Legal
Privacy Policy
Who we are. Stylist Checked Ltd ("Stylist Checked", "we", "us", "our") is a company registered in England and Wales, company number 16072163, registered office 20 Wenlock Road, London, England, N1 7GU. We are the data controller for the personal information described in this policy.
What this covers. This policy explains how we handle personal information in the Stylist Checked iOS app, on stylistchecked.co.uk and its subdomains, on our waitlist pages, and in related services (together, the "Services").
Contact. One address for everything in this policy: privacy@stylistchecked.co.uk
The short version
- You sign in with an email address, a phone number, Apple or Google. You must be 16 or over, and you confirm this with a tick when you sign up.
- We keep what you add: saved professionals, looks, boards, plans, notes and photos.
- Analytics through PostHog only runs if you say yes. Until you do, the app sends nothing to PostHog. Crash reports go to Sentry, with no account details attached.
- We show beauty professionals built from public business information on social media. If that is you, use our removal page to have your profile removed or corrected (section 4).
- We delete what we say we delete, on the timetable in section 8, including our own activity records after 12 months.
- We do not sell your personal information and we do not use it for advertising.
- You can delete your account in the app (Settings, then Delete account).
1. Who this policy is about
App users. People who create an account and use the app. Most of this policy is about you.
Beauty professionals in our directory. People whose public business profiles appear in Stylist Checked, whether or not they have ever used the app. Section 4 is written for you.
People on our waitlist. People who gave us an email address on stylistchecked.co.uk or one of our waitlist pages. Section 5 is written for you.
2. Information we collect from app users
A. Account information
Your email address or phone number, or your Apple or Google sign-in, used to create, secure and recover your account. One-time passcodes are sent by our sign-in provider, Clerk. You may add a display name, a username and a profile photo.
B. Your age
When you sign up you tick a box to confirm you are 16 or over. We store that you confirmed it and when. We do not ask for or store your date of birth. If you tell us you are under 16, the app takes you to delete your account.
C. Content you create
Saved professionals, saved looks and boards, plans and occasions, private notes, and photos you add to a plan. If you choose to, you can also add your own photo to your profile.
D. Links and images you share into the app
- A link from TikTok or Instagram. We use the link to find the professional it points to, and to build or update their public business profile. For a TikTok link, the app asks TikTok for the post's details.
- A link from Pinterest. Saved to your private Inspo.
- A screenshot or image. Saved to your private Inspo. We do not try to identify anyone from an image.
- Anything else. We tell you plainly that we cannot use it.
When you ask the app to find a professional for one of your looks, the image is sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, to work out which kind of beauty service it shows. It is not used to identify anyone.
E. Beauty preferences
We do not currently collect hair, skin, nail, lash, brow or makeup preferences. The screens that asked for them are switched off, and any answers stored before 3 October 2026 have been deleted. If we bring them back, we will ask for your explicit consent first and update this policy.
F. Photos and camera
Only when you choose a photo or take one, and only with your iOS permission. We do not scan your photo library.
G. Location
Only with your iOS permission, and only while you are using the app, to centre the map and sort results by distance.
H. Your phone's calendar
Only if you choose to add a plan to your calendar. The first time, you pick which of your calendars to use, and you can change it in Settings. We write the plan's title, time and notes to that calendar. We do not read anything else in your calendar.
I. Notifications
If you allow notifications, we store a notification token for your phone so we can send reminders about your plans. Reminders are delivered through Expo and Apple, and may show a plan's title and a professional's name on your lock screen.
J. Our own activity records
- Searches. The words you search for and how many results came back, stored without your account attached. We use this to fix searches that return nothing.
- Actions in the app, only if you allow analytics. For example searches and links you tap to a professional's booking page, Instagram or TikTok, stored against your account. If you have not allowed analytics, we do not store these.
K. Analytics (PostHog)
PostHog only runs if you say yes, with the tick at sign-up or later in Settings. Until you say yes, the app sends nothing to PostHog. If you say yes, PostHog receives how you use the app, linked to your account so we can see how one person moves through it. You can turn it off at any time in Settings, and it stops straight away.
