HomeSwitch – Privacy Policy

HOMESWITCH GLOBAL LTD, a private company limited by shares registered in England and Wales under company number 17459952. HomeSwitch is the consumer-facing brand of HOMESWITCH GLOBAL LTD.

Registered Office: 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom

Privacy contact: info@homeswitch.asia. We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer.

This Privacy Policy applies to all visitors and registered members of the HomeSwitch platform at www.homeswitch.asia and describes the personal information the platform actually processes in its current form.

Account and profile information: first and last name, email address, password (stored only in encrypted form by our authentication system), profile photo, short biography, languages, city and country, member since date, verification status, Trust Score and number of completed exchanges.

Home and listing information: title, description, property type, number of bedrooms, bathrooms and guests, amenities, house rules, photos of the home, city and country, and an optional address field that you may complete. The precise address is not shown publicly in search results.

Calendar and availability information: the periods in which your home is available, your preferred destinations and dates, and the dates blocked by confirmed exchanges.

Exchange information: exchange requests (dates, number of guests, your free-text message), their status, confirmed exchanges and the damage-responsibility acknowledgement recorded for an exchange (version, member and timestamp).

Messages: the content, sender, recipient and time of private messages in exchange conversations, together with any block you set on a conversation.

Notifications: notifications generated for you about exchanges, messages and cases, including whether you have read or removed them.

Reviews: reviews you write or receive after a completed exchange.

Safety and support information: reports you submit about members, listings, reviews, messages or conversations; exchange issues and disputes; Damage Center claims including your description, submitted photos, documents and the exchange of messages within a case.

Consent records: your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions and of the damage-responsibility acknowledgement, with the document version, your user reference, date and time and the result of the consent.

Membership information: your membership plan, its status and the period it covers. HomeSwitch does not currently process live payments and does not store card or bank details.

Technical information: IP address, browser and device information and log data generated when you use the platform, used for operating and securing the service.

We do not currently collect telephone numbers, identity documents or newsletter subscriber lists. If you email us, we process the content of your message in order to reply.

• Providing the platform, registration and account management
• Publishing listings and enabling members to search and discover homes
• Enabling exchange requests, confirmation of exchanges and calendar availability
• Enabling private messaging between members involved in an exchange
• Sending in-app notifications about your exchanges, messages and cases
• Reviews and the Trust Score as trust signals within the community
• Verification of member accounts
• Security, fraud prevention and prevention of abuse, including detection of attempts to move contact details off the platform
• Handling reports, exchange issues, disputes and Damage Center claims
• Managing memberships and entitlements
• Responding to enquiries and providing support
• Complying with legal obligations and defending legal claims
• Maintaining and improving the reliability of the platform

We rely on the following lawful bases under applicable UK data protection law, depending on the purpose:

• Performance of a contract, or steps taken at your request before entering into a contract: creating and managing your account, publishing your listing, processing exchange requests and confirmed exchanges, delivering messages and notifications, managing memberships and providing support relating to your use of the platform.
• Legitimate interests: keeping the platform secure, preventing fraud and abuse, investigating reported safety issues and disputes, maintaining the Trust Score and review system as community trust signals, and maintaining the technical stability of the service. Our interest is in a safe and trustworthy home exchange community; we balance this against your interests and use the least intrusive means reasonably available.
• Compliance with legal obligations: retaining records where the law requires it and responding to lawful requests from competent authorities.
• Establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims: retaining evidence connected with damage claims, disputes and safety cases.
• Consent: where consent is actually required and obtained, for example for non-essential cookies. Consent is not the basis for the processing that is necessary to operate your account.

Where processing is based on consent, you may withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future.

The Trust Score is a score calculated by the platform from information already held about your account, such as your verification status, profile completeness, confirmed and completed exchanges, reviews and any reports or safety incidents.

Its purpose is trust, safety and community integrity: it helps members judge who they are dealing with. It is a profiling measure in the broad sense, but it does not produce a legal effect or similarly significant effect on you, and there is no fully automated decision that determines whether you may use the platform. Account restrictions are reviewed by our team.

