Privacy

What we collect, and why

When you buy a report. The address you looked up, and the email address you give Stripe at checkout — that is where the report and its permanent link are sent. Your card details go to Stripe and never reach us; we see that a payment succeeded, not the number.

When you create an account. Your email address, and whatever else you choose to type on the form: a name, a company, a phone number, the area you work in, a note. The email is where the daily digest and your sign-in link go. Nothing on the form is required except the email.

When you use the site. Your browser stores a random visitor id (in localStorage) and a session id (in sessionStorage) so we can count visits and see which pages people reach. Page views and clicks are sent to our own server with the page path and the referring site. Our server keeps ordinary request logs — IP address, browser user agent, time — and classifies the network an IP address belongs to (a company network, home broadband, or a datacenter) so we can tell people from crawlers. There are no advertising cookies and no third-party analytics scripts.

Email we send

Subscribers get a welcome email and the daily digest. Existing pilot users may receive reminders about their remaining access. Each one carries a working one-click unsubscribe, and the digest can be switched off from the top of your feed. Report buyers get the report itself and nothing else.

Separately, we sometimes write to contractors whose businesses appear in public permit records — one email at a time, from tommy@pingpermit.com, never through the product's own lists. Reply with a word and it stops; the address then lives only on a do-not-contact list.

Mail leaves through Google Workspace on our behalf.

Permit records are public

Everything in a report or in the feed comes from a city's own published permit records. Where a city names the contractor, applicant or owner on a permit, that name appears as the city published it — we do not add to it, and we cannot change the city's record. If a page about you or your business is wrong, write to tommy@pingpermit.com and we will look at it with you.

Looking up an address sends that address to the city's data portal, because that is where the records live.

Who else sees your data

Stripe handles every payment. Render hosts the site and the database, in the United States. Google delivers our email. Each of those sees only what it needs to do its job. We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with anyone else.

How long we keep it, and your rights

We keep a signup while the pilot or subscription exists, and an order while its report link is live — the link is meant to keep working. Analytics events are kept as raw rows (a random id, a page, a time, a referring site) and carry no name or email; server request logs are kept briefly by our host.

Email tommy@pingpermit.com to see what we hold about you, correct it, or have it deleted. Unsubscribing from the digest is immediate and needs no email.