Privacy

The public site

Opening a page sends technical data from your browser, including your IP address. It is processed to deliver the page and is not used to build a profile. The access log at the entrance to our servers records the method, the address of the page without anything after a "?", the response and how long it took — not your IP address — and each line is deleted before it is 30 days old. The services behind it log each request the same way, with the network it came from in place of your address (its last part removed) and sometimes the reference number of the account or capacity concerned; those logs live in a fixed space per service that is overwritten as new lines arrive, and since every service writes to it every few seconds even when nobody is using it, a line lasts about a week at most.

The site loads nothing from third parties: no third-party analytics, no externally hosted fonts, no advertising networks. The maps on the site are served by us. It sets one cookie of its own, talqero_consent, and only when you answer the question about visit statistics; Cloudflare, which carries our traffic, may set a short-lived security cookie. Every cookie and stored item is listed, with its purpose and how long it stays, on the "Cookies and storage" page (/en-ie/cookies).

We count the pages our server sends, on our own servers and without reading anything from your device, to know which pages people read, where they came from and how much of our traffic is search engines and other robots. For each page we record its address, the site or search engine that linked to it (its name only, never the full link), any campaign tag in the link, your country, and the kind of device and browser your browser names in its request. Your IP address is used for a moment to work out the country and to check whether a visitor claiming to be a search engine really is one, and is never stored. Instead of an identifier we keep a code made from your IP address, your browser and a random value that we create each day and delete at midnight, so we can count unique visitors within one day but cannot recognise you on any other day. Basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in delivering and securing the site and in knowing, without tracking anybody, how it is found and used.

Visit statistics, only if you allow them. A small script of ours can also tell our server, for each page, the size class of your screen, how long the page was open and how far down you read it, your browser's language, the site you arrived from on the first page, and whether the browser says it is being driven by a program. That reads information from your device, so it needs your consent (Regulation 5(3) of the ePrivacy Regulations 2011): it does not run until you press "Allow statistics", and it stops as soon as you reject or withdraw — "Cookie settings" at the foot of every page reopens the choice. Nothing is sent to anybody else, nothing is used for advertising, and you are not followed across other sites. Basis: Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, your consent, which you may withdraw at any time without affecting what was counted before (Art. 7(3)). Your choice is kept in the talqero_consent cookie for six months and then asked again, or sooner if what the statistics collect changes. To be able to show that a statistic was collected with consent, each one is stored with the version of the cookies page you agreed to and the day you agreed, and we count how many people allowed or rejected each day — without anything that identifies who.

The phone app sends the same kind of count for the screens you open and a few steps such as posting a task, with its version and platform, and no device identifier — only if you allow it when the app first asks, or later under Profile. Basis: Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, your consent.

Individual visit records are deleted after 90 days; only daily totals, which contain nothing about any person, are kept after that.

Cookies in the application

The application at /app sets cookies of its own that it needs to work, which is why no consent is asked for them (Regulation 5(5) of the ePrivacy Regulations 2011). talqero_session holds your sign-in for the length of the session — two hours from an e-mail code, up to twelve from a passkey — and is cleared when you sign out. talqero_party remembers which capacity you are acting in, until you close the browser; it is a preference, and every service still checks your membership on every request. talqero_role remembers whether the screens are laid out for ordering work or doing it, for 180 days, and only once you have pressed that switch.

The application asks the same question about visit statistics as the site, and the one answer, kept in talqero_consent, covers both. The application itself runs no statistics script.

The phone app sets no cookies. It keeps your session token, the key it signs with and a few settings in the operating system's secure storage on the handset; the "Cookies and storage" page lists each one.

Your account

To sign in we hold your e-mail address, the one-time codes we send it, any passkey you register, and the public half of any key your phone registers. The private halves never leave your device.

Every session is recorded with when it was created and last used, and you can see and revoke them in the application. Sign-ins, key registrations and similar security events are written to an audit log that you can read out. That log also records what our staff did and why; each entry is deleted six years after it was written, whether or not the account is still open, because until then it is what shows who did what if a decision is challenged.

The codes, and every other e-mail we send you, go through our own mail server. Codes and sign-ins that were never finished are deleted after 30 days, and a session record 30 days after it ended.

Which months you used your account is kept only until that month ends, and is then turned into a monthly total that names nobody, because the Digital Services Act requires us to be able to give the regulator our number of monthly users (Art. 24(3); basis Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR). Demonstration and staff accounts are not counted.

