Privacy policy.
Last updated 2 October 2026
This explains what barterama stores about you, why, and what you can do about it. It is written to describe what the platform actually does, not a general template.
1. Who controls your data
barterama.com is governed by the laws of England and Wales and is the data controller for the personal data described here. Contact: privacy@barterama.com if required.
2. What we store, and why
We only collect what running the swap and matching system requires. Nothing here is used for advertising, we do not build a profile of you for marketing purposes, and we do not sell data to anyone.
| Data | Why we hold it | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Handle, city and postal area | Your public identity, and matching swaps by location and handover | Performance of a contract with you |
| Email address | Signing you in — every sign-in sends a code to this address — plus swap notifications and account recovery | Performance of a contract with you |
| The postcode you gave at sign-up | Resolving your postal area once. Only the area — never the full postcode, and never an address — is used for matching, shown on a listing, or drawn on a map | Performance of a contract with you |
| Listings and their descriptions and photos | The core of the service — this is what you are showing other users | Performance of a contract with you |
| Messages between swap parties | Letting you arrange a handover, and as a record if a swap is disputed | Performance of a contract with you |
| Moderation records of blocked messages | The legally required statement of reasons when an automated system blocks content, and so you can appeal it | Legal obligation, and our legitimate interest in a working moderation system |
| IP-derived data (via Cloudflare, our hosting provider) | Security — rate-limiting and abuse prevention at the network edge | Legitimate interest in keeping the service available and abuse-free |
| Session cookie | Keeping you signed in | Strictly necessary — see our cookies page |
| What you type into the swap checker | Knowing which kinds of thing people arrive holding, so we cover those next — on its own, with a date, and with nothing attached that identifies you. See section 7 | Legitimate interest in understanding what the service is asked for |
3. Messages are scanned before they send
Every message you send through a swap conversation is checked by an automated filter before it is written anywhere. The filter looks for contact details, links to other platforms, and arrangements to pay money on top of a swap — none of which are permitted on barterama. If a message is blocked, it is never stored as sent and the other party never sees it; only you see your own blocked attempt, with the reason. The rule that fired and the original text are kept as a record so you can query or appeal the block, and so we can tell whether the filter is working correctly rather than just trust that it is.
4. Who we share data with
Your data is processed by our infrastructure providers acting on our instructions: Neon (database hosting) and Cloudflare (application hosting, file storage for listing photos, and network security). We do not transfer data to any other third country beyond where these providers operate. We do not share your data with advertisers, data brokers, or any other party, and we do not sell it.
5. How long we keep it
We keep account and listing data for as long as your account is open. Messages and the swap record they belong to are kept for as long as the account of either party involved is open, since either party may need them as a record of what was agreed. Settled-swap records that feed the valuation model are kept indefinitely in de-identified, aggregate form — they record that an archetype of item traded against another, not who traded it. If you close your account we delete your profile, listings and messages; we do not delete the aggregate valuation record, because it no longer identifies you.
6. Your rights
Under UK GDPR you have the right to:
- ask what personal data we hold about you, and get a copy (access);
- have inaccurate data corrected (rectification);
- ask us to delete your data, subject to the limits in section 5 (erasure);
- get your data in a portable format (portability);
- object to processing based on our legitimate interest (objection);
- complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) if you think we have got this wrong.
To exercise any of these, email privacy@barterama.com. The ICO can be reached at ico.org.uk.
7. What you type into the swap checker
What could I get for this? answers entirely in your browser — the valuation maths runs locally and needs no account and no database. One thing does leave your browser: the words in the first box, the ones describing what you own. We keep those with the date and nothing else, because they tell us which kinds of thing people arrive holding and therefore which to cover next.
No IP address, no session, no account, no identifier of any kind is stored alongside them, and there is nothing in that table to join them to. That is a permanent design decision rather than something not built yet: a per-person record of what strangers own would be a different dataset with a different legal footing, and the question we are actually asking — how many people came here holding one of these — does not need one. We cannot tell you which of those rows were yours, because we do not know either.
Anything that looks like an email address or a phone number is discarded before it is written, rather than stored and cleaned up afterwards. None of the other controls on that page — the category, the condition, the sliders — leaves your browser at all.
8. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the platform changes. We will change the date at the top of this page when we do.