Privacy Policy

BldFox is a construction and contracting hub for the United Arab Emirates, operated from the UAE. Throughout this policy, "we", "us" and "BldFox" refer to the platform operator identified above, who acts as the Data Controller within the meaning of UAE Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data and any implementing regulations issued under it (the "UAE PDPL"). The suppliers who host and process data for us act as Data Processors and are named in Section 6.

Where to reach us about data. One address handles every privacy matter. Questions, access and deletion requests, objections and complaints all go to: contact@bldfox.com. It is monitored by the person responsible for data protection at BldFox, who is the point of contact for the UAE Data Office and for data subjects under Article 10 of the UAE PDPL. If the scale or nature of our processing later requires the formal appointment of a Data Protection Officer, we will appoint one and publish their contact details here.

• Account info: name, email, phone (optional), home emirate, password hash, and any avatar or bio you add.
• If you use Get Quoted without an account: a guest account for your browser, with no name and no email: an identifier, when it was made, when it last passed our human check (Section 5), and a hash of the network address it passed from. If you post a job as a guest, the job also carries the phone number you give for businesses to reach you, how and when you prefer to be reached, and a name if you add one. We also keep a hash of that number (a fixed code made from it) so we can limit how many guest jobs one number is on and block a number whose job we took down (Section 8). Anyone holding that hash could work the number out from it by trying every UAE number, so we treat it as the phone number itself. If you then create an account, all of this becomes part of it.
• Language: English or Arabic, taken from the version of the site you sign up on. You can change it at any time with the language switch.
• Contractor info: business name, category, service area, portfolio photos, contact details, pricing indicators, team details and trade / insurance documents you upload for verification.
• Activity: posts, comments, reviews, reactions, private messages and the photos and files attached to them, quote requests, notification settings and unsubscribe preferences.
• Moderation signals: records of automated AI moderation decisions (approved / held / rejected), appeal submissions and admin notes.
• Agreement records: which version of the Terms of Use you accepted and when, and your marketing and notification choices. We keep these because we need to be able to show what you agreed to.
• Technical: device, browser, and the basic logs and security events needed to keep the service working and to prevent abuse. Our hosting provider sees your IP address, as every website's does. Where we need to count requests from one visitor, to stop somebody hammering a search or to limit what one network can do without an account, we store a hash of the address rather than the address itself. That keeps the address itself out of our records, but it is not anonymisation: someone who already knows an address could check whether its hash is there. So we treat these hashes as personal data, and they are deleted on the schedule in Section 8.

Sensitive personal data. We do not ask for, and do not want, the categories the UAE PDPL treats as sensitive: data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, criminal records, health or genetic data, biometric data, or data concerning a person's sex life. Please do not put them in a post, a comment, a review, a message or the Get Quoted assistant. Two qualifications: a trade licence or insurance certificate you upload for verification may contain such data incidentally, in which case it is stored privately and seen only by staff who need it for verification; and anything you choose to publish yourself becomes visible to others, which is a decision only you can make.

We do not collect Emirates ID, passports or any identity document. We used to accept an Emirates ID from Contractors to verify the person behind a business. We stopped, and deleted the ones we held, because a trade licence already evidences that a business is licensed and an identity document is the one thing we could hold that a person cannot replace if it ever leaked. If a form ever asks you for one, it is not ours.

We do not collect. We do not collect or store card numbers, bank details or payment credentials, and we do not process payments between you and a Contractor at all. We do not use tracking pixels, advertising identifiers or device fingerprinting, and we never ask your device for its location.

Hidden details in photos. A photo taken on a phone usually carries hidden details, such as the camera it was taken with and the GPS location where it was taken. We remove them from JPEG, PNG and WebP images before we store them, wherever you upload them, and we refuse an image we cannot read safely rather than store it as it came. AVIF images are refused for anything public, such as a post, a review, a profile or a listing, because we cannot yet remove their details safely. Files you share privately, such as a PDF, a drawing, or an AVIF or TIFF image attached to a job or a message, are stored exactly as you sent them, with any details they carry; Section 4 says who can open them.