Basis: Art. 6(1)(b), the contract with you, and 6(1)(f) for the security records. Kept while the account is open. Closing the account revokes every session, retires every device, and replaces your e-mail address with something that is not one, immediately. What is kept after that, and why, is under "When you close your account".

When you close your account

Your profile, portfolio and profile photographs, your service areas and availability, your notifications, your push tokens and the places and words of requests that never became a job are removed at once. Open requests are withdrawn, offers that were not accepted are withdrawn and lose their message, and a job that was agreed but not started is cancelled, with the other side told why.

Some things stay, because the law allows us to keep what is needed for a legal claim (GDPR Art. 17(3)(e)): a minimal record of each job you had — which two parties, the dates, its state and the agreed price — for six years after it closed, the period in which a claim on the contract can be brought (Statute of Limitations 1957, s. 11); the conversation, the address and the photographs of a job on their own timers above — two years after the job closed, six after a dispute; invoices and completion records for six years after they were issued; complaints, disputes and notices for six years after they were decided; and the staff audit log for six years from each entry. Only staff answering a complaint or claim about that job can open any of it.

A review you wrote stays, without your name and cut off from your account, because another person's standing rests on it; reviews written about you are blanked. Data deleted under these rules survives in our backups for up to fourteen days, and then goes with them.

Offering work: as a private person or as a business

Before you offer work you say whether you do it as a private individual or in the course of a business. The answer is recorded and shown to the customer, because a consumer has to be told whether the person they are about to contract with is a trader — consumer law protects them against a trader, not against another private person (Consumer Protection Act 2007, s. 46(3)(g), and Consumer Rights Act 2022, s. 107).

A business gives its legal name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, a register or VAT number, and a declaration that it offers only what it may lawfully offer; we check a company number against the Companies Registration Office register. These details are shown to the customer on a confirmed job and on the invoice and completion record, so that the customer knows who they are contracting with. We follow the rules the Digital Services Act sets for traders on a marketplace (Art. 30), although at Talqero's present size it does not yet require them (Art. 29).

Basis: Art. 6(1)(c) for the declaration; 6(1)(b) and 6(1)(f) — the customer's interest in knowing who they deal with — for the trader details. Those are deleted six months after the business stops using the platform; the copies on invoices and completion records stay as long as those do.

Jobs, offers and addresses

A job carries what you asked for, the town, and — if you gave it — the street address, a coarse position (to about a hundred metres) and, if you pin it, the exact spot of the property. Businesses see the town and nothing finer until you accept an offer. The business you chose then sees the address and the exact spot for the length of the job, and loses them when the job closes or is cancelled. Our staff see the address only when answering a complaint about that job, and the exact spot only through the evidence of a dispute.

An offer carries the price, any conditions, the earliest day the business could start and how long it expects the work to take. How long the work actually took is worked out from the moves both of you made on the job, and shown to both of you.

Basis: Art. 6(1)(b), and 6(1)(f) for keeping the record afterwards. The job itself — who, when, its state and the agreed price — is kept for six years after it closes, the time in which a claim on the contract can be brought (Statute of Limitations 1957, s. 11). What was written and where — the description, the address, the exact spot, the conversation and the photographs — is erased two years after the job closes; if a complaint or dispute was raised, six years after it was decided or withdrawn, because it is then evidence. A request that never became a job loses its words after a year and is deleted after two; a draft never posted is deleted after ninety days.

Conversations

Messages between a customer and a business are kept with the job and are readable by the two of you, and by our staff only when answering a complaint about that job. Nothing in them is read by a machine for any other purpose than the two named on the safety page: a sentence that proposes taking the money around the platform, and a phone number, e-mail address or link written before a job is confirmed. Neither is blocked; the writer is shown one sentence about what leaving the platform costs, and that the sentence was shown is recorded.

When somebody writes to you, you are told in the application, with the first sixty characters of what was said — and, once push notifications to phones are switched on (they are not yet) and if you allowed them, on your phone; a push will pass through Google or Apple to reach the handset. A notification in the application — about a message or anything else on your jobs — is deleted ninety days after you read it, and a year after it was sent if you have not.

You can withdraw a message you wrote; its words are erased and a mark stays in its place. Two years after a job closes, or after a request ends with no job, the words of the whole conversation are erased, and so are the quotations of them in notifications — six years after a dispute about the job, if there was one. Basis: Art. 6(1)(b), and 6(1)(f) for the two detections.

