Privacy Policy

The Short Version

If you read nothing else, read this. Everything below is the same thing said carefully.

• There are no accounts. You cannot create one. We have no users, only readers.
• There is one analytics tool, and it is Google Analytics. It counts page views and a short list of actions (an address was checked, a table was filtered, a CSV was downloaded) so we can tell which parts of this site are worth maintaining. It sets cookies. We turned off Google's advertising features: no cross-device tracking, no remarketing audiences, no ad personalisation, and your IP address is truncated before it is stored.
• The analytics never receives an address you type. Not the address, not the search-box contents, not coordinates, not a parcel id. Two things enforce that in code rather than by good intentions: events carry only an allowlist of fields (the town already in the page URL, and a category such as "matched" or "no match"), and the site's own navigation carries what you typed inside your browser rather than in the web address. Where a link somebody shared does carry an address in its URL, that parameter is stripped from both the page address and the referring address before the analytics ever sees either.
• There is no pixel, heatmap, session recorder or fingerprinting. Nothing here replays your session or profiles your device.
• There is no advertising network. Sponsorships are fixed slots written into the site's own files. No third party is called to fill them, so no third party watches you read.
• We never see the address you check. That lookup runs inside your browser and talks directly to state and federal map services. It does not pass through us.
• We sell nothing about you. Not to advertisers, not to agents, not to lenders, not to anyone. There is no lead generation on this site and there never will be.

Who We Are and What We Publish

RE413 publishes at https://www.re413.com under the name Property Data for Western Massachusetts. It is an independent publication covering the 101 towns of Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin and Berkshire counties in Western Massachusetts. 413 is the area code those four counties share.

What we do is narrow and worth stating plainly, because it explains why this policy is so short. We take records that government bodies already publish, we join them together, and we present them per town and per address in language a person can read. We are a publisher of public information. We are not a broker, not an agent, not a lender, not a marketplace, and not a lead service. Nothing is listed for sale here and no transaction happens here.

The site is paid for by clearly labelled sponsorships. That is the whole business model. There are no subscriptions, no paywalls, no logins, and nothing about you is part of what we sell. A sponsor buys a labelled slot beside independent facts, and never influence over a number.

What We Do Not Collect

This list is deliberate and it is enforced by how the site is built rather than by policy alone. The site is a set of pre-built static pages. Most of what a normal website uses to watch people simply is not present in the code.

• No account, profile, username, or password, because there is nothing to sign in to.
• Almost no browser storage of our own. The one exception is small and worth stating exactly: when a search box routes you to a town's checker, the address you typed rides along in your browser's sessionStorage for that single hop, precisely so it never has to appear in the web address, and the destination page deletes it on arrival. It is never sent anywhere. The analytics tool sets its own cookies, described above.
• No advertising or social media pixels, trackers, or conversion tags. Google's advertising features are switched off in our configuration.
• The analytics does record which pages are visited, along with the referring site and any campaign tags in the web address, which is ordinary traffic measurement. The address-check parameters are removed from both the page address and the referring address before either is recorded.
• No fingerprinting of your device, canvas, fonts, or hardware.
• No cross-site or cross-device tracking, and no data broker relationships.
• No third-party fonts. The typefaces are served from this site's own domain, so no font provider is told what you read.
• No phone number and no postal address, ever. An email address only if you hand it to us yourself, in one of exactly two places: the weekly email signup and the contact form. Both are described in their own sections below.
• No payment information, because nothing is sold to readers.

You do not need to trust that list. Open your browser's developer tools on any page here and look at the network and storage panels yourself.

What Is Recorded Automatically

One thing is unavoidable, and pretending otherwise would be the sort of dishonesty this whole site exists against. Any web server records the requests it answers.

This site is hosted by Vercel Inc., which serves the pages and keeps ordinary operational logs. Those logs can include your IP address, the page you asked for, the time you asked, your browser's user agent string, and the referring page if your browser sent one. That information is used to serve the site, to keep it up, and to absorb attacks. It is not used to build a profile of you, it is not joined to anything else, and we do not query it to see what any individual reads.

Vercel acts as our hosting provider and processes that data on our behalf under its own terms and security programme. We do not enable Vercel's analytics or audience products.