L. Crash reports (Sentry)
When the app crashes or hits an error, a report goes to Sentry so we can fix it. It contains the device type, the app version and the error. We strip out your account details and never send screenshots. This runs without asking, because we need it to keep the app working.
M. Purchases
If you subscribe, our subscription provider, RevenueCat, tells us your subscription status. Apple processes the payment. We never see your card details.
3. Information about other people that you give us
You can add a beauty professional to your own private list by typing in their details yourself, for example a name, a phone number, a social media handle or an address. This exists for the professional who has no online presence at all.
Anything you add this way is private to your account. It is never published in our directory, never shown to other users, never enriched from other sources, and never used as a signal that this person should be added to our catalogue.
Please only add details you are entitled to hold. If someone contacts us about details held privately in another user's account, we will explain the position and, where the law requires it, act on their request.
4. Beauty professionals in our directory
Stylist Checked includes a directory of beauty professionals in the UK. We build these profiles from publicly available business information: public professional accounts on TikTok and Instagram, the booking pages and websites they link to, and public map data. We use Apify to collect public posts and profiles, and Anthropic's AI to read them and write a short summary. A profile may include a professional or trading name, public handles, work photographs, services, indicative prices, and the general area worked in.
We do this on the basis of our legitimate interests: helping people find beauty professionals, particularly for textured hair, where discovery is genuinely difficult.
Where we show you.
- Location. In the app we show the area you work in, not an exact point. We only show an exact map pin and directions for a business premises we have confirmed, such as a salon or a shop unit. We do not publish home addresses, and we never send exact coordinates for anyone else.
- Web pages. A shared link to your profile opens a short page with only your name, area and category, and a button to see more in the app. It shows no photos, prices or written summary, and we tell search engines not to list it.
- We do not publish personal, non-business content, contact details that were not already public, or reviews or star ratings of any professional.
If you are featured and you do not want to be, or something is wrong, use links.stylistchecked.co.uk/remove or email privacy@stylistchecked.co.uk. You do not need an account or a reason.
- Removal. A person checks each request, then hides your profile from the app. Seven days later it is erased from the app and our directory. We keep your handle and a note of the request, so the profile is not rebuilt later, and the contact details you gave us so we can reply. Copies already held by Apify and Anthropic from when we collected the information are not reached by this, and our 90-day backups expire on their own (section 9).
- Correction. A person checks every correction and fixes what is wrong.
We act on every request within one month. What you send through the removal page is stored in our directory database (Airtable) and sent to our internal alert channel (Discord) so we see it straight away.
Saved by others. Where three or more people have saved a professional, we may show an anonymous count on that profile. It is a plain number with no names, and below three we show nothing at all.
5. The waitlist and launch email
If you join our waitlist, we keep your email address, your first name if you gave it, which form you used, when you joined, and the exact wording you were shown next to the form, as a record of what you agreed to. This is stored in Airtable.
We email you once, at launch, and nothing else. That is the promise shown next to every waitlist form. People who joined through the footer form before 3 October 2026 were told "Launch news and nothing else", and we hold them to the same single email. To be removed, email privacy@stylistchecked.co.uk.
In the app you can also tick "Email me updates and launch news" when you sign up. It is never ticked for you. To change your mind, email us.
6. How we use information
- To create and secure your account
- To run the app: sharing in, saving, boards, plans, reminders, the map and search
- To manage subscriptions
- To build and correct the directory of beauty professionals
- To fix what is broken and keep the Services secure
- To meet our legal obligations
We do not sell your personal information. We do not use it for advertising. We do not use your content to train third-party AI models.
