Your footprint in a commission

A judge can see your handle, whatever you write in the brief, and the material you send - nothing else unless you add it. A lot of hesitation about commissioning a review comes from overestimating that footprint.

What is actually visible

Your username or account handle, which most buyers pick specifically to reveal nothing. The brief itself, meaning whatever words you chose to type. The photos or clips you attach.

That is the full set, on a properly built platform. There is no address, no real name, no payment detail beyond confirmation that a charge went through, and no history a judge can browse beyond the commissions you have sent them directly. Rate Cock structures its judge-facing view around exactly this narrow set, because giving judges anything wider would be a liability for buyers with no offsetting benefit for anyone.

What adds to that footprint

Anything you choose to put in. A name, a location, an identifying detail in a photo, a personal story in the brief - all of these are things you added, not things the platform surfaced. What happens to the photos you send starts and ends with what you sent, which is why the material you submit is worth a second look before you attach it.

This is the useful reframe: privacy here is mostly a decision you make once, at the point of writing the brief and choosing photos, rather than a setting to configure. Leave a detail out and it simply is not part of what the judge knows.

Why this matters for nervous buyers

A buyer who overestimates their exposure tends to either over-explain in an attempt to control the story, or avoid commissioning entirely. Neither is necessary once the actual footprint is this narrow.

You can ask a judge a direct, specific question without worrying it will be tied to anything beyond the handle you are using. You can send a brief with real feeling in it without that feeling becoming part of some visible record beyond the one conversation. The system was built around minimal visibility on purpose, because most buyers want exactly this.

How this compares elsewhere

An automated scoring tool sees strictly less - there is no handle to read, no ongoing relationship, just an image processed and discarded or stored per its own privacy terms. A measurement app sees a number and nothing about who produced it, which is the same minimal-footprint design, just without a person on the other end at all. A judge sees slightly more than either, because a judge is a person responding to you, not a function processing an input - but "slightly more" still means a handle and a brief, not a dossier.

Where a scoring platform differs again is in how results surface publicly: some rating tools show aggregate data that a buyer opted into, which is not remotely the same model as a private commission that stays between two people by default.

Why the narrow footprint is a design choice, not an accident

None of this happened by default.

It is also what UK data protection law expects of any service: the ICO's guidance on data minimisation tells organisations to "identify the minimum amount of personal data you need to fulfil your purpose" and hold no more.

A platform that let judges see a buyer's full order history, real name, or activity across other judges would be building a surveillance layer nobody asked for, and it would change the character of every commission that followed - buyers would write more guardedly, disclose less, and get worse clips for it, because what a judge actually responds to is what is in front of them, not a dossier. Keeping the footprint to a handle, a brief, and material is what lets a buyer write the specific, sometimes personal brief that gets a specific, personal clip back. Widen the footprint and that specificity is the first thing to go, replaced by the same caution people bring to any account they know is being watched. Minimal visibility is not a courtesy extended after the fact; it is a precondition for the kind of honest brief that makes a commission worth having at all.

The short answer

Handle, brief, material - that is what a judge has, unless you hand over more. Knowing that going in is usually enough to turn a nervous buyer into one who writes a clear, specific brief without worrying about who else might see it.