Requests for the data files behind the pages are logged the same ordinary way.

The Address Check, and Why We Never See Your Address

This is the most important section on the page, and it is good news, so it is worth understanding rather than skimming.

When you type an address into this site, that address is not sent to us. The lookup is a small program that runs inside your own browser. Your browser contacts the Commonwealth's and the federal government's public map services directly and assembles the answer on your screen. When a search box routes you from one page of this site to another, the address travels inside your browser too, never in the web address, so it does not appear in our host's request logs. The address never reaches a server we control, and there is no record of it for us to keep, lose, sell, or be compelled to hand over.

One honest edge worth naming: a checker page can also be opened from a link that carries an address in its URL, the kind you make yourself by bookmarking or sharing a search. Opening any URL sends that URL to the host that serves it, ours included, as described under "What Is Recorded Automatically". The page removes the address from the web address bar the moment it loads, and the analytics never records it, but the one arrival request is what any shared link makes anywhere on the web.

The honest trade is this. Because your browser speaks to those services directly, those services see the request, including the address or coordinates being asked about and the IP address asking. They are government bodies and their contractors, each with its own privacy practices, and we do not control them. Here is every one of them and exactly what it is asked for.

Nothing you type outlives the lookup: the single-hop handoff entry is deleted when the destination page reads it, and nothing is sent anywhere else. If you would rather no third party saw the lookup at all, do not use the address check. Every town page works without it, and none of the reading you do on this site requires it.

Maps and Aerial Imagery

Pages that draw a map or show aerial photography load those image tiles from the mapping services named above. As with any image on any website, the service providing it can see the IP address requesting it and roughly which area of the map is being viewed. This is how web maps work everywhere. We use the Commonwealth's own imagery and public tile services rather than a commercial mapping product that would have a commercial interest in watching you.

Sponsorship and Advertising

Advertising on this site works the way it worked in a newspaper, and that is a privacy decision as much as an editorial one.

• Sponsorships are written into the site's own files and built into the page. No ad server is contacted when you load a page.
• No sponsor receives any information about you. Not your IP address, not what you read, not what you searched, not whether you are in the market for anything.
• There is no retargeting, no audience segment, no lookalike modelling, and no conversion tracking.
• A slot is chosen by the subject of the page and the town it covers, never by anything about the person reading it.
• If you click a sponsor's link you leave this site, and what happens next is governed by that company's own privacy policy.
• Sponsors never see, influence, or approve a figure. The independent number renders first and unaltered.

Email

Two forms on this site accept an email address, and they are the only two ways this site ever holds one.

The weekly email. The signup form on This Week takes the address you give it and nothing else. Joining is double opt-in: we send a confirmation request to that address, and you are only subscribed after you confirm from your own inbox. The list is used for that one email and for nothing else. It is held and sent through Resend, an email delivery provider acting as our processor. Every issue carries a working one-click unsubscribe, honoured immediately, and we never sell, rent, share, or otherwise disclose the list. An address that is never confirmed is not written to, and you can ask for it to be removed entirely through the contact form.

The contact form. What you write, the name you sign it with if any, and the address you give for a reply are emailed to us so we can answer you, and are kept for as long as it takes to deal with and a reasonable period after. They join no list and feed no marketing.

Other People's Privacy, Which We Also Take Seriously

A privacy policy usually covers only the reader. This one covers the people the data is about, because a site built on property records can harm them just as easily.

Massachusetts property records name owners, and that is public record. We still do not publish those names. Republishing them at scale, indexed and searchable, is a different act from their sitting in a registry, and it is exactly the exposure people are entitled to be spared. The exclusion is enforced in code rather than by good intentions: the field list refuses owner fields outright, a test proves it, and the release gate walks every published data file before anything ships, failing the build on owner fields, on contact-shaped fields, and on anything shaped like a personal email address or phone number. Government registers we republish are stripped of their administrative-contact blocks for the same reason: a register of water systems or facilities ships as systems and facilities, never as the people who answer their phones.

For the same reason we publish no data on race, ethnicity, ancestry, disability or family composition, even though those tables are free and public. We publish no school ratings and no town rankings. Those figures are well documented vehicles for steering people toward or away from neighbourhoods, and the Fair Housing Act exists because that causes real harm. Nothing we set out to do requires them.