The Trust Score is not a guarantee of a member's reliability or safety. We do not publish the detailed weighting of security-relevant signals, as this would make the system easier to manipulate.

Messages are processed to enable members to organise home exchanges. Their content is not used for advertising purposes.

Private conversations are not intended for routine browsing by HomeSwitch staff and access is restricted by technical access controls.

Where a member reports a message, a conversation, an exchange, a safety issue or a dispute, authorised Trust & Safety staff may access the information reasonably necessary to investigate that specific case. The platform also applies automated checks that block obvious contact details such as phone numbers, email addresses and messenger handles before a message or request is sent, in order to keep communication on the platform and reduce fraud.

Members publish information about their home voluntarily, for example photos, description, amenities, house rules, city and country and availability. This information is visible to visitors of the platform.

Please only publish photos and details you are willing to make public, and do not include documents, keys or other sensitive content in your photos.

HomeSwitch uses technically necessary cookies and browser storage, in particular to keep you signed in and to maintain your session. Analytics or marketing cookies, where used in future, are only deployed after appropriate consent. Further details are set out in our Cookie Policy.

Other members receive the information you choose to make visible: your public profile, your listing, and — within an exchange — the content of your requests, messages, acknowledgements and reviews.

Service providers: we use hosting, database, authentication, file storage and email delivery providers that operate the platform infrastructure on our behalf under a data processing agreement. We do not currently use a payment provider, an external identity verification provider or advertising networks.

Authorities, legal and professional advisers: where necessary to comply with a legal obligation or to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

We do not sell personal information.

The platform is served over a secure connection via HTTPS. Access to member data is restricted by database-level access rules, so that members can generally only reach their own data and the data of exchanges they are involved in, and administrative access is limited to authorised staff roles. Administrative actions are recorded in an audit log.

No system can be guaranteed to be completely secure, but we apply appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal information against loss, misuse and unauthorised access.

We keep personal information for as long as it is needed for the purpose for which it was collected, and thereafter only where a further basis applies. We have not fixed a uniform retention period for every category; instead we apply the following criteria:

• Account, profile and listing information: for as long as your account exists.
• Exchange requests, confirmed exchanges, acknowledgements and messages: while the exchange relationship is live and thereafter for as long as needed to evidence what was agreed between members.
• Reviews and Trust Score information: while your account exists, as they form part of the community trust record.
• Notifications: until you remove them or they are no longer relevant; removal hides a notification from your list and does not delete the underlying exchange, message or case.
• Reports, disputes and Damage Center claims including submitted evidence: until the case is closed and thereafter for as long as needed for safety, fraud prevention and potential legal claims.
• Consent records: for as long as needed to evidence the consent given.
• Technical and security log data: for a short operational period, unless needed for investigating a specific incident.

Some records may need to be retained after an account is closed where this is necessary for legal obligations, fraud and security prevention, open disputes, damage claims, retaining evidence, or the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.

Subject to the conditions and exceptions of applicable data protection law, you have the right to:

• be informed about how your personal information is used
• request access to the personal information we hold about you
• request rectification of inaccurate or incomplete information
• request erasure of your personal information
• request restriction of processing
• object to processing based on our legitimate interests
• receive certain information in a portable format
• withdraw consent where processing is based on consent

You can update much of your profile information yourself in the platform. To exercise any of these rights, contact info@homeswitch.asia. We may need to verify your identity before responding.

If you are not satisfied with how we handle your personal information, you may complain to the data protection authority competent for you. We will also confirm the competent supervisory authority on request.

HomeSwitch operates internationally and members exchange homes across borders, so personal information may be processed outside your country of residence, including by our infrastructure providers.

Where personal information is transferred internationally and safeguards are required by applicable law, we put in place the safeguards required for that transfer.

HomeSwitch may update this Privacy Policy to reflect legal, organisational or technical changes. The date at the top of this page shows when it was last updated.

Privacy enquiries: info@homeswitch.asia