Protecting Your Information

To tear down the walls around Wall Street, Robinhood built its app for today’s investor — the tech savvy and digitally-connected consumer who uses their mobile device for nearly everything. In addition to making investing less scary, more accessible, and easier to understand, Robinhood also wanted to make the experience more personal.

Technology enables people to do so many things: from buying a car to shopping for a home, and now, investing. But as our world becomes digitally connected, and as people share more and more of themselves across various platforms, we see people are concerned that companies may abuse the access they have to their customers’ lives by sharing or selling customer data.

While how the stock market works isn’t something most people spend a lot of time thinking about, and while the process of buying or selling a stock has a few more steps than what the customer actually sees, one thing is clear:

We take the safeguarding of our customers’ personal information seriously. We do not sell customer personal information to third parties. The order information that we route to market makers only contains the data necessary to complete a customer’s order, such as the order type, number of shares, symbol and order number. It does not include any personal identifiable information about customers themselves.

When a customer buys or sells a stock on our platform, Robinhood Securities, the clearing broker for Robinhood Financial, sends the order data to a market maker to execute the order. Robinhood is subject to what’s called a “Best Execution” responsibility to provide customers with the best price reasonably available and seek price improvement on trades whenever possible. And we route orders to market makers to fulfill this responsibility, as they provide liquidity, opportunity for price improvement and generally better overall quality than can be attained at an exchange.

So what kind of data does Robinhood send?

At Robinhood, we’re committed to protecting your privacy and treating your data with the responsibility it deserves. No customer data such as demographics, age, or gender are included in order data or are ever sent to market makers.

Details the market makers need to execute the orders such as the transaction type (buy or sell), the number of shares being traded, the symbol, the time in force (day or GTC), and order ID / Firm MPID are the kinds of data we send. In fact, these are regulatorily required or needed by the market maker to complete the transaction.

At Robinhood, we take our customers’ financial future and privacy seriously. And we’re interested in looking for ways to make investing better by working with market makers who fulfill trades in a way that benefits our customers. We know that the information surrounding the ins and outs of investing can be a little confusing. Robinhood’s resources like Learn and our blogs are here to help.

Here’s a breakdown of the order data by type that Robinhood sends:

All investments involve risk and loss of principal is possible. Robinhood Financial LLC is a registered broker dealer (member SIPC). Robinhood Securities, LLC provides brokerage clearing services (member SIPC).