Privacy Policy

Who we are

I Need Handyman (Ineedhandyman) provides handyman and home services across Chicago, IL and the surrounding suburbs. We are the controller of the personal information described here. To reach us about anything on this page, email info@ineedhandyman.com or call (630) 854-2247.

What we collect

When you request a quote or send an enquiry

The form asks for your name, email address and phone number, and for a description of the job. You may also give us a service category and a postcode or area. Everything except your name, email and the description is optional.

Alongside your enquiry we store a one-way hash of your IP address and your browser user-agent string. We keep the hash rather than the address itself: it lets us spot repeated spam submissions from the same source without our holding a record of where you were.

When you subscribe to maintenance tips

Your email address and a hash of your IP address, nothing else.

When you create an account

Your name, email address, an optional phone number, and your password. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt before they are stored — we never hold the password itself and cannot recover it for you, only reset it.

What we do not collect

We do not ask for payment card details on this website, and we do not collect them. We do not track your location, and we do not buy personal information about you from anyone else.

Why we use it

• To answer your enquiry — to price the job, ask follow-up questions and arrange a visit. This is the whole purpose of the form.
• To match your job to the right tradesperson, which means sharing the details of the work with the specialist who will carry it out.
• To send the emails you asked for — a confirmation when your request arrives, and maintenance tips if you subscribed.
• To keep the site working and free of abuse — rate limiting, spam detection and security.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with anyone for their own marketing.

Automated summarising of enquiries

To route enquiries quickly we use an AI service (Anthropic) to read the description of the job, summarise it and suggest an urgency level for our team.

Only the job description, the subject line and the postcode are sent. Your name, email address and phone number are never included. The summary is a prompt for a human, not a decision: a person always reads your enquiry and decides what happens next, so there is no automated decision-making that produces a legal or similarly significant effect on you.

The same applies to the chat assistant on this site — what you type into it is processed by the same AI service to produce a reply. Please do not put payment details or anything sensitive into the chat.

Who else handles your information

We keep the list of processors short and name them plainly:

• MongoDB Atlas — stores enquiries, subscribers and accounts.
• Amazon Web Services — hosts the site, sends our email (Amazon SES) and stores any images uploaded by our team (Amazon S3).
• Anthropic — the AI service described above, which receives job descriptions but not your contact details.
• Meta — receives the pixel data described under Cookies below (that a visit and an enquiry happened), but none of the details you type into our forms.
• The tradesperson assigned to your job, who needs your name, contact details and address to carry out the work you asked for.

If you reach us through an advertisement or a lead form on Facebook or Instagram, Meta collects the details you enter there under its own privacy policy and passes them to us. From the point we receive them, this policy applies.

Cookies and the Meta advertising pixel

Two of the cookies below are ours and exist only to keep you signed in. The third is set by Meta, because we advertise on Facebook and Instagram.

The two inh_ cookies are strictly necessary for the sign-in feature, are marked HttpOnly so scripts cannot read them, and are sent only to this site. Signing out removes them. If you never create an account, neither is set.

What the Meta pixel does

We run advertisements on Facebook and Instagram. The pixel is a small piece of Meta’s code on our pages that tells Meta two things: that a browser visited this site, and — if you send us an enquiry — that an enquiry was submitted. That is how we can tell which advertisements bring us real work rather than just clicks.

What we do not send it: the pixel reports that an enquiry happened, not what was in it. Your name, email address, phone number and the description of the job are never passed to Meta by this website.

Meta receives your IP address and cookie identifier as part of this, and uses that data under its own privacy policy, which we do not control.

To stop it: any mainstream content or tracking blocker will prevent the pixel loading, as will your browser’s setting to block third-party cookies. The site works exactly the same either way — nothing about requesting a quote depends on it. You can also review what Meta collects, and turn off the use of off-Facebook activity, in your Facebook account settings.

This is the only advertising or analytics technology on the site. If we add another, this page will say so.

How long we keep it

• Enquiries — kept while we are dealing with the job and afterwards as a record of work done, so we can honour the workmanship guarantee. Ask us to delete yours at any time.
• Subscribers — until you unsubscribe.
• Accounts — until you ask us to close the account.

Your choices

You can ask us to:

• tell you what we hold about you, and give you a copy;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete it, where we do not need to keep it for a job we are still responsible for;
• stop emailing you.

Email info@ineedhandyman.com and we will deal with it. We will not charge you or make it difficult. Every marketing email also carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing never affects an enquiry you already sent us.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS. Passwords are hashed, sign-in tokens are held in cookies that scripts cannot read, and access to the enquiry inbox is restricted to our team. No system is perfectly secure, but we do not collect payment details here, which removes the most sensitive category of data from the picture entirely.

Children

This site is meant for adults arranging work on a property. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you believe a child has sent us information, email us and we will remove it.

Changes

If this policy changes we will update the date at the top of the page. Material changes to how we use your information will be explained here rather than slipped in quietly.

Contact

I Need Handyman
Chicago, IL
info@ineedhandyman.com
(630) 854-2247