If you own property in Western Massachusetts and something about your parcel appears here that you believe should not, write to us at the contact form and we will look at it properly. Note that we cannot change the underlying public record, which is held by your town's assessor and the Commonwealth, but we can and will look at what we publish.

Where Our Data Comes From

Everything published here is drawn from records that government bodies already make public. We hold no private database and buy no proprietary feed. The main sources are the Massachusetts Department of Revenue's Division of Local Services, MassGIS and the Commonwealth's own map services, the U.S. Census Bureau including the American Community Survey, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey.

Every figure on the site names its source and the date it was retrieved, on the page where it appears. The full list, with the quirks and caveats of each source, is at Sources and Method, and the machine-readable catalogue is at The Data Catalogue. We do not use MLS or IDX feeds, and we do not take data from Zillow, Redfin, or Realtor.com.

Every Third Party That Receives Anything

The complete list. If a company is not named here, it gets nothing from this site.

No advertising network, no data broker, no social platform, no customer-data platform, and no sponsor receives anything about you. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

Your Rights

Various laws give people rights over personal information held about them. Those rights are easy for us to honour, because in almost every case we hold nothing to which they could attach. We state our position plainly rather than reciting statutes.

Everything We Hold, in One Table

What We Never Collect

Stated as a list because the absences are the point, and because a policy that only describes what it does collect leaves you guessing about the rest. Beyond an email address you hand us yourself and whatever you choose to write to us, we hold no name, no postal address, no telephone number, no date of birth, no government identifier, no payment or financial account information, no precise geolocation, no biometric or health information, no information about your race, ethnicity, religion, union membership, sexual orientation, immigration status or philosophical beliefs, and no profile of you built from anywhere else.

We process no sensitive personal information as the California statute defines it, and we run no automated decision-making or profiling that produces any effect on anybody. There is no algorithm here that decides anything about a reader, because there is no reader record for one to run against.

We Do Not Sell or Share Personal Information

Not for money and not for anything else of value. We do not share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, as that phrase is used in the California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Texas, Oregon and Montana privacy statutes and their equivalents. We have never done so and there is no arrangement under which we could: no advertising network, data broker, social platform or exchange receives anything from this site, and our advertisers receive nothing about any reader at all.

This is architectural rather than a policy we maintain. The advertisement on a page is a line of text and an image we host ourselves, with no script, no pixel and no beacon, and the site's content security policy refuses those outright, so an attempt to add one would fail to load rather than quietly succeed.

If You Are in California

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended, you have rights to know, to delete, to correct, and to opt out of sale or sharing. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined, we have never done so, and we do not use personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising. We collect no categories of personal information beyond the server logs described above, and we do not process sensitive personal information. You will not be discriminated against for exercising any right, which is straightforward here because there is nothing to withhold.

If You Are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom

Where the General Data Protection Regulation applies, our lawful basis for processing server logs is legitimate interest, specifically the interest in delivering the site reliably and defending it against abuse. You have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection, and a right to complain to your supervisory authority. Because logs are not tied to an identity by us, a request may require you to provide the information needed to locate any record at all, and we may be unable to identify you, which we will tell you honestly rather than pretending otherwise.

If You Are in Another US State With a Privacy Law

Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Montana, Delaware, Iowa, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Tennessee, Minnesota, Maryland and the states that follow them give broadly the same rights: to confirm whether we process your personal information, to access it, to correct it, to delete it, to obtain a portable copy, and to opt out of targeted advertising, sale and profiling.

We honour all of them, and the honest position is that most have nothing to operate on: there is no sale, no targeted advertising and no profiling here to opt out of. Where a state gives a right to appeal a refused request, you may appeal through the same contact form and we will answer in writing with our reasoning. If we still refuse, you may complain to your state attorney general, and we will tell you how.

How to Exercise Any of This

Write to the contact form, say which right you are exercising and give us something to search on, such as the email address you subscribed with. We will acknowledge within a few days and answer within the period your law allows, which is forty-five days in most US states and one month under the GDPR, extendable once where a request is genuinely complex.