Where you are

Nothing about your position is recorded unless you switch it on. A business can set itself available and share a coarse position (about a hundred metres) so that it is shown distances to open jobs and can be followed by a customer whose job it is on the way to; that position is used only while it is fresh: a reading more than twenty minutes old is no longer shown to anybody, it is deleted within half an hour of the last reading if your phone stops sending one, and it is deleted at once when you switch off. Only the latest reading is ever held — never a trail.

A worker on a company's roster can open a shift, which is the only window in which positions are recorded against them; the worker opens and ends it, never the employer. Positions taken during a shift are coarse (about 110 metres), nobody can browse them, and they are deleted 90 days after the shift ends — longer only while the job the shift was on is held because of a dispute; the hours themselves never depend on them. What is recorded in a shift belongs to the company's records — see "Working for a company".

Basis: Art. 6(1)(b) and (f). The operating system's location permission is the switch, and denying it costs you nothing but the distance figures.

Photographs of the work

A business can photograph a job — arriving, before, during, after, leaving — from the app's own camera. Each photograph carries when it was taken and, if location was allowed, the position of the phone at that moment to about a metre, with how accurate the phone said it was and whether the phone reported the position as simulated. That one point is compared with the property to show whether the photograph was taken there. The point itself is shown to nobody: the customer, the business — everybody in it, when the photograph was taken by an employee — and our staff handling a dispute see the time, the distance from the property and that verdict. It is never used to follow anybody: an employee's position during a shift stays rounded to about a hundred metres. Each photograph is signed by the phone's key so that it can be shown to belong to that job and that moment. The customer sees the photographs and which of them the phone could vouch for.

Photographs are evidence in a dispute and are kept with the job: erased two years after it closes, or six years after a dispute about it — also when the account of the person who took them, or of the customer, has been closed in the meantime, because they are kept for a possible legal claim (GDPR Art. 17(3)(e)). Basis: Art. 6(1)(b), and 6(1)(f) — the interest of both sides in a record of the work that can be relied on.

Your phone

The steps that record work actually happening — starting, pausing, resuming and finishing it, opening and closing a shift, and photographing it — are taken from the Talqero app on a phone whose hardware has vouched for it. To do that the app creates a key inside the phone's secure keystore and sends us its certificate chain, which we check against Google's or Apple's root. We keep the public key, the verdict, the security level and whether the bootloader was locked, and the chain itself. We do not read your sensors, your contacts or your files, and we do not use the verdict for anything but deciding whether a request came from a phone that can be checked.

If you allow notifications, the app registers a push token with us so that we can tell you about your jobs once push notifications are switched on — they are not yet, so nothing is sent through Google or Apple today. The token is deleted when you sign out, when Google or Apple tells us it no longer works, and when you close the account.

Basis: Art. 6(1)(f), our and every user's interest in a platform that a script cannot act on. The key is used while it is registered. When you retire it, sign out of the phone for good or close the account, it can no longer be used for anything, but its public half and the verdict are kept for as long as any photograph it signed is kept (see "Photographs of the work") — without it, a signed photograph could no longer be checked, and the evidence would be worth nothing to either side of a dispute. The model of the phone is blanked when the account closes.

Reviews, standing and complaints

After a job both sides may write a review, which is published to both at once and cannot be edited afterwards, though you can withdraw one and its words are erased. What a business has shown for its work — photographs, reviews, upheld disputes — is computed from the jobs it did and shown to customers as it stands. Reviews about a business stay while its profile does; a review written by somebody who has since closed their account stays without their name, because other people's standing rests on it.

A business can also review you as a customer after a job: a rating from one to five and, if it wants, a few words about how the job went from its side. Those reviews are never published. You can read the ones about you on the job they are about; a business deciding whether to offer for a new job of yours sees only how many there are and their average, rounded to one decimal, never the words and never who wrote them. Basis: Art. 6(1)(f) — the interest of businesses in knowing, before they travel to somebody's home, how jobs with that customer have gone, balanced by keeping the words private and the figure coarse. Kept while your account exists; blanked when you close it.