• To run your account, show you relevant content and connect you with other users and contractors.
• To put the jobs you post on the jobs board, where every business with a live listing can read them, and to notify the Verified businesses that fit each job best. A job carries no name, and carries your phone number only if you choose to be called or messaged on WhatsApp about it; Section 4 sets out exactly what is shared and with whom.
• To record what came of a job when you tell us, or confirm what a business tells us: which business you hired and the price it quoted, or that you hired someone else or are not going ahead. We use it to tell the business you chose, to let the others know the job has gone, to ask you to review only the business you hired, to show each business its own results from the jobs board, and to show on a business’s public listing how many customers have hired it through BldFox.
• To moderate content. We use AI to screen posts, comments, reviews, business listings and photos before they go live, and to hold borderline submissions for human review. A business listing goes live on that screen alone; our team reviews the ones it holds. This means the content you submit is sent to a third-party model provider outside the UAE; Section 6 names them and explains exactly what is sent.
• To run the Get Quoted assistant, which reads what you type in order to understand the job, draft your job post and, if you ask, suggest Contractors; and to write the short English summary businesses read first when you post a job with the Post a job form.
• To send service emails: sign-in links, quote responses, replies and important notices.
• To let you use Get Quoted without an account, and to keep that from being abused: to check that a person is starting it, to limit what one guest, one network and one phone number can do, and to stop a number being used for guest jobs after we took one of its jobs down.
• To prevent abuse, fraud and spam.
• To operate any paid contractor features (such as listing fees, promoted placement or subscription plans) where applicable, including billing and renewal notifications.
• To improve the product based on aggregated, non-identifiable usage data.

We do not sell your data, and we do not use it for third-party advertising.

Legal basis for processing. We rely on one or more of the following lawful bases permitted under the UAE PDPL: (1) performance of the contract with you (the Terms of Use) to operate your account and provide the services; (2) your explicit consent when you submit a quote request, publish public content, or upload trade-licence documents for verification; (3) our legitimate interest in securing the Platform and preventing fraud, abuse and spam, and in moderating content; and (4) compliance with a legal obligation under applicable UAE law. You may withdraw consent at any time without affecting the lawfulness of processing carried out before the withdrawal.

• Public: your display name, in full, and your profile photo, on your profile and on your posts, comments and reviews; your bio and home emirate, on your profile; the content of those posts/comments/reviews; your phone number, only if you mark it public; and your contractor listing (including business name, category, service area, portfolio and any contact details you explicitly mark as public) if you have one. If you sign up with Google, your display name starts as the name on your Google account. You can change it at any time in Settings. A new account with no name is shown as “Member”: we do not make a name out of an email address. An account created before 11 October 2026 without a name may have been given the first part of its email address instead, and its owner can change that in Settings.
• Private: your email, password, phone (unless you choose to make it public), private messages, quote requests, uploaded trade / insurance documents, moderation history and admin notes.
• Our administrators can read a private conversation only in the limited circumstances set out under “Private messages” below.
• Shared with businesses on BldFox: when you post a job, its details (the headline, your description, the trade, the area and emirate, the timing, any budget or details you add, and any photos and files you include) are visible to every business with a live listing on BldFox while the job is open, and are sent directly to the Verified businesses the Platform matches to it; afterwards only the businesses that were part of the job can still open its photos and files. A file is downloaded as you sent it, so take out of a drawing or a document anything you would rather a business did not see. JPEG, PNG and WebP photos have their hidden details, such as location, removed first (Section 2); other files keep theirs. Files are checked for their type and are never sent to an AI provider. Your name and email are not part of a job. Your phone number is part of one only if you choose, for that job, to be reached by phone or WhatsApp: every business that can see the job then sees that preference, and the number itself is shown only to the businesses that respond to it (or to none of them, if you choose to share it yourself in a conversation), while the job is open and afterwards only to the business you hired. You can stop sharing it with any of them from the job's page, which hides it from that business from then on; we cannot recall a number a business has already seen. In Messages you can also share your number with one person in one tap. A business that responds sees your name in the conversation it opens with you, and anything you choose to share there. Quote requests sent before 18 September 2026 were shared only with the contractors they were sent to, together with the contact details you gave. We cannot control how businesses use what you share with them, so please review a business's reputation before engaging.
• If you post as a guest, without an account: how to reach you is part of the job, because a business has no other way to. Every business that can see the job sees how you prefer to be reached, and your number is shown to the businesses that respond, as above. They are also told that you posted without an account, so a reply sent in Messages will wait until you create one, and that we have not verified the number. Because we do not verify a guest’s number, one number can be on at most two guest jobs in any seven days. If your number was put on a job you did not post, Section 7 says how to have the job taken down.
• Who you hired: if you tell us which business you hired for a job, and at what price, that is seen by you, by the business you hired, and by our administrators. The other businesses that answered your job are told only that you chose someone else, or are not going ahead: never who, and never the price. The business’s public listing counts you among the customers who have hired it through BldFox; it shows that number and nothing about you, your job or the price. If a business says you hired it, we ask you to confirm, and nothing is recorded unless you do.
• Other users can only see your phone if you marked it public on your profile or your contractor listing, chose to share it on a job as described above, or shared it in a conversation.

