can object; see "Your rights".

The automated assessment

What is sent. To produce the Free Case Check, our server sends Anthropic (the provider of the Claude models) up to four of your photographs and your answers as short category labels: the type of home, the occupancy, the room, what you reported seeing, and when you first noticed it. The health-related safety answers are not included in what is sent to the model; our own code uses them to set the urgency of the result. The photographs are not attached to the request; Anthropic fetches them through links that stop working after one hour. The household safety answers are not included in what the model receives; they are handled by our own code. Your IP address, your device identifier and, where you have one, your account details are never sent.

What comes back. A structured description: the visual extent, an urgency level, the likely pattern and the alternatives, a confidence level, the quality of the evidence, what the photographs cannot establish, the next action, the evidence gaps, the likely contributors and a summary of what is visible. The model is instructed not to diagnose health, not to make a hazard rating, not to invent legal deadlines and not to estimate costs.

It is automated, and it says so. The result is produced without a person reading it and is labelled as an automated first assessment. A person reads it only if you buy the Reviewed Report.

No solely automated decision with legal effect. The assessment describes what the photographs show. It does not decide anything about you, your tenancy or your entitlement to anything, and neither we nor the model take any action against you on the strength of it. What you, a landlord, a council or anyone else does with it is a human decision. If you think the assessment is wrong, you can ask the founder to review it (the Reviewed Report) or email us.

Anthropic's use of the data. Anthropic processes the photographs and answers as our processor under its commercial API terms. Under those terms the inputs and outputs are not used to train Anthropic's models. Anthropic's servers are in the United States; see "International transfers".

Telephone enquiries

Who answers. Calls to 01695 317777 are answered by an AI phone assistant provided by Retell AI, a company in the United States. You are not speaking to a person. The assistant takes a general enquiry so that a person can call you back; it does not give legal advice. Questions about an existing case should go by email with the case reference so there is a written record.

What is recorded. The call is transcribed, and the record we keep in our own database (Supabase, eu-west-1, Ireland) so that a person can call you back is:

• the transcript of the call, and the assistant's summary of it;
• the number you called from and the number you called, and whether the call was incoming or outgoing;
• anything you give the assistant during the call that it records as a detail of the enquiry: your name, an email address, a postcode, and whether you are a tenant, a homeowner, a landlord or an agent;
• the time the call started and ended, how it ended, whether you asked for a person, and whether it was transferred;
• our urgency rating, described below;
• the assistant's own structured analysis of the call, and technical details of the call from the provider: its call identifier, which assistant answered and its version, and the values the assistant was given at the start of the call.

Retell AI records the audio of the call on its own systems under its own terms. We do not publish or share recordings, and we do not use calls for marketing.

How urgency is decided. If the assistant returns a rating of its own, we keep it. Otherwise our own server assigns one, by looking for particular words in the summary and the transcript — a reported emergency, a health risk, a vulnerable person, or a call that looks like a test or a sales approach. It is a triage rating that decides how quickly a person calls you back. It is not a medical, legal or safety assessment, and nothing about it is automated decision-making with a legal effect on you.

How long. The record is kept with the enquiry until you ask us to delete it; see "How long we keep it". To ask, email hello@stopthemould.com with the number you called from and roughly when you called.

Who we share it with

We use the following providers (processors) to run the service. Each acts on our instructions under its data-processing terms.

Cloudflare Turnstile. A bot check from Cloudflare exists in the code but is switched off. If it is switched on, Cloudflare would receive your IP address and browser details on the free-check page to decide whether you are a person. This policy will be updated before that happens.

People you choose. When you create a share link or send your report to a landlord, the recipient sees what you send them. They are not our processors; they receive the information because you asked us to give it to them.

Authorities. We disclose data where the law requires it, for example in response to a court order.

We do not sell or rent data, and we do not share it with advertising networks or data brokers.

International transfers

Your data is stored with Supabase in Ireland, which the UK recognises as providing adequate protection. Three kinds of transfer go further:

• Anthropic, in the United States, receives your photographs and answers to produce the assessment.
• Retell AI, in the United States, receives the audio of the call and your number when you call the AI phone assistant, and records the audio on its own systems.
• Support access by US-headquartered providers (Supabase and Resend) may involve staff outside the UK and Ireland seeing data when they support us.

The Anthropic transfer and the support-access transfers rely on the provider's standard data-processing terms together with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, which gives the transfer the safeguards UK law requires. We keep a record of each transfer and the reason it is needed. Retell AI processes the call under its own terms, as set out under "Telephone enquiries". Stripe's transfers to the United States take place under Stripe's own safeguards, described in its privacy policy.

Sharing a case

Share link. A case can be shared by a link. Anyone who has the link can view the case, read-only, until it expires 30 days after it was created. Each view is counted. There is no self-service way to end a link early. If you need a link to stop working sooner, email hello@stopthemould.com and we remove it. We cannot take back what someone has already seen or downloaded.

Report to your landlord. If you send the report by email from the site, the landlord receives the assessment and links to the first five photographs. Those links work for seven days.

Responses. A landlord, agent or adviser who responds through the case writes into your case timeline, and you see what they wrote and when.

How long we keep it

No automatic deletion runs yet. This is what happens today:

• Free checks, cases, accounts, share records, usage events and abuse-prevention records are kept until you ask us to delete them.
• Telephone enquiry records (everything listed under "What is recorded" in "Telephone enquiries") are kept with the enquiry until you ask us to delete them. Retell AI keeps the audio under its own terms.
• Payment records are kept for six years after the transaction because tax law requires it. Stripe keeps its own records under its own policy.
• Server logs are kept by the hosting provider under its own retention rules.
• The copy in the previous hosting environment (data from before 6 September 2026) is deleted once the migration is verified.

Automatic deletion schedules are being introduced. When they are live, this policy will state the retention period for each kind of data.

Your rights, and how to use them

Under UK GDPR you can ask us to:

• give you a copy of the data we hold about you (access);
• correct something that is wrong (rectification);
• delete your data (erasure). We will keep only what the law requires us to keep, such as payment records;
• restrict what we do with it while a dispute is resolved;
• give you your data in a machine-readable form (portability);
• stop processing that relies on legitimate interests (objection);
• withdraw your consent to the health-related answers, which we then remove from the check.

How. Email hello@stopthemould.com from the address you used with us, or include your case reference. We may ask you to confirm you control that address before we release anything. We respond within one month. If a request is complex we may take up to two months more, and we will tell you within the first month if so. There is no self-service deletion or export inside the product yet; every request goes through that mailbox.

Complaining to the regulator. You can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113. We would rather hear from you first so we can put it right; our complaints procedure says what to expect.

Security

• The site is served over HTTPS.
• Photographs and documents are stored in private buckets. They are reachable only through time-limited signed links: one hour for the assessment and the case gallery, seven days for a report emailed to a landlord.
• Database access rules (row-level security) limit what each signed-in account, and each share token, can read.
• Provider keys for Anthropic, Stripe and Resend are held as server-side secrets and are never sent to the browser.
• IP addresses in abuse-prevention records are stored only as salted hashes.
• Card details are handled by Stripe. We are never in possession of them.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach puts your rights at risk we will tell you, and we will report it to the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours as the law requires.

Children

The service is for adults. It is not directed at anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has used it, email hello@stopthemould.com and we will delete the data.

Changes to this policy

The date of the last change is shown at the top of this page. If a change affects what we collect or who we share it with (for example, switching on the bot check, or a new retention schedule), we update this page before the change goes live and, where you have an account, tell you by email.