Privacy Notice

Last updated 18 July 2026

PlanningLeads compiles construction-lead intelligence from public records and serves it to business customers. This notice explains what personal data we process, why, and the rights you have under the GDPR.

Who we are

PlanningLeads is the data controller for the lead database. Contact us about anything in this notice at privacy@planningleads.ie. Our customers are independent controllers for what they choose to do with a lead after retrieving it.

What we process, and what we don’t

Most of our data is about companies and other registered entities - which is not personal data. Where an applicant is a private individual(for example a homeowner applying for an extension), our policy is deliberately restrictive:

We do not enrich or sell personal phone numbers or email addresses for private individuals.
We classify organisation vs individual fail-safe - anything ambiguous is treated as an individual.
The public planning record (which may name an applicant) is shown only on our highest tier, and exports mask individuals.

Homeowner quote requests (only if you ask)

Our free Home Energy & Grant Report is anonymous: we do not store the address or property details you enter. Separately, the report offers an optional quote-request form. If - and only if - you submit that form with its consent box ticked, we store what you provide (name, email, phone, the jobs you want priced, your timeframe and the report snapshot) under consent (Article 6(1)(a)). We use it for exactly one thing: sharing that project with up to three matched SEAI-registered installers or assessors so they can contact you about quoting - and with no one else. These requests are held in a separate store that is never part of our lead products, API or exports. Every email we send you about it carries a one-click withdrawal link; withdrawing deletes your details from the request immediately. Requests we never match are deleted after 12 months.

Free tools, feedback and analytics

When you look up an address or Eircode in our free tools, the text you type is sent to the OpenStreetMap Nominatim geocoding service (and, where precise Eircode lookup is enabled, to HERE) solely to place the map pin. We do not store it in our database; it appears only in short-lived web-server logs. “Email me this report” uses your address once, to send the link, unless you separately tick the weekly-digest option. Our funnel analytics are anonymous counters (an event name and the day - no identifiers, no cookies). If you answer our one-question product survey while signed in, the answer is stored against your account and deleted with it.

Where the data comes from

All from public sources: the national planning system and local-authority registers, the Building Control Management System, An Bord Pleanála, the Companies Registration Office, EU tenders (TED), and public business listings (used only to enrich organisations). Re-used under Ireland’s open-data / PSI licence.

AI & automated processing

We use AI (a large-language model provided by Anthropic) to read the public planning description of each project and turn it into structured, filterable data - the project type, scale, storey count and trade signals - and to draft optional outreach notes for customers. This runs on public, organisation-level text. It does not make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects on any individual (no Article 22 profiling of people); the outputs are indicative classifications that a human customer chooses whether to act on, and can be wrong.

For this processing Anthropic acts as our processor under a data-processing agreement, with EU Standard Contractual Clauses for any transfer outside the EEA, and does not use our data to train its models. AI-drafted outreach text is presented as AI-generated so you review and edit it before sending. In line with the EU AI Act’s transparency rules, we disclose our use of AI here and label AI-assisted features in the app. A plain-English explainer of exactly what our AI does (and doesn’t do) is at /how-we-use-ai.

Lawful basis

For organisation data we rely on legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) - providing business-to-business construction lead intelligence from public records - balanced against the limited impact of processing already-public business information, and the restrictions above for individuals.

Your rights

You can ask us to give you access to, correct, or erase your personal data, and to object to our processing. Email privacy@planningleads.ie. On an erasure or objection request we add you to a permanent suppression list: your personal data and any enriched contact stop being served immediately, everywhere, and survive our weekly data rebuild. You may also complain to the Irish Data Protection Commission (dataprotection.ie).

Retention

Our lead database is rebuilt weekly from the public sources rather than accumulated indefinitely; individual contact details are never stored; and suppression records are kept permanently so a “do-not-process” request always holds. Homeowner quote requests are deleted after 12 months if never matched, and immediately on withdrawal; account data (including survey answers) is deleted with the account.

Our service providers

We use a small set of processors, each under a data-processing agreement: Anthropic (AI classification of public planning text, EU SCCs, no training on our data), Stripe (payments - we never see card details), Resend (transactional email), Hetzner (EU hosting), and the geocoding lookups above. We run no advertising or tracking networks.

Cookies

We use only strictly-necessary cookies - your sign-in session and a security (CSRF) token, plus Stripe’s own cookies during checkout. We run no tracking, advertising or third-party analytics cookies, and our traffic analytics are cookieless (based on server logs, not the browser). Because we set only essential cookies, no consent banner is required under the ePrivacy rules - we show a short notice for transparency only.