Private messages. A conversation between you and another user is private to the two of you. Its messages are never published and do not appear in search, and the photos and files attached to them are held in private storage that only the people in the conversation can open. Nothing you write in a conversation is sent to an AI provider: unlike posts, comments and reviews, private messages are not screened by automated moderation.

When a message is waiting for you. If a message sent to you is still unread after ten minutes, we email you to let you know, no more than once every six hours for any one conversation. The email names the sender and the job the conversation concerns. It never contains the message itself, because an email can be forwarded or read in places we cannot protect.

Reporting a conversation. Either person in a conversation can report it to us, for example for spam, harassment or an attempted scam. Only a participant can report a conversation, and each participant can have one open report on it at a time. Reports are reviewed by our administrators and kept for 12 months (Section 8).

When our administrators may read a conversation. An administrator may open a private conversation for one purpose only: keeping the Platform safe. That means when a participant has reported it, or when we are investigating spam, fraud or another breach of our Terms of Use. The access is strictly read-only. An administrator cannot send a message, join the conversation or act on behalf of either participant; opening it changes nothing that you or the other person see, and neither of you is notified. Photos and files are not shown to administrators, only how many were exchanged. Before any message is displayed, a record is made of which administrator opened the conversation and when. That record is visible to our other administrators, cannot be altered from within the Platform, and is kept for 12 months (Section 8).

Keeping messaging free of spam. Each account can send a limited number of messages per hour and per day. Our administrators can also see which accounts have written to the most people recently, and how many of those people replied. These are counts of activity, not the content of anyone’s messages, and they are used only to identify accounts that may be sending spam.

How long messages are kept. A conversation remains available to both participants for as long as both accounts exist. A message cannot be edited or withdrawn once it has been sent, so please take care with what you share. When a participant closes their account, the messages they sent, and the photos and files attached to them, are deleted along with the rest of that account 30 days later (Section 7). The other participant’s own messages remain in the conversation, because they are theirs.

BldFox does not set any cookies. What the site stores instead is kept in your own browser, and this is all of it:

• Your sign-in session, stored in your browser's localStorage by our authentication provider so you are not asked to sign in on every page. It is removed when you sign out.
• A guest session, if you use Get Quoted without an account: the guest account’s session and when its human check runs out, in localStorage, so your chat survives a reload. It is cleared when the guest becomes an account, and is of no use once we delete the guest (Section 8).
• What you have not sent yet: an unposted job card in Get Quoted, the Post a job form, or an edit to a job, in localStorage so a reload does not lose your work, each removed when it is posted; and the words you type in the home page’s box, in sessionStorage, carried to the chat that opens.
• Your choices: your language, English or Arabic, in sessionStorage so the page renders in the right language and direction; and light or dark, in localStorage.
• Small markers for the tab you are in, in sessionStorage: the jobs board filters to come back to and the job you last opened, and which business views have already been counted (see below). They are discarded when you close the tab.

