Privacy notice

Last changed 23 October 2026.

What BER Buddy does with your personal data, and with a homeowner's when their home is surveyed with it.

Who we are

BER Buddy is the trading name of Brendan Clarke, a sole trader in Ireland. It provides software that helps BER assessors record a home survey and prepare it for their BER. Where this notice says BER Buddy, we or us, it means him.

Contact for anything in this notice: privacy@berbuddy.ie.

Two roles

For most of what an assessor records, the assessor's firm decides why and how it is used, so the firm is the controller and BER Buddy is its processor. We act only on the firm's instructions, under our data processing agreement with it. That covers the survey recording, the records made from it, photographs and the survey's other records.

For the rest, BER Buddy decides, so we are the controller. That covers accounts, usage data, visits to our website, where a firm opts in, the verification copy, and during our first field trial, the trial's scoring copy, both described below.

If you are a homeowner, the assessor who visited you is your first point of contact for the survey. You can still write to us, and we will pass your request to the firm or answer it ourselves where we are the controller.

If you use BER Buddy

Your account

• What: your name, email address, the organisation you belong to and your role in it.
• Why: to let you sign in, to know which surveys you may see, and to address a message from us to you.
• Legal basis: our contract with you or your firm.
• Held by: our sign-in provider and our own database.
• Kept: while your account is open, and for 90 days after it closes.
• A record of which of these documents you accepted, and when, is kept for 6 years after your account closes, as proof of what was agreed.

What you do in BER Buddy

• What: the record of your surveys (started, finished, abandoned), credits bought and spent, and measures of how the service performed in a survey. These carry ids and counts, never a homeowner's name, address or anything said or typed.
• Why: to run the service, to charge fairly, to prevent abuse of credits, and to find out where the product fails you.
• Legal basis: our contract with your firm, and our legitimate interest in running and improving the service.
• Kept: survey records for as long as the survey is kept; credit records for 6 years, because tax law requires it.

Buying credits

• What: when you buy credits by card, our payments provider takes the payment on its own page, and you give it your card and email address there. We never see or keep your card details. From the provider we receive that the payment went through, the amount, a link to its receipt, and a code it makes from your card so we can tell whether that card has had our first-purchase offer before. We keep that code only as a one-way scrambled version of it, not the code itself, and we record which member of your organisation bought, as we do for every credit.
• Why: to add the credits you paid for, to give you a receipt, to deal with a refund or a disputed payment, and to keep the first-purchase offer to once per organisation, per person and per card.
• Legal basis: our contract with your firm; the law, for the tax records; and our legitimate interest in preventing abuse of the offer.
• Held by: our payments provider and our own database. The payments provider is also a controller in its own right for what the law requires of it, such as preventing fraud and keeping financial records, and its own privacy notice applies to that.
• Kept: with the credit records, for 6 years.

Messages from us

• What: messages we show you in the app, written for everyone, for your organisation or for you, such as a request to update the app or a note about one of your surveys; and a record that you dismissed one, so it is not shown again on any of your phones. A message never carries anything about a homeowner.
• Why: to tell you about the service and your work in it.
• Legal basis: our contract with your firm, and our legitimate interest in telling customers about the service.
• Kept: 90 days after the message stops showing, with the record of who dismissed it.

Detailed usage data

• What: how you use the app and how the phone performs during a survey. Trial participation and usage data, shown in the app, lists exactly what is recorded.
• Why: to measure whether BER Buddy works in a real survey, and where it gets in your way.
• Legal basis: your agreement, given in the app. During the free trial this agreement is a condition of taking part; see Trial participation and usage data. Once you are a paying customer it is your choice, and you can change it at any time in settings.
• Kept: 24 months, after which it is kept only as totals that cannot be linked to you.

Signing in to the app

• What: each step of signing in with an emailed code, whether or not it succeeds: which step, how it ended (for example a code sent, a wrong code, or no account for that email), how long the screen had been showing, and which try it was; with the app version, the phone model and its system version, a random number for the app on that phone, and whether the phone is an app store's test device. Once you have signed in, your account is linked to the steps before it. Never your email address, the code, or your network address.
• Why: to find out where signing in fails, including for someone who never gets in.
• Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a service people can get into.
• Kept: 90 days.

Our browser extension

• What: the browser extension fills in the energy assessment website from a finished survey, in the assessor's own signed-in session there, when the assessor asks it to. It never submits or publishes an assessment.
• What it downloads from us: who you are, the surveys of your organisation you may see, and the survey you choose, with its photographs.
• What it tells us: which survey it is filling in, which version of the website and of the extension, which page is open and which of its sections are showing, and which photographs it needs. It also tells us how each filling-in went: which pages it filled, and where and why it stopped. Otherwise never anything typed into the website, anything it reads there, or anything from another website or tab.
• If you are a pilot assessor in our field trial: it also tells us what it typed and found on the website, and the messages it showed you, so we can find and fix what goes wrong. We never keep the home's address, Eircode or meter number, or anyone's name. Our team looks at it only to help with a filling-in, and each look is noted on the survey.
• What it reads: on the website's pages, the form, what it has filled in, and the Eircode already entered, to check its work and to stop if the home is a different one. What it reads stays in your browser, except what it tells us for a pilot assessor, as above.
• What it keeps in your browser: your sign-in, the survey you chose and how far it has got, only until the browser closes or you sign out. It never asks for, sees or keeps your password for the energy assessment website.
• Why: so the assessor does not type a survey in by hand.
• Legal basis: our contract with your firm. The survey's contents are the firm's, and we handle them as its processor.
• Kept: the record of each filling-in, with its survey, for as long as the survey is kept; how each filling-in went, 90 days.

