What we store, in plain words
Flatscanner is in early access. This page is short because we keep very little.
Listings you paste
We keep the structured facts we extract (rent, deposit, locality, room type and so on), a short text snapshot, and the report we generated, so that your share link keeps working. Reports are public to anyone who has the link, which is the point of them, but the link is a long random one, and we keep report pages out of search engines. Your office and commute are yours: they show on your own screen, never to someone you send the link to. Don't paste phone numbers or names you wouldn't want on a shared page.
Your email and your account
You sign up with your email: we send a 6-digit code to check it is yours (no password, and we keep only a scrambled copy of the code, for 10 minutes). Your email then opens full reports and keeps your reports, room-wanted card and listings with you on any phone or laptop you sign in on. If you turn on the Flatscanner Agent, we also email you the rooms that fit what you asked for. We don't sell your email or share it with brokers or listing sites. One reply to any email from us removes it.
Your preferences
Office area, budget, room type, flatmate preference and move-in date, if you choose to save them. They exist only to score listings against what you need.
The rent you tell us
When you add what you pay, we keep the rent, what you rent, whether maintenance is in it, and the deposit, furnishing and month you moved in if you give them. Your pin is rounded to about 100 m before it is saved, so it never points at your building. We never ask your name, number, email or flat. We keep your browser's id and a scrambled form of your internet address only to stop one person adding many rents, and to let you remove yours (the link is on the screen after you add it). Your rent is only ever shown as part of an area's typical rent.
Cookies and analytics
One first-party cookie (fs_vid) tells your device apart so your free reports and your account follow you, and two small ones (fs_ft, fs_lt) remember which link or site brought you here, so we know which of our posts and ads work. We count product events (a report was run, a link was shared) to see what's working, and we use Google Analytics to understand visits: which pages are read, roughly where visitors are (city or state) and how they found us. Google Analytics sets its own cookies (_ga) and gets a scrambled id for your device, never your email, preferences, office or the listings you paste. We don't use it for advertising. You can opt out with Google's browser add-on.
Our ads on Instagram and Facebook
We advertise on Instagram and Facebook and use the Meta Pixel to measure those ads: it counts page visits, and when you sign up we tell Meta that a sign-up happened, with a scrambled (hashed) copy of your email and your browser's details so Meta can match it to the ad you saw. Meta never gets your preferences, office or the listings you paste. You can control ads based on this in your Facebook or Instagram ad settings.
Map and analysis data
Locations, commute times and nearby places come from Google Maps Platform (Google's Geocoding, Places and Routes services). To work them out we send Google the listing's address or location and, for your commute, your office location, never your name, email or phone. The map on a report is a Google map, loaded from Google by your browser. Google's privacy policy applies to those requests. Listing text is processed by an AI model to pull out structured fields and write the summary.
Questions or deletion
Email hello@flatscanner.ai and we'll remove your email, preferences and reports.