PermitScope Privacy Policy

Effective 2026-09-03 · PermitScope · permitscope.dev · Questions, corrections, or deletion requests: [email protected]

1. What we collect, and where it comes from

Everything below originates from public records or from businesses' own published contact information. None of it is collected from you directly unless you email us or buy something.

• Building-permit records. Permit number, issue date, permit type, work description, declared job value, property address, the contractor named on the permit, and (where the issuing city publishes it) the property owner's name and mailing address. Obtained from municipal open-data portals and official public report exports.
• Property and parcel records. Assessment values, parcel identifiers, and normalized addresses from county and municipal assessor data.
• Contractor business contact information. Business name, business email address, business phone, and business mailing address, from state and municipal license lists, trade association directories, and businesses' own websites.
• Email correspondence. If you reply to us, we store the sending address, subject, and an excerpt of the message so we can route it, honour an opt-out, and avoid contacting you again in error.
• Purchase records. If you buy a report we store the payment processor's session identifier, the amount, the window purchased, and the delivery status.

2. What we do not collect

• No payment card details. Card data is entered on Stripe's own checkout and never reaches our servers. See Stripe's privacy policy.
• No tracking cookies, analytics, pixels, or advertising networks on any public page. The only cookie this site can set is a signed session cookie for the operator's own administrative login, which a visitor never receives.
• No consumer credit, income, or financial information, and no inferences about any individual's circumstances.
• No data purchased from data brokers, and no personal information sold to anyone.

3. Not a consumer report

PermitScope reports are not consumer reports under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (15 U.S.C. § 1681). They must not be used, in whole or in part, to determine any person's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, housing or tenancy, or for any other "permissible purpose" under 15 U.S.C. § 1681b. We are not a consumer reporting agency. Our analyses describe properties and businesses, never a person's characteristics or circumstances.

4. How we use it

• To compile market analyses describing permit activity by business, including counts, rank, market share, and typical job values.
• To identify and contact contracting businesses who may want those analyses.
• To fulfil and support purchases, and to keep records required for accounting and dispute resolution.
• To honour opt-outs and suppression requests.

We do not use this information to make automated decisions about any individual, and we do not profile consumers.

5. Who we share it with

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Information reaches third parties only in these cases:

• Stripe, to process a payment you initiate.
• Our email provider, to deliver messages you receive or send us.
• Buyers of a report, who receive the analysis they purchased. Buyers are contractually forbidden from reselling it, incorporating it into a distributed data product, or using it for any FCRA purpose, see the Terms of Sale.
• When legally required, in response to lawful process.

6. Marketing email

Our messages are commercial email governed by the CAN-SPAM Act. Every one carries our physical postal address, a working one-click unsubscribe header, and a plain-text opt-out instruction. Replying STOP suppresses your address permanently across the whole system; we keep the address on a suppression list precisely so we do not contact it again, which is the one case where deleting a record would make things worse.

We make no claim of prior express consent for telephone contact, and we do not place calls or send text messages.

7. Your choices

Wherever you live, you may ask us to:

• See what we hold about you or your business.
• Correct anything inaccurate.
• Delete it, subject to the suppression-list exception above and to records we must retain for tax or dispute purposes.
• Stop receiving email, immediately and permanently.

Write to [email protected]. We action requests within 30 days and will tell you if we need longer. We do not charge for this and will not treat you differently for asking.

Note on public records: where information originated in a government record, we can remove it from our systems, but the underlying public record remains published by the agency that created it and is outside our control.

8. Retention

Permit and property records are retained while they remain useful for historical market analysis, since the product is explicitly a record over time. Business contact information is retained until you ask us to remove it or it proves undeliverable. Suppression entries are retained indefinitely by design. Purchase records are retained as long as tax and dispute-resolution requirements demand.

9. Security

Data is held on access-controlled infrastructure, transmitted over encrypted connections, and reachable administratively only through an authenticated session. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.

10. Children

This is a business-to-business service. It is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.

11. Where we operate

PermitScope currently compiles records for Wisconsin jurisdictions only, and is operated from the United States. If that changes, this page will be updated before the change takes effect.

12. Changes

If we change this policy we will update the effective date above. Material changes affecting how we use information already collected will be notified to affected contacts by email.

PermitScope · [email protected] · Terms of Sale