Crash reports

• What: when the app or one of our servers fails, what failed and where in the software, the app version, the phone model and its system version, and a random number for the app on that phone so repeated failures can be counted. Before a report is sent, anything that would identify a home is removed from it. Never a photograph, a recording, anything said or typed, or a screenshot.
• Why: to find out that something broke, and fix it, without waiting for someone to tell us.
• Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a service that works.
• Kept: 90 days at most.

Logs

• What: the time, address, path and outcome of each request to our servers. Never the content of a request.
• Why: to keep the service running and secure.
• Legal basis: our legitimate interest in security and reliability.
• Kept: 30 days.

If you visit our website

Our website sets no cookies and runs no tracking scripts. Our hosting provider records each visit: the network address, the page, the browser and the time. We use that record to protect the site and to understand, at the level of an organisation, who has shown an interest in it. We never try to identify a person who has not signed up.

• Legal basis: our legitimate interest in protecting the site and understanding interest in it.
• Kept: raw records with network addresses for 30 days; after that only a record from which the address cannot be recovered.

If an assessor surveys your home

An assessor using BER Buddy records the survey on a phone, with photographs and sound. You may be heard on the recording if you speak near the assessor or their phone.

• What: the recording, records made from it, photographs, the home's Eircode and MPRN, and the survey's other records.
• Who decides: the assessor's firm. BER Buddy processes it for them.
• Why: to produce the survey the assessor needs for the BER.
• Legal basis: the firm's, which is usually the legitimate interest in carrying out the assessment you asked for, and the legal duty on assessors to keep records.

What we do to protect it:

• Personal details in photographs, such as faces, documents and number plates, are blurred before a photograph is kept with the survey or shared, and the assessor can check what was blurred. Apart from the case in the next point, only the blurred copy is kept with the survey.
• An assessor can also add photographs they took with the phone's own camera. We copy each one without the details stored in the file, such as where it was taken. One added while the photographs are being checked is not blurred for them: the assessor blurs it by hand, and one they pass over without checking is kept as it is.
• The unblurred original we receive is held separately and privately in the European Union, and deleted within 90 days of our receiving it, sooner if the survey is abandoned or the photograph thrown away.
• The assessor's phone also keeps its own unblurred copy of each photograph, with its location removed, as it would of any photograph they take. That copy is under their firm's control, not ours: the firm keeps or deletes it under its own rules, and if the phone backs up its photos online, the copy goes wherever that backup keeps it.
• The recording is deleted within 30 days.
• If the assessor abandons a survey, its material is kept for 30 days to find out what went wrong and then deleted. The record that the survey took place, with the home's Eircode and MPRN, is kept with the firm's other survey records.
• Survey evidence that supports a published BER is kept for 10 years, because the SEAI requires assessors to keep it.
• Everything BER Buddy stores is in the European Union.

The verification copy

Some firms agree to let BER Buddy keep a copy of their surveys for quality checks on real surveys. For that copy BER Buddy is the controller, and the legal basis is our legitimate interest in a service that records surveys correctly. It is kept apart from the firm's own data, for no longer than the firm keeps the original, and a request to delete your data reaches it too. Ask the assessor, or us, whether their firm has agreed.

The field trial

During our first field trial, a firm taking part adds a member of BER Buddy's team to its organisation when it creates it, so that we can measure the app's work against the firm's own BER work. That person can read the firm's surveys as any member can, including the words of the recordings and the blurred photographs, but does not change them. The firm can remove them at any time.

For each survey in the trial we keep a scoring copy: the survey's form and records, the recording and its words, our own notes of what was said, and the assessment the firm produced for the home. For that copy BER Buddy is the controller, and the legal basis is our legitimate interest in a service that records surveys correctly. It is used only to measure the app, kept privately in the European Union, and deleted once the measurement is done, within 90 days of the survey at most. Any tool that helps with the measurement sees only a copy with the homeowner's name, address, Eircode and MPRN removed.

Who else handles the data

We use these kinds of provider, each under a contract that limits them to acting for us:

• Cloud hosting, in Ireland: our servers, database and logs.
• Cloud storage and network services: photographs and audio, stored in the European Union, and our website and our domain's email. Transfers for the website and email rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.
• A sign-in provider, in the United States. Transfers rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.
• An error reporting provider, which stores crash reports in the European Union.
• A payments provider, in Ireland, which takes card payments for credits. Some of its processing is in the United States, relying on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.
• A software tool provider, in the United States, which may help us score the field trial, only ever from a copy with the homeowner's name, address, Eircode and MPRN removed. Transfers rely on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.
• Automated speech-to-text and AI processing providers, in the European Union and the United States, that help prepare a survey's records from what the assessor captures. Transfers to the United States rely on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, and that processing runs in Ireland. Some keep what they receive for up to 30 days to guard against misuse of their service, then delete it; none uses it to train its models.

We give the names of these providers to firms using BER Buddy, and to anyone who asks at the address above.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not use it for advertising.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, to delete it, to limit what we do with it, to object to what we do on the basis of legitimate interest, and to receive data you gave us in a form you can take elsewhere. Where we rely on your agreement, you can withdraw it at any time; that does not undo what was done before.

Write to privacy@berbuddy.ie. We answer within a month.

You can also complain to the Data Protection Commission, at www.dataprotection.ie.

Changes

When this notice changes in substance, its version number goes up and the app and website ask you to read it again before you continue.