This notice is in force. It was written by Caredly and has not yet been reviewed by a solicitor; if a review changes anything that matters, we'll tell you.
Privacy notice
Last updated: 11 October 2026
In short
- Your care passport is shared only when you apply for a role or accept an invitation.
- When you apply, a home sees your name and scores. It sees your whole passport only if it shortlists you, and after a hire it must keep a staff file about you.
- Every time a home opens your passport is logged for you to see, and you can stop sharing at any time.
- Your passport and documents are held in the UK.
Caredly helps care workers build one recruitment profile and share it with care employers on their terms. That means we handle sensitive information, and this notice explains exactly what we collect, why, who can see it, how long we keep it, and the control you keep. We've tried to write it the way we'd want it explained to us.
Who we are and how to contact us
Caredly Ltd ("Caredly", "we") is a company registered in England and Wales, number 17405103, registered office 1 Main Street, Grimston, Melton Mowbray, LE14 3BZ. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office as a data controller, registration number ZC226705. For anything in this notice — including exercising your rights — email hello@caredly.org or write to us at the address above. We aim to respond within one month.
Who is responsible for what
There are two kinds of information on Caredly, and the responsibility for them is different:
- Your Caredly profile — the care passport a care worker builds and chooses to share, and an employer's own account and organisation details. For this, Caredly is the controller: we decide how it's handled, and this policy is our promise to you about it.
- An employer's staff file — the records an employer creates on Caredly about someone they've shortlisted or hired, and about staff who have no Caredly account (agency and bank workers, volunteers, the registered manager, the responsible or nominated individual): which checks they carried out and when, verbal verifications of references and the written references they receive, a named team member's sign-off, training records, files they upload, the interview and decision record, what each previous employer said when the employer checked an earlier job with children or vulnerable adults (who confirmed it, the reason for leaving, whether a safeguarding concern was raised and what was done about it, or why it couldn't be checked, and its decision about any risk), the employment record (induction, probation, appraisal, fitness review, qualification deadlines, leaving date), supervision notes, and the log of when they viewed the passport. For a person without an account the employer also records the identity, date of birth, contact and DBS certificate details it holds, and the supervision level it has decided. For this, the employer is the controller and Caredly is their processor: we hold it on their behalf, under written terms, and only do with it what they instruct. Questions about that data go to the employer first; we'll help.
What we collect
- Account details — name, email address, whether you're a care worker or an employer, and the version of these terms you agreed to and when. For employer accounts, what the second sign-in step needs: the key your authenticator app uses, your backup codes (stored one-way hashed, so we cannot read them) and a token for each device you ask us to remember for 30 days.
- Care workers' care passports — the information UK care regulators require employers to check before you start work: date of birth; full work history since leaving education, with written explanations for gaps over two weeks; referee details for relevant roles and a character reference; identity documents; proof of address; right-to-work evidence; details of time lived outside the UK and related overseas checks; your self-declared DBS certificate details (type, number, issue date, Update Service status); your criminal-record self-declaration (unprotected convictions and cautions, pending cases — free text you choose to give, shown only to verified employers you share with); National Insurance number; five-year address history; previous names; qualifications; professional registration (body, number, renewal date) where your role needs one; whether you need visa sponsorship, your visa route and expiry; training you have completed, with certificates if you upload them; driving details; a passport-style photo if an employer requests one; and optionally a CV.
- Job preferences — care types, hours, location and qualification level, used to score how well roles match you.
- Employers' organisation details — organisation name, regulator (CQC/Ofsted) and registration identifiers, care types, and job posts.
- Activity on the platform — applications, consent decisions, messages between applicants and employers, the steps of a recruitment arranged in Caredly (interview times offered and the one chosen, how the interview went as the employer records it, a job offer with its start details and the answer to it), the notifications about each of those steps, and the audit log of every time an employer opens a care passport in Caredly.
- People an employer invites — if an employer uses Caredly to invite someone they already employ, they give us that person's name, email address, job title and start date so we can send the invitation. See If an employer invited you.
- Referees — a referee's name, job title, work email and phone number, provided by the care worker. See If you're a referee.