You may object to a review about you as a customer (GDPR Art. 21), with "Object to this review" beside it on the job page in the application or in the phone app, or by writing to the privacy address. For a business, an owner objects in its name. A person reads the objection and the review and answers you within one month — or, if it is complex, tells you within that month that it will take up to two months more (Art. 12(3)). The author of the review is not told about the objection. Unless we can show a reason to keep using it that outweighs yours, or it is needed for a legal claim, the review stops counting towards anything and its words are erased; if we keep it, you are told why and how to complain to the Data Protection Commission.

A complaint, a dispute or a notice of illegal content is read by a person, who decides with written reasons that both sides receive (Digital Services Act, Arts. 16 and 17). Anybody can send a notice of illegal content, with or without an account, at /en-ie/report; a notice holds what its sender gives — the address of the content, the explanation, and a name and e-mail address, which may be left out for a notice about child sexual abuse material — and the sender's details are not shown to the person the notice is about. Nothing here is decided automatically: what a machine notices is a signal for a person to read, never a consequence. If a notice gives reason to suspect a criminal offence that threatens somebody's life or safety, the law obliges us to tell the Gardaí (Art. 18).

Basis: Art. 6(1)(b) and (c). A complaint, dispute or notice is kept with its history while it is open and for six years after it was decided or withdrawn — the time in which a decision can be challenged in court (Statute of Limitations 1957, s. 11) — and then deleted. A suspension of an account is deleted six years after it was lifted.

Invoices, records and money

No payment for a job passes through this platform, and we hold no card or bank details of yours for one. What we sell — a promoted place in a list, a company subscription — will be paid through Stripe (Stripe Payments Europe, Limited, Dublin) once card payments open; they are not open yet, and nothing has been sent to Stripe. When they are, Stripe takes the card on its own page and we never see the card number. Stripe then has two roles: it processes the payment for us, on our instructions, as our processor; and it is a controller in its own right, under its own privacy notice (stripe.com/privacy), for what the law and its own business require of it — checking for fraud, anti-money-laundering and other checks on payments, and keeping its own records. We keep the invoice, the amount and Stripe's reference for six years, because tax law requires it (Taxes Consolidation Act 1997, s. 886), and with them a copy of what you were shown and chose when you bought — including whether you asked for the service to start at once — as the record of the information and confirmation consumer law requires (Consumer Rights Act 2022, ss. 109 and 119; Art. 6(1)(c)). The messages Stripe sends our server about a payment are deleted two years after they arrive.

Where the law obliges a platform to report the businesses that earn through it to Revenue (the DAC7 rules), we report what it requires and nothing more. Whether those rules reach a platform through which no money for a job passes is not yet settled; until it is, we ask nobody for a tax number or a PPS number and hold none.

The completion record and the invoice a business issues to a customer carry both parties' details. Two controllers are involved, for two different purposes. The business that issues it is the controller of it as its own record: it decides to issue it, it is the one the tax law obliges to keep its invoices and records (Value-Added Tax Consolidation Act 2010; Taxes Consolidation Act 1997, s. 886), and it should keep its own copy — the document stays readable on the job. Talqero is the controller of the copy it keeps itself, as the record of what was issued on the platform, to answer a complaint or a dispute about the job (Art. 6(1)(f)) and for a legal claim (Art. 17(3)(e)). Our copy is deleted six years after it was issued. Basis: Art. 6(1)(b), (c) for the business, and (f) for us.

Who else sees your data

The other party to a job, as described above. Nobody receives your data for advertising, and nothing is sold.

Companies that process it for us, under contracts that bind them to our instructions (GDPR Art. 28): Hetzner Online GmbH (Gunzenhausen, Germany), whose data centre in Falkenstein, Germany holds our servers, every database, the photographs, the logs and the nightly backups (kept for fourteen days); Cloudflare, Inc. (San Francisco, United States), whose network carries every request and response between your device and those servers — it sees your IP address and what passes, including cookies and what you type, in order to deliver it and protect the site from attack; and Hetzner again for our own mail server, which we run ourselves on a Hetzner machine in Finland and which sends the sign-in codes, security notices and receipts, holding the recipient address and the letter while it is delivered.

Companies responsible for their own part, under their own notices, once each is switched on: Stripe, for paying for what we sell — our processor for the payment and a controller for its own checks, as described under "Invoices, records and money" (not yet active); Google and Apple, whose services will deliver push notifications to a phone (not yet active) and, on an iPhone, vouch for its hardware. An Android phone's certificate is checked on our own servers against Google's published root, and nothing about you is sent to Google for that.

