Privacy Policy
Hi Bear LLC ("RentBear," "we," "us," or "our"), located at Harju maakond, Tallinn, Kesklinna linnaosa, Tornimäe tn 3 // 5 // 7, 10145, Estonia, operates the RentBear platform. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and protect your information when you use our services.
For the purposes of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Hi Bear LLC is the data controller for the personal data described here. You can reach us about any privacy matter at support@rentbear.co.
1. Information We Collect
We collect information you provide directly when you create an account or use our services. This includes:
- Email address — provided when you register for an account.
- Search preferences — the cities, price range, size and other criteria you save so we can match listings against them.
- Profile information — anything you choose to add to a profile if you use the features that connect you with other renters, including photos and a description you write yourself.
- Usage metrics — data about how you interact with our platform, including features used and pages visited.
- IP address — collected automatically when you access our services.
- Browser and device information — including browser type, version, operating system, and a push notification token if you enable alerts on a mobile device.
We do not ask for and do not want special categories of personal data — health, ethnicity, religion, political opinion, sexual orientation or biometric data. Please do not put any of it in a profile or a message.
2. Legal Bases for Processing
Under Article 6 of the GDPR we must have a lawful basis for every use of your personal data. Ours are:
| What we do | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Create and run your account, deliver alerts, take payment | Performance of a contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Keep the service secure, prevent abuse, debug and improve it | Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) |
| Show your profile to other renters, or send optional marketing | Your consent (Art. 6(1)(a)), withdrawable at any time |
| Keep accounting and tax records | Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)) |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed those interests against your rights and freedoms. You can object to that processing at any time — see section 8.
3. How We Use Your Information
We use the information we collect for the following purposes:
- Provide our service — to deliver rental search alerts and match you with relevant rental listings across the Dutch rental websites we watch.
- Manage your account — to maintain your account, preferences, and subscription.
- Contact you — to communicate with you about your account, service updates, and respond to your inquiries.
We do not sell, rent, or share your personal data with landlords, property managers, or any third parties for their marketing purposes. We do not use your personal data to train machine learning models, and we do not make decisions producing legal or similarly significant effects about you by automated means alone.
4. Who We Share It With
We share personal data only with service providers who process it on our instructions and under a written data processing agreement — hosting, databases, authentication, payments, email and push delivery. Each of them, and what they process, is named in our Data Processing and Subprocessors policy.
We may also disclose personal data where we are legally required to, or to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim. If RentBear is ever involved in a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, we will tell you before your personal data is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
5. International Transfers
We aim to keep personal data within the European Economic Area. Where a provider processes data outside the EEA, we rely on an adequacy decision by the European Commission, or on the Standard Contractual Clauses together with any additional safeguards the transfer requires. You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards that apply to a specific transfer by writing to support@rentbear.co.
6. Data Retention
We retain your personal data for as long as necessary to provide you with our services and fulfill the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. If you choose to delete your account, we will remove your data in accordance with applicable law.
In practice: when you delete your account it is deleted 14 days later, a window in which you can change your mind. Your account and profile data, photos, saved searches, alert history and login go then, and messages you sent are removed from other people's conversations. Reports and blocks that involve you are kept to protect the people who made them; server and security logs are kept for a short period and then discarded; and invoices and payment records are kept for as long as accounting and tax law requires, which in Estonia is seven years.
How to delete your account walks through the steps in the app and in a browser, and the 14 days in which you can change your mind.
7. Security
We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal data, including encryption in transit, access controls that limit who on our side can see what, and providers who are themselves contractually bound to protect it. No online service can promise perfect security, but if a breach ever affects your personal data and is likely to present a risk to your rights, we will notify the competent supervisory authority and, where required, you.
8. Your Rights
If you are in the EEA or the United Kingdom, the GDPR gives you the following rights over your personal data. They are free to exercise, and we will respond within one month.
- Access — get a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
- Rectification — have inaccurate or incomplete data corrected.
- Erasure — have your data deleted where we no longer have grounds to keep it.
- Restriction — have us pause processing while a dispute about it is resolved.
- Portability — receive the data you gave us in a structured, machine-readable format, or have it sent to another controller.
- Objection — object to processing based on legitimate interests, and to direct marketing at any time and without giving a reason.
- Withdraw consent — where we rely on consent, withdraw it at any time. That does not affect processing already carried out.
- Complain — lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.
To exercise any of these, write to support@rentbear.co. We may ask you to confirm your identity before we act, so that nobody else can use these rights against your account.
Our lead supervisory authority is the Estonian Data Protection Inspectorate (Andmekaitse Inspektsioon, aki.ee). If you live in the Netherlands you may instead complain to the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl), or to the authority where you live.
9. Tracking Technologies
RentBear uses cookies and similar tracking technologies to operate and improve our platform. Cookies are small data files stored on your device that help us provide a better user experience. We use essential cookies that are strictly necessary for the operation of our website, such as keeping you logged in and remembering your preferences. You can manage your cookie preferences at any time through your browser settings. For more information, please see our Cookie Policy.
10. Children
RentBear is not intended for use by children, and our Terms of Use require you to be at least 18 to hold an account. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If we become aware that we have collected personal data from a child, we will take steps to delete that information promptly.
11. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any material changes by posting the updated policy on this page and updating the "Last updated" date. Your continued use of RentBear after changes are posted constitutes your acceptance of the revised Privacy Policy.
12. Contact Us
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or how we handle your data, please contact us at support@rentbear.co.