Privacy Policy

Effective August 8, 2026

This policy explains what WaterDamageIQ (“WaterDamageIQ,” “we,” “us”) collects when you use waterdamageiq.com, what we do with it, who else sees it, and how to get rid of it. It applies to the website and everything reachable from it.

Plain version, before the detail: we keep what you give us, we use it to run and improve this product, and we do not hand your personal information to any professional, contractor, adjuster, or anyone else unless you explicitly ask us to. That is a real commitment, and the rest of this page is written so you can hold us to it.

1. What we collect

Information you give us

• Your description of what happened — the free text you type at the start.
• Photos and files you upload, including any metadata embedded in them by your camera or phone (which can include the time the photo was taken and, on some devices, GPS coordinates).
• Property details — the address of the damaged property, home type, approximate age, number of stories.
• Answers to the assessment questions, including safety answers and anything you type into a free-response field.
• Contact information — name, email address, phone number — when you ask us to send you a report or connect you with a professional.
• Insurance information, including your declarations page if you choose to upload one. That document typically contains your policy number, carrier, named insured, coverage limits, and deductibles.

You are never required to create an account to use the assessment, and the assessment itself is anonymous until you choose to give us an email address.

Information collected automatically

• Usage and device data — pages viewed, time on page, referring page, browser and operating system, approximate location derived from IP address, and similar analytics data.
• Advertising click identifiers — when you arrive from an ad, the advertising platform appends an identifier to the link (Google uses gclid, gbraid, or wbraid; Microsoft uses msclkid; Meta uses fbclid). We store it so we can tell which advertising actually produced a homeowner we helped.
• Cookies and similar technologies — see section 6.

Information from others

Advertising and analytics platforms give us aggregate performance data about the ads that brought you here. Address autocomplete is powered by a third-party mapping service. If a professional you asked us to connect you with tells us what happened with your claim or repair, we record that too.

2. How we use it

We use the information above to:

• Produce your assessment, cost range, incident report, and preparation guidance;
• Store your report and let you return to it or share it;
• Connect you with a professional when you ask us to, and follow up with you about that connection;
• Send you the emails you asked for, plus service messages about your incident (for example, that your report is ready or that you left the assessment unfinished);
• Send you marketing about our own products and services, which you can stop at any time with the unsubscribe link;
• Build, test, evaluate, and improve the product — including our assessment prompts, question logic, severity scoring, repair-scope extraction, regional cost data, and pricing models;
• Measure and improve our advertising, including working out which campaigns, keywords, and channels produce homeowners we can actually help;
• Detect and prevent fraud, abuse, and security incidents, and enforce our Terms of Service;
• Comply with law and respond to lawful requests.

3. Damage data, models, and aggregate insight

This section matters, so it gets its own heading rather than a clause buried in the last one.

We use the content you submit — descriptions, photos, answers, assessments, and outcomes — to develop and improve our own products. That includes tuning how we read damage photos, calibrating what repairs cost in your region, evaluating whether our severity ratings were right, and developing new features and models. Your uploads are the only way this product gets better at the thing it exists to do.

We create de-identified and aggregated data from what you submit, and that data is ours. De-identified means we have removed the identifiers that reasonably link it to you or your property — no name, no contact details, no street address, no policy number. Aggregated means it is combined with data from other incidents. We may retain, analyze, publish, and license de-identified and aggregated data indefinitely and for any lawful purpose, including research, benchmarks, and industry reporting about water damage frequency, severity, and repair costs. We maintain de-identified data in de-identified form and will not attempt to re-identify it. Because it is no longer personal information, this data is not affected by a deletion request.

Third-party AI providers process your content on our behalf. Reading your photos and generating your assessment requires sending that content to AI model providers we contract with. We direct those providers to process it only to deliver the service to us. We do not control, and this policy does not speak for, their own independent practices; we choose providers whose terms are consistent with this section.

4. When we share your information

With professionals — only when you ask

Your incident report, photos, insurance information, and contact details are shared with a public adjuster, claims professional, or mitigation or restoration contractor only after you check the consent box asking us to connect you. We record the exact wording you agreed to and the time you agreed to it. If you never ask to be connected, no professional ever receives your information.

We are compensated by the professionals we connect you with. Those professionals pay us a fee for each homeowner introduction. That is how this product is free for you. It also means you should evaluate any professional we introduce on their own merits — read section 6 of the Terms of Service, which explains what that relationship is and is not.

A request for documentation guidance only — the option whose consent text says your information is not shared with any third party — is not an introduction, and your information is not shared with any professional under it.

