SpareRoom Scout

Privacy

This tool handles things you would reasonably want kept close: your SpareRoom session, a description of yourself, and messages you are about to send to strangers. Here is exactly what happens to each of them.

The short version

  1. Your SpareRoom password is never seen, asked for or stored. The tool uses the login already in your browser, the same one you use when you click around the site yourself.
  2. Almost everything stays on your own computer. The rooms it finds, the drafts it writes, and your notes about yourself all live in your browser's own storage.
  3. One thing leaves: the text needed to write a message. Your “About you” details and the ad's text are sent, each time you press Generate, to a small server that asks an AI model to write the message and sends it back.
  4. That server keeps two things about you: your email address and a monthly count. Not your details, not the ads, not the messages.
  5. There is no analytics, no tracking and no advertising anywhere in this. This page loads nothing from anywhere else.

What stays on your computer

Held in your browser's extension storage. It is not synced, not backed up anywhere, and nobody else can read it.

  1. The ads it scrapes from your saved search — titles, prices, descriptions, links.
  2. Your “About you” details: whatever you typed into Settings.
  3. Every draft message, including your edits.
  4. A record of which ads you have already messaged, so nobody gets approached twice.
  5. Your settings, and the email address of the Google account you signed in with (shown in the dashboard so you can see who is signed in).

Backups you make with the Export button are ordinary files on your computer. They contain everything in the list above, so treat one like any other personal document.

What leaves your computer, and when

When you press Generate

Your “About you” details and that one ad's contents are sent to the SpareRoom Scout server, which passes them to OpenAI to write the message, and returns the text. Nothing else is sent, and nothing is sent for ads you do not generate a message for.

When you sign in with Google

The extension asks Google for permission to see your email address, and nothing else. No access to your Gmail, Drive, contacts or anything similar is requested — it cannot be, because the permission was never asked for. The email address is used for exactly two things: checking you are on the friends list, and counting your messages for the month.

When you scrape or send

Requests go to spareroom.co.uk only, from your own browser, carrying your own login — exactly as if you had clicked. Nothing about your scraping or sending is reported anywhere else.

Once a day

The dashboard checks this website for a newer version. That request contains no information about you.

What the server keeps

The server exists so that no one has to hold an AI provider's API key. It is deliberately forgetful.

  1. Your email address on a friends list, so it knows to answer you.
  2. A number: how many messages you have generated this month, which resets each month.
  3. A log line per request recording the method, the path, whether it succeeded, and your email address. Nothing else.

What it does not keep: your “About you” details, the ads, and the generated messages are used to answer the request and are not written to storage or to the log.

Who else is involved

  1. Google — handles the sign-in and confirms your email address to the server. Governed by Google's privacy policy.
  2. OpenAI — receives your “About you” details and the ad text in order to write each message. Governed by OpenAI's privacy policy and their API terms, under which API content is not used to train their models.
  3. Cloudflare — hosts this page and the server. Governed by Cloudflare's privacy policy.
  4. SpareRoom — sees ordinary browsing and messages from your own account, because that is what it is.

Your data is never sold, never used for advertising, and never shared with anyone beyond the four above.

Deleting your data

  1. Everything on your computer: remove the extension at chrome://extensions. Its storage goes with it. Delete any Export files yourself.
  2. Your Google sign-in: revoke it at your Google account permissions, any time.
  3. Your email address and count on the server: ask to be taken off the friends list and both are deleted.
  4. Messages you already sent: those are in your SpareRoom account and are between you and the person you wrote to. This tool cannot unsend or delete them.

This website

No cookies, no analytics, no tracking pixels, no fonts or scripts loaded from anywhere else. It is a page of HTML and a stylesheet. Cloudflare keeps standard server logs for its own operational purposes.

Questions, and changes to this page

SpareRoom Scout is a personal tool shared with a handful of people, not a company. Questions, or a request to be removed: avantgardadev@gmail.com, or just ask the person who sent you the link.

Last updated 4 September 2026.