Each is needed for something you have asked for, and none is used to track you. We do not run any third-party analytics, advertising, retargeting or social media tracking on the Platform, and there is no advertising or data-broker code in the page. Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs (see Section 6) for security and operational purposes.

The human check before Get Quoted without an account. Before a guest account is made, Cloudflare Turnstile checks that a person is using the browser. For almost everyone it is invisible; a few are asked to tick a box. Cloudflare’s script runs in the page and reads signals from your browser and device to decide, under Cloudflare’s own privacy terms for the service (Section 6). We receive only its answer, which we confirm with Cloudflare together with your network address. It runs only when you start Get Quoted without an account, never for a signed-in member.

We do measure how the Platform itself is used, with our own code rather than a third-party analytics service. When you view a business, reach for its contact details, or complete or abandon one of the main journeys, the page sends us a small record of that: the business’s identifier and what happened. It carries no account identifier, no name and no email address: the endpoint that receives it has no way to know who you are, and where we need to count something only once per business we do that in your browser so that nothing identifying is ever sent. We also record errors that happen in your browser so we can fix them; before an error is stored, we mask any phone number or other long run of digits, email address and link to a private file in it. These records are kept in Cloudflare’s analytics store (Section 6) for three months, and we keep day-by-day totals per business beyond that so a business can see how its own listing is doing.

Searches. When you search the directory we record whether the search found anything. We keep the words you typed only when a search found nothing, because that tells us which trades are missing from the directory so we can go and recruit them. If your search found results, the words are not stored at all. Before a search is stored, any phone number, or other run of seven or more digits, is replaced with a placeholder; anything else you typed, such as a name, is kept as you typed it. Search records carry nothing about who you are, and are kept for three months like the rest.

If we ever introduce third-party analytics, advertising or any non-essential storage, we will update this section and ask for your consent before it runs.

We do not run our own servers. The Platform is built on a small number of named suppliers, each of which acts as a Data Processor on our behalf: they process data on our written instructions under agreements carrying the confidentiality and security obligations required by the UAE PDPL, and none of them may use your data for their own purposes or marketing. This is the complete list.

What is actually sent to the AI providers. For text moderation we send only the submission itself and a label saying what kind of content it is: no name, no email, no account identifier, nothing linking it back to you. For the Get Quoted assistant, the conversation you type is sent so the assistant can reply; your account identifiers are not attached to that call either, but anything you type into the chat goes with it, which is why Section 2 asks you not to type sensitive details into it. When you post a job with the Post a job form, its text (the headline, your description, the area, the timing, and any budget or details you add) is sent once so that an English summary can be written for businesses, again with no account identifier; its photos are not sent. Images you upload are sent to Cloudflare's own models, not to DeepSeek. No AI provider we use trains its models on your data.

How long the AI providers keep it. Two different answers, so both are set out plainly:

• Cloudflare runs the image and search models on its own infrastructure and does not use anything sent to them for training. Requests to DeepSeek and to the photo models pass through Cloudflare’s AI Gateway, and we keep a log of those requests with their content, meaning what was sent and what came back. We use it to diagnose the assistant when it fails and to control cost. We attach no name, email or account identifier to those requests, only which feature made them. The log is not kept for a fixed period: it holds the most recent 100,000 requests and deletes the oldest as new ones arrive, so while traffic is low a request can stay in it for months. Because what people type is free text, the log can contain personal details someone typed, such as a name, a phone number or an address.
• DeepSeek retains what it receives for 30 days and then deletes it. What it receives is the text of the submission, the conversation or the job, again with no identifier attached.

