Who is responsible
Hyphora Consulting Ltd is the controller of the information you give this tool. We are registered in England and Wales, company number 12904446, registered office 126 Crampton Street, London, England, SE17 3AE. Questions or requests go to Ben Hart at ben@hyphora.co.uk.
What the tool collects, and why
Your answers. Your postcode, house number or name, and what you tell us about the house and the people who live there: its age, size and construction, how it is heated, how many people live there and whether someone is usually home in the day, what you care about most, any budget and any work you have planned. We use them to work out the figures in your report and nothing else.
Photos you choose to send. If you photograph an energy bill or a boiler's data plate, the photo is sent to Anthropic's AI model, Claude, which reads figures such as your annual kWh, unit rates or the boiler's age. You see every figure it reads and confirm or correct it before it is used. We keep the figures you confirm, not the photo. A bill usually shows your name, address and account number. The tool does not ask for them or record them, but they are in the picture the model reads, so crop or cover them first if you would rather they were not.
Your Energy Performance Certificate. With your postcode, the tool searches the government's public EPC register, run by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, for addresses that have a certificate. If you pick yours, it copies details from the certificate for you to check and correct. For your report we keep the rating, its date, the certificate number and the certificate's own recommendations. We do not keep the list of addresses or the certificate itself. Addresses on the register are Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail data, and we use them only to find your certificate.
What you type to the assistant. Your replies are sent to Claude so it can word the next question and understand answers given in your own words. It does not decide what to ask, and it never produces a figure in your report: every figure comes from a fixed calculation.
Your IP address. We count requests from each IP address to stop the tool being overloaded or abused. The counts are deleted within an hour. Our host, Vercel, also keeps short-lived server logs that include IP addresses, as the main notice describes.
Lawful basis: our legitimate interest in producing the report you asked for, and in running the tool securely.
What stays in your browser
The tool sets no cookies. While you use it, your browser holds a reference to your conversation so a page reload does not lose your place; it is cleared when you close the tab. If you press the button to save your results to your Hyphora dashboard, a summary of your report is kept in your browser's own storage so the dashboard can show it. That summary has no address, no photos and no transcript. Our server works it out from your answers and sends it back without keeping a copy; it is then held only in your browser, and clearing your browser's site data removes it.
Who we share it with
We do not sell your information, we do not pass it to installers, and we do not use it for marketing. The tool shares it only with the services that run it:
- Anthropic, whose model Claude reads your photos and your typed replies. Under Anthropic's commercial terms it does not train its models on them.
- Vercel, which hosts the tool.
- Upstash, which stores your conversation between messages.
- The government's EPC register, which receives your postcode and, if you pick your address, the certificate number.
Anthropic, Vercel and Upstash may store or access data outside the UK, mainly in the United States. Those transfers are covered by UK adequacy regulations or the ICO's International Data Transfer Agreement, as set out in the main notice.
How long we keep it
- Your conversation, answers and confirmed figures: deleted automatically 24 hours after your last answer.
- Your report: built when you ask for it and sent straight to you. We do not keep a copy.
- Request counts by IP address: deleted within an hour.
- Server logs: deleted by our host within 30 days.
Once your conversation has been deleted we cannot recover it or your report, so download the report if you want to keep it.
Your rights
You can ask us to confirm whether we hold information about you and give you a copy, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to our use of it, or give it to you in a portable format. Because the tool deletes everything within 24 hours, there will usually be nothing left to ask about after that. Email ben@hyphora.co.uk; we reply within one month and there is no charge.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.
Changes
We will update this statement when what the tool collects, or how it uses it, changes. The date at the top shows when it was last revised.