• Verification. We will ask only for what is needed to be confident it is your information, and never more. Since we hold almost nothing, this is usually the address a request came from.
• Authorised agents. Somebody may act for you if you give them written permission and we can confirm it with you.
• We may not be able to find you. Request logs are not tied by us to any identity. If we cannot connect a record to you, we will say so plainly rather than inventing a match, and we will not collect more information in order to try.
• No charge, and no penalty. Requests are free unless one is genuinely excessive or repetitive, and exercising a right never changes what the site does for you. Everything here is free to everybody and there is nothing to withhold.

Everyone

Wherever you are, you may write to the contact form and ask what we hold about you. The answer will almost certainly be nothing, and we will say so specifically rather than in general terms.

Where Information Is Processed

This site is published from the United States and its host serves it from a global network of servers, so a request from you is answered by whichever location is nearest. Our host, our analytics provider and our email provider are all United States companies and may process information in the United States and elsewhere.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, that means information can be transferred outside your region. Where those transfers happen they rely on the standard contractual clauses our providers publish and on the data protection frameworks they participate in. Given how little is involved, in most cases the only thing crossing a border is the ordinary record of a page request.

If Something Went Wrong

A promise about security is worth very little without a plan for the day it fails, so here is ours. If we learn of a breach affecting personal information we hold, we will investigate immediately, tell the people affected and the regulators who must be told within the periods the law requires, describe what happened in plain words rather than in a form letter, and say what we changed so it does not recur.

The reason we can say that without hedging is that the exposure is small by design. There is no reader database, no account system, no password to steal and no stored address history. The most sensitive thing anybody could take from us is a list of email addresses belonging to people who wanted three numbers on a Thursday.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control

We honour Global Privacy Control. When your browser sends a GPC signal we do not load the analytics tag at all: no measurement cookie is set and no event is sent. We do not act on a Do Not Track header, which has no agreed meaning and which the industry abandoned years ago. If you would rather not be counted and your browser does not send GPC, any content blocker will stop the tag, and nothing on this site depends on it working. Neither signal changes anything else about how you are treated here, because nothing else here watches you.

Children

This site is intended for adults making decisions about property. It is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. The only forms on the site are the weekly email signup and the contact form, and neither is aimed at or interesting to a child. If you believe a child has provided information to us, write to the contact form and we will delete it.

Retention and Security

Because we collect almost nothing, there is almost nothing to retain. Hosting logs are kept by our host for its own limited operational period and are not archived by us. Any correspondence you send us is kept for as long as it takes to deal with it and a reasonable period after.

The site is served over HTTPS. The strongest security measure here is structural rather than technical: a database that does not exist cannot be breached, and an address that never reaches us cannot be taken from us. That is a large part of why the site is built the way it is.

Beyond that, the measures worth naming because they are checkable rather than claimed: every page is served over HTTPS with strict transport security; a content security policy names the exact hosts a page may load from, which are the government map services listed above and Google's analytics, and refuses every other third party script, pixel and beacon, which is why no advertiser can observe a reader even in principle; the site is static, so there is no application server to compromise and no query for anybody to inject into; and there is no login anywhere, which removes the single most common way a reader's information is lost.

No system is perfect and we will not pretend otherwise. If you find a security problem here, please tell us through the contact form before telling anyone else, give us a reasonable chance to fix it, and we will not pursue anybody who reports one in good faith and does not access or alter other people's information in the process.

Links to Other Sites

We link to town websites, state agencies, sponsors, and the live data pages of services such as the U.S. Geological Survey's river gauges. Once you follow a link you are on someone else's site under someone else's policy, and we have no control over and take no responsibility for what they do.

Changes to This Policy

If what the site does changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top changes too. We treat that as a release requirement rather than a courtesy: a change to what is collected and a change to this page belong in the same piece of work. We will not quietly begin collecting something and describe it later.

Contact

Questions about privacy, requests about your information, or a concern about what we publish: the contact form. Advertising enquiries go to the contact form. We read everything sent to both.

For how we build what we publish, see About RE413 and Sources and Method. For the rules on using the site and the limits of what our figures mean, see the Terms of Use.