The honest limit of this: because these are free-text fields, we cannot promise that a submission contains nothing personal, only that we attach nothing to it. If you type your own phone number into a post, that phone number is in the text that gets screened. That is the reason for the request in Section 2, and it is a real one rather than boilerplate.

Transfers outside the UAE, in plain terms. All three suppliers above hold or receive personal data outside the country: Supabase in India, DeepSeek in China, and Cloudflare, whose network spans many countries and whose stored files and logs may be kept outside the UAE. India and China are not currently the subject of a decision by the UAE Data Office recognising an adequate level of protection, and we do not rely on such a decision for Cloudflare either. These transfers are therefore made under Article 23 of the UAE PDPL, which permits a transfer to such a jurisdiction where it is protected by a contract binding the recipient to the standards required by the law, where it is necessary to perform the contract we have with you, or where you have given your explicit consent to it. We rely on the contractual route, backed by necessity for the operation of the service you have asked for. Article 22 remains available for any future supplier located in a jurisdiction the Data Office recognises as adequate.

If you would rather your content were not sent outside the UAE for screening, the practical consequence is that you cannot post publicly, because everything published is screened first. You can still hold an account, browse, and contact Contractors.

Other disclosures. We will disclose personal data where required by UAE law, a court order, or a lawful request from a competent UAE authority, and where it is necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim. If BldFox is sold, merged or reorganised, data may transfer to the acquiring entity, which will remain bound by this policy or one no less protective; we will tell you if that happens. We never sell your personal data and never share it with marketers or data brokers.

Under the UAE PDPL and similar laws, you have the right to:

• Access the data we hold about you
• Correct anything that is wrong
• Delete your account and the data tied to it
• Export your data in a portable format
• Object to specific uses or withdraw consent
• Request restriction of processing in the cases provided for by law
• Object to decisions based solely on automated processing (including automated moderation) and request human review
• Ask us to transfer your data directly to another controller, where that is feasible

Automated moderation, and your right to a human. Every post, comment, review and photo is classified automatically before it appears, and that classifier can approve it, hold it for a person to look at, or reject it. The decision is made on the content of the submission itself against our published content rules in the Terms of Use, not on any profile of you, and not on your history. Where a submission is rejected you are told the reason, and you can ask for a human administrator to review it through the appeal button shown with the rejection, or by writing to us. Nothing about that decision affects your account standing on its own.

Two of these you can exercise yourself, right now, without asking us. Both live on your Account and data page:

• Download my data gives you a single file containing your profile, posts, comments, reviews, the messages you sent, your quote requests and your business listing. Photos and uploaded documents are listed by name rather than included in the file, and you can download those from the pages they appear on.
• Close my account schedules your account for deletion. Nothing is destroyed straight away: for 30 days the account is hidden from everyone else while you keep full access to it, so you can change your mind or export anything you want to keep. After 30 days it is deleted permanently and cannot be recovered. One thing deliberately survives, as Section 8 explains: reviews you wrote stay on the Contractor's page, de-identified. They lose your name, your profile photo and any photos you attached, but their words stay as you wrote them, so they may still show who wrote them; you can ask us to remove or edit any of them, before or after your account is deleted. Notifications other people received about your reviews, comments, replies and reactions are changed to say “A member”, and the words of yours they quoted are taken out. The messages you sent are deleted from the conversations they are in, while the messages other people sent you remain with them (Section 4).

To exercise any of the other rights, or if you would rather we did the first two for you, email contact@bldfox.com from the address on your account. We will respond within one month. If a request is unusually complex or you have made several, we may extend that once, and we will tell you within the first month if we do, and why. Exercising a right is free; we may charge a reasonable fee, or decline, only where a request is manifestly excessive or repetitive, and we will explain our reasons if so. We may need to verify your identity before acting, to make sure we are not disclosing your data to someone else.

If you do not have an account. Reviews, posts and comments are written by other people, and sometimes they name or describe someone who has no account on BldFox. If something here is about you and you want it corrected or removed, you do not need an account to ask. Use our contact form, choosing “Privacy, or something on BldFox about me”, or email contact@bldfox.com, with a link to what you mean. We will reply within one month, as above.

