Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect

Property and ownership data: Sourced entirely from Wake County public real estate records. This is public information and is not personal data belonging to platform users.

Review content: When you submit a review, we collect the ratings, flags, tenancy dates, and written text you provide. This content is displayed publicly on the platform.

Email address (verification only): When you submit a review, we ask for an email address to verify you are a real person and to prevent duplicate or fraudulent reviews.

2. How We Handle Your Email Address

We do not retain your email address in our database. Here is precisely what happens when you submit a review:

• You provide your email address so we can send you a one-time verification code
• Your email is transmitted to Resend, our email delivery provider, so they can deliver the verification code to your inbox. Resend retains recipient email addresses and delivery metadata in their own systems as part of standard email operations (see Section 5 for details)
• On our servers, your email exists only in memory during the brief verification request — it is never written to our permanent database
• Once you enter the correct verification code, we generate a one-way cryptographic hash of your email address (SHA-256 with a private salt)
• We store only this hash, solely to prevent the same person from submitting multiple reviews for the same property
• The plaintext email address is discarded from our own systems at the end of the verification request

The hash we store cannot be reversed to reveal your email address. This means that within our own database, we cannot identify who submitted a specific review, even if compelled to look. If someone asks us "who wrote review X?" our own systems have no way to answer.

We want to be transparent that Resend, as our email delivery provider, does have access to the email addresses we send verification codes to. We do not access this information for any purpose other than troubleshooting delivery failures. See Section 5 for more detail on how Resend handles this data.

3. How We Use the Hash

The email hash is used only to enforce a "one review per property" limit — when someone attempts to submit a review, we hash their entered email and check whether that hash already exists for that property. It is not used for marketing, is never sold, cannot be linked back to your identity, and is not shared with any third party.

4. Cookies and Analytics

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5. Third-Party Services

We use the following third-party services to operate the platform. These providers are not authorized to use data from our platform for any purpose beyond delivering their service to us.

• Supabase — database hosting for property and review data. Supabase does not receive your plaintext email address.
• Vercel — website hosting. Vercel does not process your review content or email address beyond routine web request handling.
• Upstash — temporary storage for verification codes, keyed by email hash rather than email address. Codes auto-delete after 5 minutes.
• Resend — delivers verification emails to your inbox. To do this, Resend receives and retains your plaintext email address along with delivery metadata (timestamps, delivery status, bounce information) in their own systems. This is standard for any transactional email service. Resend's retention is governed by their own privacy policy, available at https://resend.com/legal/privacy-policy. We do not access this data except for occasional troubleshooting of delivery failures.

We have chosen Resend because they are an established transactional email provider that follows industry-standard security and privacy practices. If email provider visibility is a concern for you, please note that any email you send or receive over the internet is visible to at least one email provider on each side of the transaction — this is a limitation of email as a technology, not something specific to our platform.

6. Public Records Disclaimer

Property ownership information displayed on this platform originates from Wake County public real estate records and is publicly available independent of this platform. We are not responsible for inaccuracies in the underlying public data.

7. User-Submitted Content

Reviews are opinions submitted by platform users based on their personal experiences. We do not independently verify the factual accuracy of review content beyond confirming the submitter completed email verification. See our Terms of Service for more information.

8. Data Security

We use industry-standard practices to protect the limited data we do retain, including:

• Row Level Security on our database restricting direct write access
• No plaintext email storage
• Server-side validation for all data submissions

9. Your Rights

Because we do not retain personally identifiable information tied to reviews, there is generally no personal data for us to provide, correct, or delete upon request. If you have concerns about a specific review, please contact us at contact@empowertenants.com.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy as the platform evolves. Material changes will be reflected with an updated "Last updated" date.

11. Contact

Questions about this policy can be directed to: contact@empowertenants.com