With service providers

We use vendors to run the product: cloud hosting and application delivery, database and file storage, AI model providers, email delivery, address autocomplete, analytics, and advertising measurement. They receive only what they need to perform their function and are bound by contract to use it only for that purpose.

For legal and safety reasons

We share information when we believe in good faith that it is required by law, subpoena, or legal process; necessary to investigate suspected fraud or abuse; or necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of any person.

In a business transfer

If we are acquired, merged, reorganized, or sell substantially all of our assets, information covered by this policy may transfer to the successor as part of that transaction. The successor remains bound by this policy for information collected before the transfer unless you are given notice and a chance to object.

What we do not do

We do not sell your photos, address, contact information, or insurance documents to data brokers, list sellers, or anyone else who wants to market to you. We do not post your report publicly. We do not use your photos in advertising without asking you first.

5. Advertising, analytics, and cookies

We use cookies and similar technologies for three things:

• Necessary — keeping you signed into your own incident, remembering where you are in the assessment, and security. These cannot be turned off without breaking the product.
• Analytics — Google Analytics 4, so we can see where people get stuck. We configure it not to receive your name, email, phone number, street address, photos, or the text you typed.
• Advertising measurement — a first-party cookie recording which channel you arrived from, plus the ad click identifier described in section 1, so we can measure and improve our campaigns.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. Blocking the necessary ones will break the assessment flow. You can opt out of Google Analytics across all sites with Google’s browser add-on, and manage Google’s ad personalization at My Ad Center.

Global Privacy Control. We treat a GPC signal from your browser as a valid request to opt out of any sharing of personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising.

6. How long we keep it, and how to delete it

We keep your incident, photos, and report for as long as your incident is active and for a reasonable period afterward, so the report stays available at its link and so we can support you if a claim drags on.

Deletion is real. When you delete an incident, we remove the underlying photo and document files from storage — not just the database rows that point at them. Deleted files are not recoverable, including by us.

Two things survive a deletion request, as described in section 3 and allowed by law: de-identified and aggregated data, which is no longer personal information; and records we are required to retain for legal, tax, accounting, fraud-prevention, or dispute-resolution purposes.

To delete an incident, use the deletion link in your account or email privacy@waterdamageiq.com.

7. Your rights and choices

Wherever you live in the United States, you can ask us to:

• Tell you what personal information we hold about you;
• Give you a copy of it in a portable format;
• Correct it if it is wrong;
• Delete it;
• Stop sharing it for cross-context behavioral advertising;
• Stop sending you marketing email.

Email privacy@waterdamageiq.com to exercise any of these. We will verify that the request is really coming from you — usually by confirming control of the email address attached to the incident — and respond within the time the applicable law allows. You may use an authorized agent. We will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights.

Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas, and other states with comprehensive privacy laws have the rights listed above under their own state statutes, including the right to appeal a refusal. To appeal, reply to our response with the word “appeal” and we will re-review it and explain the outcome in writing.

On “selling.” We do not sell personal information for money in the ordinary sense of the word. When you ask us to connect you with a professional, we transfer your information at your direction and we are paid for that introduction; we disclose this plainly in section 4 and it only ever happens on your explicit instruction. Our use of advertising and analytics technologies may constitute “sharing” for cross-context behavioral advertising under California law. You may opt out of that by emailing us, by sending a GPC signal, or by blocking the relevant cookies.

8. Security

Photos and insurance documents are held in private storage and served only over short-lived signed links. Access to homeowner data is restricted to the people who operate this service. We use encryption in transit, and our database refuses anonymous access outright.

No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee that a determined attacker will never succeed. If a breach affects your information, we will notify you as required by law.

Your incident report link is unguessable but public to anyone holding it. Treat it like a document you emailed: forward it to the people who need it, and understand that they can forward it on.

9. Children

This service is for adults. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has given us information, email privacy@waterdamageiq.com and we will delete it.

10. Where we operate

We operate in the United States and this service is intended for United States residents only. Information is stored and processed in the United States. If you access the site from elsewhere, you are sending your information to the United States, where privacy laws differ from those in your country.

11. Changes

We may update this policy. When we do, we will change the effective date at the top. If a change materially reduces your rights or materially expands how we use information we already collected from you, we will give you notice — by email if we have your address, or by a notice on the site — before it takes effect.

12. Contact

Privacy questions and requests: privacy@waterdamageiq.com
Everything else: reports@waterdamageiq.com
WaterDamageIQ