What’s changed in our Terms & Privacy Policy (Oct 2026)

Identity Verification: an extra trust signal

Saying yes to a swap means trusting someone with your home. That’s why we’re gradually rolling out Identity Verification: a short ID and selfie check carried out by Didit, our verification partner. Once approved, an Identity Verified badge appears on your profile and home listing.

It’s optional and free for now. Your ID and selfie are never shown to other members, and we never see them either: we only receive the result. Didit deletes your ID images and selfie after one month.

A badge is a helpful signal, but not a guarantee of how someone will behave or how a swap will go. And not everyone can verify yet, so a missing badge doesn’t mean someone is unsafe. The new Terms explain exactly what the badge does and doesn’t confirm, and the rules for your public name once you’re verified.

Reviews stay part of your history

This is the change that matters most, so we want to explain why.

Reviews are one of the main ways members decide whom to trust with their home. That only works if they’re complete. A review describes a real swap that two people took part in, and it shouldn’t disappear just because one of them deletes their account and starts over. Keeping reviews connected to the person they’re about protects members who are about to hand over their keys, gives reviewers’ words lasting meaning, and means a great swap history isn’t lost either.

So from 30 December 2026:

• When you delete your account, reviews other members wrote about you are kept for five years, together with a minimal record: your name, the city of your listing and an encoded form of your LinkedIn ID. Everything else is deleted, and this record isn’t shown to anyone.
• If you come back within those five years, we may link your earlier reviews to your new account, and we’ll let you know when we do. This works both ways: positive reviews come back too.
• Creating a new account to avoid your reviews, a suspension or other measures isn’t allowed.

Why 30 December, and not straight away? Because this change affects what happens after you delete your account, we want to give everyone enough time to read about it and decide what they think, before it applies. Our Terms promise at least 30 days’ notice for changes like this, and we’ve chosen to give twice that. It only applies to accounts deleted from 30 December 2026 onwards.

Read the details in Section 8 of our Terms and in our Privacy Policy.

What we’ve clarified

We’ve also made a few things clearer:

• Your consumer rights: nothing in our Terms takes away the rights you have under consumer law in your country.
• How we announce changes: if we change our Terms in a way that limits your rights or adds obligations, we’ll email you at least 30 days in advance.
• Verification badges: Address and Identity Verified badges don’t currently expire. If that changes, we’ll let you know before it applies to your badge.
• Our Privacy Policy now also explains signing in with LinkedIn, how long backups are kept, and the limited data we keep after an account is deleted.

What doesn’t change

Swaphouse is still free. Matching, chatting and swapping work exactly as before. And unless you choose to verify, nothing changes in how you use Swaphouse today.

Questions, or don’t agree?

We’d love to hear from you at support@swaphouse.io, and we answer every message. If you don’t agree with the change to reviews, you can delete your account before 30 December 2026. You can also object to us keeping the minimal record, as explained in our Privacy Policy.

This post is a summary. Our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy take priority.