Public authorities — Revenue, the Gardaí, a court, the Data Protection Commission or Coimisiún na Meán — only when the law obliges us to give them something, and then only that.

Outside the European Union

Our servers, our databases, the photographs and our mail server are in the European Union (Germany and Finland). Not everything stays there, though: every visit to the site, the application and the phone app passes through Cloudflare, Inc., an American company whose network may handle it in the United States or wherever its nearest server is, and the same will be true of Stripe, Google and Apple once payments and push notifications are switched on. For Cloudflare, and for each of the others when it starts, the transfer rests on the European Commission's decision of 10 July 2023 that the EU-US Data Privacy Framework protects data adequately, for companies certified under it (GDPR Art. 45), and, as a fallback, on the Commission's standard contractual clauses in their data-processing terms (Art. 46(2)(c)). You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards.

What others tell us about you

Not everything here comes from you. The other side of a job writes messages and reviews about it; a customer gives the address of the work; the public register confirms a business's details; Google or Apple say whether a phone is genuine. Your town may be suggested from your IP address, looked up in a table we hold on our own servers; the IP address is not kept with it.

What you are asked for when you sign up, post a job or offer work is what the service needs to do that. Without it we cannot provide that part of the service; nothing else is required of you.

Working for a company

A company that uses Talqero to run a crew — the roster, shifts, hours worked, holidays, sick days and its register of employees — decides what it records about the people who work for it. For that data the company is the controller and Talqero is its processor: we hold it on the company's instructions and under a contract with it (GDPR Art. 28) — the data processing agreement for businesses at /en-ie/legal/company-dpa, which an owner accepts before anything is recorded — use it for nothing of our own and give it to nobody else.

You can see what a company keeps about you at any time, in your Talqero account under "Your work records" (on the web and in the app): your register entry, licences in your name, leave, shifts and hours, the work given to you, and how many positions were recorded during your shifts. Nothing there is about a colleague, and no colleague can see yours.

If you work for such a company, questions about those records, and requests to correct them, go to your employer first — it decides what is kept; if you write to us, we pass them on and help the employer answer. How long the records stay is set by what the law requires the employer to keep: hours worked and annual leave for three years (Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, s. 25), the dates of sick leave for four years (Sick Leave Act 2022) — only the dates and hours: there is no note on a sick day, so no reason or diagnosis can be written down — and the register for the length of the employment and three years after. Your right to work is recorded as one fixed value — confirmed, confirmed until a date, or not required — never a permit number, an immigration status or your nationality.

Your rights

Under Articles 15 to 22 of the GDPR you may: see what we hold about you and have a copy (Art. 15); have it corrected (Art. 16); have it erased where we have no reason left to keep it (Art. 17); have its use restricted while a question about it is settled (Art. 18); take what you gave us with you, as data (Art. 20); and object to what we do on the basis of our legitimate interests (Art. 21) — we then stop, unless we can show reasons that override yours or need it for a legal claim.

Much of this you can do yourself from the application, without asking: read out everything the sign-in service holds about you, as data; correct your business details; withdraw a message or a review; revoke a session; retire a device; close your account. Jobs, conversations, photographs and invoices are readable where they are.

For anything else, write to [email protected] or to the address on the legal notice. It costs nothing. We answer within a month; if a request is complex we may take up to two months more, and tell you within the first month if we do (Art. 12(3)). We may ask you to confirm who you are, but not for more than we need to.

You may complain to the Data Protection Commission, 6 Pembroke Row, Dublin 2, D02 X963, telephone 01 765 0100, online at forms.dataprotection.ie/contact — or to the data protection authority of the EU country you live or work in. You do not have to write to us first.

Decisions made by machine

We make no decision about you by automated means alone that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you (GDPR Art. 22). The order in which businesses are listed when a job is shown is computed from serving the town, what finished jobs said, experience, how quickly a business answers, distance and paid promotion; the order of open jobs shown to a business, from distance and paid promotion only. Neither decides anybody's rights: every business that qualifies is still shown, and the customer chooses. The parameters and their weights are published in the application, on the page where the order is used.

Age, and changes to this notice

The platform is for people aged eighteen and over, and we do not knowingly hold data about children. A photograph of the work should not show people; if one shows a child, tell us and it is removed.

This notice is dated at the top. When it changes, the date changes and the change is described on this page for the following ninety days; a change to what we do with data we already hold is told to you before it applies.