Privacy Policy

We collect information you provide directly to us when you create an account, complete your profile, make a booking enquiry, or contact our support team. This includes your name, email address, phone number, location (city, neighbourhood), profile photos, and any other information you choose to provide in your sitter or owner profile. For pet sitters, this also includes your service descriptions, rates, availability, home details, and optional verification documents you choose to submit, such as police-check or insurance evidence.

Site statistics are optional and require your consent. They record page paths without URL queries or fragments, approximate country, device category, referring website domain and limited action counts, without linking them to your account. Your IP address is used momentarily for country lookup and a salted daily visitor count, then discarded; it is not stored in analytics. Separately, Optional analytics can link approved campaign labels to a new account and its signup and software-use milestones. Raw search terms, email-confirmation parameters and advertising click identifiers are not collected. Essential security and account operations are separate from both optional categories.

We use your personal information to provide and improve the Service, including to create and manage your account, display your sitter or owner profile, facilitate communications between pet owners and sitters, process booking enquiries, send you service-related notifications and updates, personalise your experience, and provide customer support. The legal basis for this processing is the performance of our contract with you and our legitimate interests in operating and improving the Service.

We may also use your information to send you marketing communications about new features, promotions, or relevant content, but only with your explicit consent. You can opt out of marketing communications at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in our emails or contacting us at [email protected]. We use aggregated and anonymised data for analytics, research, and service improvement purposes.

We share certain profile information publicly as part of the Service. If you are a pet sitter, your profile name, bio, services, rates, availability, reviews, and approximate location are visible to pet owners using the platform. If you are a pet owner, your name and profile information are shared with sitters you contact. We do not sell your personal information to third parties.

We may share your information with third-party service providers who assist us in operating the Service, such as hosting providers (Digital Ocean), email delivery services (Resend), payment processors (Stripe), and mapping services (Mapbox). These providers are contractually obligated to protect your data and may only use it to provide services to us. If you enable push notifications, each notification is delivered through the push service built into your browser or device (operated by Google, Mozilla or Apple depending on what you use), which necessarily receives the notification content. We do not use third-party analytics or advertising services — our own analytics are first-party and are not shared with anyone — although the Mapbox map library collects its own usage data on pages that display a map. We may also disclose your information if required by law, to protect our rights, or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.

Stripe processes sitters’ Pro subscription payments to The Pet Sitter and handles payment-card details and billing information under its privacy policy (stripe.com/privacy). We do not store full card details. Payments from pet owners to sitters are separate: sitters choose and control their own payment arrangements. Payment instructions stored in our software, such as bank details, are encrypted at rest and disclosed only to authorised parties in the relevant booking workflow; we do not process or settle those business payments.

Stripe processes paid sitter subscriptions. We do not store full payment-card details; we receive and retain subscription, billing, invoice and tax records needed to provide the service. Booking payments do not pass through The Pet Sitter. We do store the payment instructions sitters choose to provide, encrypted at rest, and share them with confirmed clients and on the relevant invoices. These instructions do not let us collect or verify a booking payment.

We use cookies and similar technologies to provide, secure, and improve the Service. Essential cookies are necessary for the Service to function and cannot be disabled. These include cookies for authentication, session management, and security. Functional cookies remember your preferences, such as language and locale settings, to personalise your experience.

The Cookie preferences notice offers Accept all and Advanced. Advanced opens a separate settings screen with Required always on and independent Site statistics and Optional analytics switches. For new visitors, both analytics switches start on as an unsaved proposal; collection only starts after Accept all or Accept choices. To use required cookies only, turn both analytics switches off and select Accept choices. Existing saved choices are retained, and disabling either analytics category does not restrict the service. Change your choices through Cookie preferences in the footer or this policy. A necessary preference cookie remembers them for 180 days and is not a tracking identifier. Only with campaign/account consent may approved campaign labels remain in this tab’s session storage for up to 30 minutes and link to a new account for up to 90 days to measure email verification, sitter signup, business setup and paid Pro subscriptions. Site-statistics consent alone never authorizes this account linkage. We do not install Google conversion tags or send this measurement data to Google. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control override both optional choices. When you select Accept choices, any categories you turned off stop measuring in this browser immediately; withdrawing campaign/account consent removes the account’s campaign linkage when the server receives the request. Retry if saving fails. Expired linkage is excluded immediately and cleared on schedule. Previously consented site-visit statistics and unlinked business totals may remain under the applicable retention rules.

We use artificial intelligence (AI) systems to help operate and improve the Service. This includes automated review of a sitter profile when the sitter requests publication of their page or when content is reported to us, automated review of verification documents when they are submitted, moderation of messages and user-generated content for safety, AI-assisted customer support responses, and suggested responses for sitter reviews. AI processing is used to assist our team, not to make fully automated decisions that significantly affect you.

Content you submit (such as profile text, messages, and reviews) may be processed by third-party AI providers (Anthropic and OpenAI) for the purposes described above. We do not use your personal data to train AI models. You have the right to request human review of any decision that was informed by AI processing. If you have concerns about AI processing of your data, contact us at [email protected].

We implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal information against unauthorised access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction. This includes encryption of data in transit (TLS/SSL), secure hosting infrastructure, access controls, and regular security assessments.

While we take reasonable steps to protect your information, no method of transmission over the Internet or electronic storage is completely secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security, but we are committed to maintaining industry-standard protections and promptly addressing any security incidents in accordance with GDPR breach notification requirements and the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme under the Australian Privacy Act.

Your data is stored on managed database and hosting infrastructure provided by Digital Ocean. File uploads (such as profile photos and verification documents) are stored on Digital Ocean Spaces (S3-compatible cloud storage). Our infrastructure may be located in regions outside your country of residence.

Where your data is transferred outside the European Economic Area or Australia, we ensure appropriate safeguards are in place, including standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission and compliance with the APPs regarding cross-border disclosure of personal information. We take reasonable steps to ensure that overseas recipients handle your data in accordance with applicable privacy laws.

Under the GDPR, you have the right to access your personal data, rectify inaccurate data, request erasure of your data ("right to be forgotten"), restrict or object to processing of your data, receive your data in a portable format, and withdraw consent at any time where processing is based on consent. To exercise any of these rights, contact us at [email protected].

We will respond to your request within 30 days. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Belgian Data Protection Authority (Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit / Autorité de protection des données) if you believe your data protection rights have been violated. To delete your account, contact us at [email protected] and we will permanently delete your account and the personal information associated with it. Deletion is irreversible, so please complete or cancel any active bookings first.

If you are located in Australia, we comply with the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). You have the right to access and correct your personal information held by us. If you believe we have breached the APPs, you may lodge a complaint with us at [email protected], and we will respond within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may lodge a complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) at oaic.gov.au. We will not use or disclose your personal information for the purpose of direct marketing unless you have consented or it is impracticable to obtain your consent, and we will always provide you with a simple means to opt out.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, technology, legal requirements, or other factors. We will notify you of any material changes by posting the updated policy on our website and, where appropriate, by sending you an email notification.

The "Last updated" date at the top of this policy indicates when it was last revised. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically to stay informed about how we protect your information. Your continued use of the Service after any changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please contact us at [email protected]. Our Data Protection Officer can be reached at the same email address. Our registered office is located in Belgium.

The Pet Sitter BV is the data controller responsible for your personal information. We are registered in Belgium and subject to the supervision of the Belgian Data Protection Authority. For formal data protection enquiries, you may also write to us at our registered address.