None of the profile fields is compulsory to hold a Caredly account. But regulators require employers to see most of them before someone works in care, so if you leave something out, an employer can't complete your file and may not be able to take you on.
We don't collect health information. Where an employer needs a health declaration for their staff file, they collect it themselves and only record on Caredly that they have it. If you include health or other sensitive information in a free-text answer (a gap explanation, for example), we hold it with your explicit consent; an employer you share it with holds it under its employment-law obligations. You never need to give medical detail — "time off for health reasons" is enough.
Why we use it, and our legal basis for each purpose
UK data protection law requires us to have a lawful basis for each thing we do. Here they are.
| What we do | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Provide your account and let you build and edit your profile | Performance of our contract with you (UK GDPR Art 6(1)(b)). |
| Show an employer your care passport — when you applied to their role | Your consent (Art 6(1)(a)), given per employer, recorded with a timestamp, and revocable at any time from your dashboard. |
| Show your employer your care passport — when they invited you as existing staff | Employers can't rely on an employee's "consent" in the strict legal sense, because of the imbalance between you, so we don't pretend to. Here you are choosing where your file is held: we share it on your instruction as part of providing the service to you (Art 6(1)(b)), and because your employer is legally required to hold this information about you (Art 6(1)(f); DPA 2018 Sch 1 para 6 for DBS details). Your employer holds it under its own legal obligation (Art 6(1)(c); Sch 1 para 1). You can stop sharing at any time: your employer then keeps your passport as it stood when you stopped, in the staff file it must hold, and doesn't see any change you make afterwards. You must not be treated differently for choosing that. |
| Let an employer contact your referees | Your separate consent, given per employer. They will be sent your name, date of birth, and the role and dates you gave, so the referee can find the right record. |
| Store your DBS certificate details and any overseas criminal-record checks | This is criminal-offence data. We hold it on your profile with your consent (Data Protection Act 2018, Schedule 1 paragraph 29), and disclose it to a regulated care employer because that employer has a statutory duty to check it (Schedule 1 paragraph 6 — statutory purposes, in the substantial public interest). Employers process it under their employment-law obligations (Schedule 1 paragraph 1). We maintain an appropriate policy document as the law requires. We store only what you self-declare — never a scan of the certificate — and never apply for a DBS check ourselves. |
| Let an employer check your DBS certificate on the Update Service | Your separate consent, given on your DBS details, which you can take back at any time. An employer you share your passport with can then make a free status check with the DBS through Caredly, in its own name, after seeing your original certificate. We send the DBS your certificate number, surname and date of birth, and record only whether your certificate is still current — never what it shows. Each check also appears on your own Update Service account. |
| Send you emails about your account, expiring documents, and invitations | Contract (account emails); legitimate interests (reminders — you can turn them off by removing the document or deleting your account). |
| Tell you about each step of an application, in the app and by email — a new applicant, a shortlist, an interview invitation, booking or reminder, an offer and its answer, a message, a hire, or a “not this time”. A message's email says only who wrote, never what they wrote, and comes at most once an hour for one conversation. | Contract — the service you asked for when you applied for a role or posted one. |
| Send reference-request emails on an employer's behalf | The employer's legitimate interests and legal obligation to verify references; your consent to referee contact. |
| Keep security and audit logs, prevent misuse, rate-limit abuse | Our legitimate interests in running a secure service (Art 6(1)(f)), and employers' legal obligation to evidence their checks. |
| Hold an employer's staff-file records after you delete your account | The employer's legal obligation to retain staff records for their regulator (Art 6(1)(c); Art 17(3)(b) — see below). |
| Verify an employer against the CQC register | Legitimate interests — we send the CQC provider ID they gave us to the CQC's public API. |
| Report a serious safeguarding or fraud concern | Where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to protect children or adults at risk, we may disclose information to the appropriate regulator, local authority (LADO), the DBS or the police — our legal obligation or legitimate interests (Art 6(1)(c)/(f)); DPA 2018 Sch 1 paras 10 and 18 for criminal-offence data. |
| Marketing | We don't do any. We will never sell or rent personal information. |
Who can see what
Caredly is built around two-stage visibility. When you apply to a role, the employer sees your name and your passport-completeness and match scores — not your documents, referees, or DBS details. Only when an employer shortlists you and you have consented can they view your full care passport. Employers open your documents through links that work for one minute, made each time only after Caredly has checked they may still see them; they agree in our Terms not to copy, download or share them beyond their own staff file. When an employer who has hired you records that it checked a document — your right to work, your identity, a qualification — Caredly files their own copy of the document they checked in their staff file, as the law expects an employer to keep (right-to-work copies, for example, for the employment and two years after). Every view by an employer's team is logged and you can see the log — and stop sharing — from "Who can see my passport" on your dashboard (Caredly's own administrative access is by written instruction and is not shown in that log). Nobody sees your passport without a relationship you started or accepted. When an employer records that you have left a job, Caredly stores a copy of your file as it stood that day in the employer's records, because the law requires the employer to keep it; that copy is the employer's and is not removed when you stop sharing or delete your account. In the same way, if you stop sharing with an employer who has hired you, or delete your account while they employ you and can still see your passport, Caredly keeps your passport as it stood at that moment in that employer's staff file, which they must keep and keep up to date; they don't see any change you make afterwards. An employer you never agreed to share your passport with gets no copy of it.
