Last updated 4 September 2026.
Your account. A name, and either an email address or a phone number depending on how you signed up. Signing up by phone creates a stand-in email address for you internally; you never need to use it. A photo, a short bio and a public @handle if you add them.
Where you are, roughly. The city and neighbourhood you pick, kept in a cookie for a year so listings stay scoped between visits. On the phone apps, and only if you allow it, a single location reading used to work out your nearest neighbourhood. That reading is sent to us, matched to an area, and not stored on our servers.
What you write. Posts, reviews, comments, ratings and the photos attached to them.
Bookings. The address, phone number and notes you give for a job, plus any photos the professional takes when finishing it.
Enquiries. Your name, phone number and message. An enquiry is copied to each business it is sent to, and each of them keeps their own copy.
Push notifications. If you allow notifications on a phone app, we store a push token — an anonymous address for that one installation, issued by Expo and passed on to Apple or Google to deliver the message. It is tied to your account so the right phone rings, holds nothing about you, and is deleted the moment you sign out, delete the app or turn notifications off. Nothing you would not already see in the app is sent through it.
Professionals only. Identity documents, a photograph of yourself, and payout details. These are collected so we know who is turning up at someone's door.
How the site is used. Searches that returned results, and taps on a business listing such as call, WhatsApp or directions. These carry a random visitor identifier rather than your name, and are used to see what people are looking for and to show a business how its page is doing.
Security records. Sign-ins and significant account actions, with the IP address and browser they came from.
Your posts, reviews and public profile are visible to anyone, under your name. Posts inside a closed street are visible only to that street's members, and we do not list them anywhere a non-member could find them.
A booking's address and phone number go to the professional assigned to it and to our staff. An enquiry goes to the businesses you sent it to. Neither is public.
A professional's identity documents are visible only to that professional and to the staff who carry out verification. They are never shown to customers and never appear on a public profile.
You can remove yourself from the people directory at any time in your settings.
We use a small number of companies to make the product work. Each one receives only what its job needs:
An email provider, for password resets and a business replying to your enquiry. An SMS provider, for one-time sign-in codes. A file storage provider, for every photo and document uploaded. A push notification service, for alerts on the phone apps. A maps and places provider, when someone searches for a business to add — it receives the words typed and the city. And for a business that chooses to connect WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger, that platform carries the messages between the business and its customers.
We do not sell personal information, and nobody can pay us for placement, for verification, or to have a review taken down. How ranking works is written out in full on a page of its own.
A sign-in cookie that keeps you logged in for thirty days. Two cookies remembering the city and neighbourhood you picked, kept for a year. And one anonymous identifier, also kept for a year, that lets us count visits without knowing who you are. All of them are first-party and none is used for advertising.
Your account and what you have written stay until you remove them. Deactivating hides your posts and reviews and can be undone simply by signing in again.
Deleting your account is permanent. It removes your profile, posts, reviews, comments, likes, saves, follows and any streets you created. Bookings and enquiries are kept but stripped of your name, phone number and address, because a professional's job history and a business's enquiry log are records of theirs too.
Three things outlive a deletion, and it is fairer to say so than to imply otherwise: security records of sign-ins expire after a year, usage records after ninety days, and anything you sent us directly — feedback, a request to be told when we reach your city, a rating of a finished job, or a business claim — is kept until we remove it by hand. Files already uploaded are not deleted automatically. Email us and we will remove them.
Edit or delete anything you have written. Deactivate or delete your account from your settings. Turn off the people directory. Withdraw location permission in your phone's settings. Ask us for a copy of what we hold, or for something to be corrected or removed, at privacy@zinola.in.
Zinola is meant for adults, and you should be 18 or over to hold an account. We do not currently ask your age when you sign up.
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so on the site rather than quietly moving the date at the top.
See also our terms of use and cancellation policy.