What we publish about homes, and how to change it.

Controller

The data controller is Close Knit, contact hello@getcloseknit.com. ICO registration: see the release checklist.

What we process and where it comes from

• HM Land Registry Price Paid Data (Open Government Licence): address, price, date and type of every recorded sale.
• Energy Performance Certificates (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities): used to match a sale to a UPRN, and for each home's latest certificate we keep the building facts: current and potential energy rating, certificate date, property type, built form, age band, floor area, habitable rooms and floor level. We do not show them for individual homes while their publication terms are being confirmed. We do not keep the certificate's tenure (it describes the occupant), names, running costs, recommendations or address.
• OS Open UPRN (OGL): the coordinate of each dwelling.
• OS Open Names (OGL): London street names and a point on each street, so search can find a street whose homes have no recorded sale. It holds no house numbers or addresses.
• HM Land Registry INSPIRE index polygons (OGL with HMLR/OS conditions): freehold parcel outlines.
• OpenStreetMap (ODbL): roads that bound street blocks.
• ONS, police.uk and other area statistics: aggregated by area, never by home.
• Ofsted Early Years, DfT road safety (STATS19) and TfL cycle lanes (Open Government Licence; Powered by TfL Open Data): nurseries’ published inspection grades (childminders are not included), pedestrians and cyclists hurt in police-reported collisions counted by area (never a person or a vehicle), and cycle lanes and Cycleways for the map.

We do not hold names, contact details or anything about the people who live in a home. Derived figures (£/m², area price ranges, the coarse band of a recorded sale) are computed from the sources above.

Next to an address we also list other homes’ recorded sales in the same building and on the same street (last 10 years): date, price, property type, tenure and new-build flag only. Those lists never show another home’s floor area or £/m²; a median £/m² appears only when at least 5 sales stand behind it, and hidden homes are left out.

The area evidence pack and the local market figures are area totals only: sale counts, turnover, the leasehold share of sales and median £/m² (shown only from 10 sales). They carry no address list, no valuation and nothing about who owns a home; with an address they add only that building’s and street’s counts and medians, never the sales.

If your home appears here

If you own or live in a London home, Close Knit may show: its address and location, its recorded sales (date, price, property type, tenure, new-build flag), its floor area and the building facts from its latest energy certificate (listed above), and figures we derive from them (£/m², and the coarse band its last sale fell in among same-type sales in its area that year, such as “top quarter”; never a value for the home). We did not get this from you: addresses and sales come from HM Land Registry, building facts from the Energy Performance of Buildings register, and locations from Ordnance Survey (OS Open UPRN), all publicly available. We keep it as long as the release it belongs to is served (see Retention).

We hold no names or contact details, and tracing and writing to the owner of every home in London would involve a disproportionate effort (UK GDPR Article 14(5)(b)). So instead we publish this notice, link it next to every home, and let anyone object and have a home hidden.

Why we show it (lawful basis)

We rely on legitimate interests (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)): making already public property records understandable for buyers, renters, researchers and the public, with the evidence behind each figure. The balancing test is documented in our legitimate interests assessment. Safeguards: data is limited to the fields listed above, figures carry their caveats, and any owner or occupier can object and have the home hidden.

Your right to object: hide a home

You have the right to object, at any time, to our processing of data about your home on the basis of legitimate interests (UK GDPR Article 21). You do not need to give a reason: once confirmed, we hide the home everywhere we show it.

Select the home on the map and choose Report or hide this home. To hide it we ask for an e-mail address and send a confirmation link; the home disappears as soon as you open it (and in any case within 30 days of a valid objection). We store a salted hash of the e-mail and of the requesting connection to enforce daily limits, never the address itself. You can also write to hello@getcloseknit.com.