If an employer invited you
If your employer keeps its staff files on Caredly, it holds one about you there: your name, job title and start date, and whatever else it already held — which can include your date of birth, National Insurance number and DBS certificate number. That file is the employer's own record, kept because the law requires it, and it exists whether or not you ever use Caredly yourself: the employer is the controller and we process it on its behalf. If your employer invites you to build a care passport, it gives us your email address for that purpose only. Accepting links your passport to the file, with the same two consents as an application, and you can withdraw them at any time; nothing from your passport is shared unless you accept. If you don't accept, we delete the invitation 30 days after it expires and the employer's file is unchanged. The invitation page lists exactly what the employer holds.
If you're a referee
A care worker gave us your details as part of their passport, so that an employer can verify their work history — which regulators require employers to do. We hold your name and contact details on the basis of our legitimate interest in enabling regulated employers to verify references (Article 6(1)(f)); the care worker separately agrees before any employer may contact you. When an employer asks you for a reference, you complete a secure form on Caredly. If you haven't replied after three working days, we send you one reminder on the employer's behalf, and no more. Your answers, your typed signature and your phone number are stored on Caredly for that employer, which is their controller, and we record the time and the internet address the form was sent from so the employer can show it came from you. The employer keeps the reference for as long as its regulator requires (a children's home: at least 15 years). Any phone call is between you and the employer; they may record on Caredly that they spoke to you and what you confirmed, and that record is theirs too. You can ask us to remove your contact details at any time.
Who processes data for us, and where
We use a small number of trusted providers, each under their data processing terms, with data encrypted in transit and at rest:
| Provider | What for / where |
|---|---|
| Supabase | Database, login and document storage. Our project is in their London (UK) region; their support engineers, some in the USA, may access it only under their data processing terms. |
| Vercel Inc. (USA) | Runs the website. Page requests and our application code run in their London region; account, control-plane and request-log data are held in the USA under their data processing terms (transfer mechanism being confirmed — see Changes). |
| Resend Inc. (USA) | Delivers our emails (confirmations, reminders, invitations, reference requests). Recipient addresses and message content pass through their US systems under their data processing terms (transfer mechanism being confirmed — see Changes). |
| Care Quality Commission | We send the CQC provider ID an employer gives us to the CQC's public register API to verify it. |
| Companies House | We send the company number an employer gives us to Companies House's public API to confirm the legal entity. |
We don't transfer personal data outside the UK other than as described above.