If your phone number was put on a job you did not post. A visitor can post a job without an account, and we do not check that the phone number they give is theirs. If businesses are calling or messaging you about a job you never posted, tell us the same way, through the contact form or by email, with your number and roughly when the contacts started. You do not need an account, and we may call or message the number to confirm it is yours. We will take the job down, and the businesses that answered it are told it was removed, though we cannot recall a number a business has already seen. Taking a guest’s job down also stops its number being used for guest jobs for 90 days; when the number is yours, we lift that block for you.

If you believe that our processing of your personal data does not comply with the UAE PDPL, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the UAE Data Office, the competent regulator, without prejudice to your right to seek redress before the competent UAE courts.

We keep personal data only for as long as it is needed for the purpose it was collected for. In practice:

These are enforced automatically, not by hand. A scheduled job runs every day and deletes what has passed its date, so a period in this table is a description of what the system does rather than an intention. If we change one of these periods we will change this table with it.

Where a record must be kept past account closure for one of the reasons above, it is reduced to the minimum needed for that reason and is not used for anything else. Once the reason expires the record is deleted or irreversibly anonymised. Backups roll off on their own cycle, so a deleted item may persist in a backup for a short period after it disappears from the live service; it is not restored to the service and is overwritten in the ordinary course.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is restricted to authorised personnel only, on a strict need-to-know basis. Documents uploaded for verification are held in private storage that is not publicly reachable, and access to the database is governed by row-level policies rather than by application code alone. No system is perfectly secure, but we take this seriously and follow industry best practices.

If there is a breach. Where a personal data breach would prejudice the privacy, confidentiality or security of your data, Article 9 of the UAE PDPL requires us to notify the UAE Data Office immediately upon becoming aware of it, and to notify you immediately where the breach would prejudice your privacy or confidentiality. We will do so, and the notification will describe what happened, what data was involved, what we are doing about it, and what you can do to protect yourself. Our processors are contractually required to tell us without undue delay about any breach affecting data they hold for us.

BldFox is not intended for children under 18, in line with UAE Federal Law No. 3 of 2016 on Child Rights (Wadeema Law) and the UAE PDPL provisions relating to minors. We do not knowingly collect personal data from minors.

We do not ask for your date of birth, and we do not verify your age. The Terms of Use require you to be 18 or over and you confirm that when you use the Platform, but that is your statement rather than a check we have carried out. We say so here as well as in the Terms because a privacy policy that implied an age check we do not perform would be describing processing that does not happen. If we become aware that a minor has created an account, we will close it and delete their data promptly; if you are a parent or guardian and believe that a minor has registered, please contact us immediately at the address above.

We may update this policy as the platform evolves. Where a change is material, meaning a new purpose, a new processor, a new country your data is sent to, or a change to your rights, we will notify you by email or an in-app banner at least fourteen (14) days before it takes effect, and where the law requires your consent for the new processing we will ask for it rather than assume it. The "last updated" date at the top always reflects the current version.

Privacy questions, complaints or data requests: contact@bldfox.com. For everything else, see our contact page.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a privacy matter, please tell us first so we have a chance to put it right. You can then complain to the UAE Data Office, the regulator competent for the UAE PDPL, and you may seek redress before the competent UAE courts. Complaining to us is not a precondition for either.

This Privacy Policy is governed by, and shall be construed in accordance with, the laws of the United Arab Emirates. Any dispute arising in relation to it shall be submitted to the competent courts of the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, without prejudice to your right to lodge a complaint with the UAE Data Office or to bring proceedings before the competent court of the emirate in which you reside where UAE law gives you that right.

This policy is issued in both English and Arabic, and both versions have been prepared to express the same meaning. The English version is the binding and governing version and shall prevail in the event of any conflict, discrepancy or inconsistency between the two. Proceedings before the onshore courts and official authorities of the UAE are conducted in Arabic, and such a court or authority will work from a certified Arabic translation of this policy.