Our privacy notice says a rating you receive is never attributed to a specific tradesperson. Your account page says the same thing in plainer words: ratings are anonymous, and you cannot see who gave them.
Both were true and neither was enough.
Why one rating is not anonymous
Imagine you have had one tradesperson at your house this year. They rate you three out of five and pick "expectations about scope or price". We show you the average: three out of five, with that reason.
We have technically told you nothing about who said it. In practice we have told you everything, because you know exactly who came round. One rating plus one visit is a name.
Two is not much better. With two raters, a customer can usually work out which of the two left the unflattering one, because people generally remember which visit went badly.
So the figure waits
Your average is now withheld until at least three different tradespeople have rated you. Below that we show you that ratings exist and nothing more. Three rather than two, for the reason above.
It is a fixed number in the code rather than a setting someone can adjust, and that is on purpose. A switch that can turn an anonymity promise off is a switch that eventually gets turned off, usually by somebody who needs a number for a dashboard.
The cost of doing it this way
We are choosing to show you less. Most people with a rating will see nothing for a while, and that is worse for anyone who wanted to know where they stand. We think that is the right trade: a promise of anonymity you can break with arithmetic is not a promise, it is a form of words.
The same floor does not apply to the tradesperson considering your job. Somebody about to work in your home seeing an assessment of that home is part of the relationship rather than a disclosure, and that read is logged. What they see is bounded to the same ninety days you can see, so nothing weighs against you that you cannot find and question.