How long we keep it
| Information | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Your account and profile | Until you delete your account. Profiles inactive for 24 months are deleted automatically, with email warnings at 18 and 23 months. Exception: while an employer holds you as shortlisted or hired staff, your profile is part of their active staff file and is not auto-deleted for inactivity. |
| Applications that didn't proceed (rejected, withdrawn) and any reference emails about them | 6 months after the outcome, then deleted automatically. |
| Interview arrangements, offers and the notifications about an application | Kept with the application they belong to, and deleted with it — so for an application that didn't proceed, 6 months after the outcome. |
| Invitations that were declined or expired | 30 days after they expire, then deleted. |
| Reference forms sent to referees | A form that is not completed expires after 30 days. A completed reference is the employer's record and is kept with its staff file. |
| Employer accounts and organisation details | Until the organisation closes its account (see below); until then, the staff-file records it holds follow its regulator's retention period. |
| Our record that an organisation closed its account | The organisation's name, who asked and when, and how many staff files it held — nothing about anyone on those files. Kept as our record of the organisation's instruction to delete. |
| Print and export logs (which staff files were printed or exported, by whom, when) | Kept with the employer's records for as long as they are. |
| An employer's staff-file records about someone shortlisted or hired, or about staff who have no Caredly account | These are the employer's records. They are kept for as long as their regulator requires (typically the duration of employment plus a period after) and are not deleted when you delete your account — see below. |
| Right-to-work copies on an employer's staff file | Destroyed automatically two years after the person's leaving date — the Home Office's rule for how long an employer must keep them — and the file records the date it happened. Copies of identity documents follow the staff file's own retention period. |
| Security and access logs | For the life of the related application, as above. |
Deleting your account
Dashboard → Account → "Delete my account". This permanently deletes your profile, work history, references, uploaded documents, preferences and messages, immediately.
One exception, which the law requires: if an employer has hired you (or shortlisted you and recorded checks) through Caredly, the records that employer created — their reference checks, verbal verifications, sign-off, training log, uploaded files and the access log — are that employer's statutory staff-file records. They stay with the employer for the period their regulator requires (UK GDPR Article 17(3)(b)). Your name is marked "account deleted" on them and your documents and profile are no longer visible to anyone — except that where an employer recorded that you left a job, the copy of your file it stored as at that day stays in its records, and an employer who had hired you keeps your passport as it stood when you deleted your account (or when you stopped sharing it with them, if you did that first), with its own copies of the documents it checked, as the law requires.
If you run an organisation on Caredly: its owner can close its account from Account → "Close the account", after downloading a copy of every staff file, the register and the training matrix — those are the organisation's records, which the law requires it to keep. Seven days later Caredly deletes the organisation, its staff files and documents, its roles, its team's access to it and the owner's login; every owner and admin is emailed when the close is asked for, and any of them can stop it before the day. Care workers keep their own care passports. Anyone else on the team can delete their own login at any time: the organisation's records stay with it, with their name on what they recorded.
Your rights
You have the right to access, correct, export and delete your information, to withdraw consent, and to object to or restrict certain processing. Most of these are built in — you can see and edit everything in your profile, see who has viewed your file, revoke an employer's access with one tap, and delete your account yourself. For a copy of everything we hold, or anything else, email hello@caredly.org or write to Caredly Ltd, 1 Main Street, Grimston, Melton Mowbray, LE14 3BZ; we'll respond within one month. Most of what an employer records about you is disclosable to you on request; references given in confidence, and notes of them, may be withheld under the Data Protection Act 2018 (Schedule 2, paragraph 24). You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk, 0303 123 1113) — though we'd be grateful for the chance to put things right first.
Scores and automated processing
Caredly calculates scores (profile completeness, match percentage) to rank and present candidates and roles. These scores inform humans — employers decide who to shortlist and hire. Caredly makes no automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects.
Security
Access to your data is enforced in the database itself, not just the screens: an employer's ability to see anything is checked on every request against your consent. Documents live in private storage behind expiring links; invitation links are stored only as one-way hashes; audit records can be added to but never edited or deleted. Every employer sign-in has a second step — a code from an authenticator app — so a password alone opens no staff file. One thing is kept on your own device: if you read your CV into your passport and haven't saved it yet, the unfinished reading stays in that browser for up to 24 hours so you don't lose your place, and is cleared when you save, start again, log out or delete your account. If we ever suffer a breach that puts you at risk, we'll notify the ICO within 72 hours and tell you without undue delay, as the law requires.
Changes
If we change this notice in a way that matters, we'll tell you by email or in the app before the change takes effect, and ask you to agree again where the law requires it. Next planned update: we are confirming the exact international-transfer mechanism in each of our US providers' contracts and will name it here.