Privacy policy

Who we are

Ruu Choice Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 17190774. Registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office under registration number ZB000000. Contact us about privacy at privacy@ruuchoice.com.

What we collect

• Account data: your name, email address, phone number and postcode.
• Booking data: the provider and service you booked, your preferred date and time, your booking reference, and any notes you choose to add.
• Payment data: the amount, status and reference of payments you make. Card details are collected and stored by Stripe, not by us – we never see or hold your full card number.
• Reviews you submit, and any response the provider publishes.
• Technical data: IP address, device and browser information, and server logs, used to keep the service secure and working.

Please do not put clinical details in the free-text notes field. Ruu Choice is a booking service – anything you need your clinician to know is best given to them directly at your appointment.

Health data

The fact that you booked a particular service can imply something about your health, so we treat booking data as special category data under Article 9 UK GDPR. We rely on your explicit consent, given when you make the booking, and we share it only with the provider you chose so they can deliver your appointment.

Why we use it, and our lawful basis

• To provide the service – creating your account, taking your booking, taking payment, and passing your details to your chosen provider. Basis: performance of a contract.
• To verify providers and keep patients safe – checking regulator registrations, moderating reviews, investigating disputes and preventing fraud. Basis: legitimate interests.
• To meet legal duties – accounting records, tax, and responding to lawful requests. Basis: legal obligation.
• To send marketing – only if you opt in, and you can withdraw at any time. Basis: consent.

Who we share it with

• The provider you book with – your name, contact details, chosen service and preferences. They are a separate data controller once they receive it.
• Stripe – payment processing, fraud prevention and payouts.
• Supabase – database and authentication hosting (UK/EU region).
• Resend – sending transactional email such as booking confirmations and receipts.
• Render – application hosting.
• Google and Microsoft – only where a practice has connected its own calendar, and only to the extent described under Connected calendars below.

We never sell your personal data. Where a supplier processes data outside the UK, that transfer is covered by the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.

The waiting list

Before Ruu Choice opens for booking in an area you can ask us to tell you when it does. If you do, we keep your email address, the first part of your postcode and, if you tell us, which kind of care you are interested in and what you would book first.

• Only the first part of your postcode. “BL1”, not “BL1 7HJ”. It answers “where should we open next”, which is the only reason we ask, and a full postcode beside an email address would identify a household.
• Basis: your consent, given by ticking the boxes on the form. Being told when we launch and receiving launch offers are two separate ticks, so you can have the first without the second. We store the wording you were shown alongside your sign-up, so a later change to our own copy cannot alter what you agreed to.
• What we send: a message when booking opens near you, and launch offers from practices if you asked for them. Nothing else, and never anybody else’s marketing. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe, and unsubscribing removes you from the list rather than quietly flagging you.
• How long: until you unsubscribe, or 24 months after you join if we have not launched near you by then – at which point keeping your address would serve no purpose.

Joining the waiting list does not create an account and is not a booking. Email privacy@ruuchoice.com to be removed at any time.

Connected calendars

A practice using Ruu Pro can connect its own Google or Microsoft calendar so that appointments booked elsewhere block out time in Ruu, and appointments booked through Ruu appear in the calendar the practice already works from. Connecting is optional, it is done by the practice rather than by a patient, and it can be undone at any time.

When a practice connects a calendar we ask for the narrowest access that makes the feature work:

• Free/busy times – the start and end times of periods when the calendar is busy. We store these times and nothing else. We do not receive, ask for, or store the title, description, location, attendees or any other content of an existing calendar entry, so Ruu cannot see what an appointment is or who it is with.
• A list of the calendars the account can write to, so the practice can choose which one Ruu should use.
• Events created by Ruu – we create, update and delete the entries for Ruu bookings in the chosen calendar. These are the only events we write to or remove. Nobody is invited to them, so no patient’s email address leaves Ruu through a calendar.

Access tokens are encrypted before they are stored and are never shown in the interface or in exports. Disconnecting a calendar tells Google or Microsoft that the permission is finished where they provide a way to do so, deletes our copy of the tokens, and deletes the busy times we had taken from it. A practice can also withdraw the permission directly from its own Google or Microsoft account at any time, which has the same effect.

Calendar data is used only to run the practice’s own diary inside Ruu. It is never used for advertising, never sold, never used to train any model, and never shared with anyone beyond the hosting providers listed above who store it on our behalf.

Ruu Choice’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

How long we keep it

• Account data – while your account is open, then 12 months.
• Booking and payment records – 7 years, to meet accounting and tax requirements.
• Reviews – until you ask us to remove them, or the listing is removed.
• Calendar busy times – only while the calendar is connected; deleted as soon as it is disconnected.
• Waiting list – until you unsubscribe, or 24 months from joining if we have not launched near you.
• Server logs – 90 days.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict how we use it, or transfer it to another service. You can object to processing based on legitimate interests, and withdraw consent at any time. Email privacy@ruuchoice.com and we will respond within one month.

If you are unhappy with our response you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. We would rather you came to us first so we can put it right.

Cookies

See our cookie policy for what we store on your device and how to change your choices.