7. Legal bases under UK GDPR
| What we do | Our legal basis |
|---|---|
| Account, core features, reminders, subscriptions | Performance of a contract with you |
| Analytics through PostHog, and activity records stored against your account | Consent, off until you say yes |
| Searches stored without your account, crash reports, security | Legitimate interests |
| The directory of beauty professionals | Legitimate interests, with an absolute right to object under section 4 |
| Waitlist and launch email | Consent |
| Meeting legal obligations | Legal obligation |
8. Who we share information with
We share personal information only with providers who process it for us:
| Provider | What for |
|---|---|
| Clerk | Sign-in and one-time passcodes |
| Convex | Our app database and backend |
| PostHog | Analytics, only if you say yes |
| Sentry | Crash and error reports |
| RevenueCat | Subscription status |
| Apple | App distribution, Sign in with Apple, payments, notifications and maps |
| Sign in with Google, and the fonts on our websites | |
| Expo | Delivering notifications and app updates |
| Vercel | Hosting our websites and directory service |
| Airtable | The directory of beauty professionals, the waitlist, removal requests and internal alerts |
| Anthropic | AI that reads public business information, writes profile summaries, and works out the service in a look you ask about |
| Apify | Collecting public business information for the directory |
| TikTok | Looking up the details of a TikTok link you share |
| Discord | Internal alerts to our team, including removal requests |
| OpenStreetMap | Public place data for the directory |
| Cloudflare | Our domain name system |
We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or as part of a business sale or transfer, in which case we would tell you first.
9. How long we keep things
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account and your content | Until you delete them. Removing a photo from a plan, deleting a plan or a look, or replacing your profile photo deletes the stored file too, unless you still use the same photo somewhere else in the app. |
| Our own activity records (section 2J), including searches and link taps | 12 months, then deleted automatically every night |
| Analytics in PostHog | Under PostHog's retention settings. To have yours deleted sooner, email us. |
| Directory profiles | While the profile is live. Removed on request under section 4. |
| Raw public pages we collected for the directory | 180 days, then deleted automatically every night |
| Waitlist entries and removal requests | Until you ask us to delete them, or as long as we need them to answer you |
| Records we must keep by law, for example transaction records | As long as the law requires |
Backups. Deleting something removes it from our live systems straight away, but copies stay in backups for a short time until the backups expire:
- App data (accounts, content, activity records) is held by Convex. Convex's backups are kept for up to 14 days (daily backups 7 days, weekly backups 14 days), so deleted app data is gone from those backups within 14 days. Convex also keeps its own encrypted backups for disaster recovery, under its own terms.
- Directory and waitlist data is backed up weekly to a private store in London, kept for 90 days. This backup does not include app accounts or content.
10. Your rights
Under UK data protection law you can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict how we use it, or send it elsewhere. You can object to processing we do on the basis of legitimate interests. You can withdraw consent at any time.
- To delete your account: Settings, then Delete account, inside the app. This deletes your account and your content from our live systems, including your photos. There is also a guide at links.stylistchecked.co.uk/delete-account. Deleting your account does not automatically delete data held by PostHog, Sentry or RevenueCat. Email us and we will ask them to.
- For anything else: email privacy@stylistchecked.co.uk. We respond within one month.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF, ico.org.uk. We would rather you came to us first so we can put it right.
11. International transfers
Our app database is hosted in the EU and our backups of directory and waitlist data in London. Some providers process data in the United States. Where personal information leaves the UK we rely on UK adequacy regulations, the UK Extension to the EU to US Data Privacy Framework, or the UK International Data Transfer Agreement and Standard Contractual Clauses, as applicable.
12. Children
Stylist Checked is for people aged 16 and over. Everyone confirms this with a tick when they sign up, and people who joined before we added the tick are asked once. If you tell us you are under 16, the app takes you to delete your account. If we find we hold information about someone under 16, we will delete it.
13. Security
We use encryption in transit, access controls, and hosted infrastructure from established providers. We never store your card details. No service can promise perfect security, so please use a secure device and keep your sign-in codes to yourself.
14. Changes to this policy
We will post changes on this page and update the effective date. Where a change is significant we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.
15. Contact us
Stylist Checked Ltd
20 Wenlock Road, London, England, N1 7GU