Your other rights

You can also ask for access to, correction of (choose Report or hide this home on the map to report a wrong figure), erasure of, or restriction of data about you, by writing to hello@getcloseknit.com. You may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Who else handles data

• Hosting: our hosting provider, OVHcloud, runs the server that holds the data and the logs, in a UK data centre.
• Map tiles: the background map is loaded by your browser from OpenFreeMap (tiles.openfreemap.org), which therefore sees your IP address and the map area you view.
• In Claude: the shortlist board Close Knit shows inside Claude loads its map from OpenFreeMap and the map library from jsDelivr (cdn.jsdelivr.net), which therefore see your IP address.
• E-mail: when e-mail is configured, hide-my-home confirmation links and correction reports are sent through our e-mail (SMTP) provider; when a reporting webhook is configured, reports reach the operator through it.

Retention

Property data lives as long as the data release it belongs to is served; releases are immutable and replaced, not edited. Objections are kept while they are active so the home stays hidden across releases; hide requests never confirmed are deleted after 30 days. Correction reports are kept until resolved; feedback sent by an assistant or from the site for 12 months; assistants' call notes and ratings for 90 days; usage events for 180 days. Web server and container logs hold IP addresses for up to 30 days for abuse prevention, then are deleted.

Cookies and analytics

No advertising cookies and no third-party analytics. In the private preview one cookie remembers that your browser was invited. Your map position and saved search stay in your browser's local storage. To rank areas, your search (budget, bedrooms, priorities, commute destinations) is sent with each match request and used only to build the answer; it is not saved.

If you tick Share redacted usage data to improve matching under Your search, each match request also saves a redacted record: buy or rent, budget rounded to £50,000, bedrooms, forecast horizon, priority weights, the number and travel modes of commute destinations, school phases and the time. It holds no destinations, location, address, IP address or identifier. Untick the box to stop.

How the site is used. To see which pages people open, whether searches find something, how long pages are in use and which portal links are followed, your browser sends us a few named events: the page's address (never a home or full postcode), the kind of action, the map layer and the areas you open, where the map is centred after you move it (to about a kilometre) and the zones you set, and for a portal link the portal, area and postcode district. What you type in search is kept as words only: a postcode becomes its district and anything with a house number is not kept; a chosen home is kept only as its postcode district. To count returning visitors your browser keeps one random identifier in local storage. It is not linked to you, your invite, your search or your IP address, it is never shared, and the events are kept for 180 days, only to improve Close Knit (statistical purposes, which UK law allows without consent as long as you can object). In an EU or EEA time zone no identifier is kept. With Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track on, or with analytics off, nothing is sent.

Your map setup. The layer, what Show draws with its filters, and where the map was are kept in this browser only, so the map opens as you left it. Nothing of it is sent to us.

Clear my data

Feedback you send. When you tap thumbs up or down on a card or a shortlist, or send the feedback form, we store your vote or star rating, the reasons you tapped, any words you wrote, the page's address (never a home or full postcode; an area page's address names the area) and the device type. It is not linked to the analytics identifier, an invite or your IP address, and we remove e-mail addresses and phone numbers from the text. Your browser remembers the votes you gave so a card can show them. Analytics off doesn't stop feedback you choose to send. We keep it for 12 months to improve Close Knit, then delete it.

Agents and the API

The same data is served to software agents through the API and MCP endpoint, with the same suppression: a hidden home is hidden everywhere. Requests are rate limited per client.

We count tool calls (which tool, whether it worked, how long it took, the assistant's name) and group one conversation's calls under a one-way tag, never its content. Listing links an assistant gives you pass through Close Knit's /go address, which counts the visit and opens the portal.

Assistants can also add a sentence or two of their own on what you are looking for with a call (for example "2-bed rental near King's Cross, quiet streets") and rate how useful each answer was. We ask them to summarise, not to copy your words, and to leave out names, contact details and exact addresses; we remove e-mail addresses, phone numbers and full postcodes before storing it. We keep these notes for 90 days to improve the answers, then delete them.

With your agreement, an assistant such as Claude can send us feedback about how the tools worked (what was wrong, missing or useful). It is meant to describe the product, not you: we ask assistants to leave out names, contact details, addresses, family and money, and we remove e-mail addresses and phone numbers before storing it. We keep it for 12 months to improve Close Knit, then delete it.