What Lintel keeps

No accounts. Lintel asks for no password and sends no email. A dashboard is a random 20-character link; the database keeps only a one-way hash of it, so a lost link cannot be recovered or sent again.

What a listing holds: what the lister types (the property's details, the address if they choose to show it, the description, the contact name, phone, email and website) and the photos they upload. A published listing, including the contact details the lister gave, is public: visitors see the contact details after pressing "Show contact details". Lintel shows the street address only when the lister chooses to.

Photos are re-saved as new JPEG files when they are uploaded, which removes the location (GPS), camera and other details stored inside them. Photos of a listing that is not live are not shown to anyone but its lister.

Deleting: deleting a listing or a dashboard removes it and its photos at once. Expired listings are deleted 90 days after they end. Drafts not saved for 60 days are deleted with their photos, and listings hidden after reports are deleted 90 days after they were last changed. Dashboards not opened for a year are deleted with everything in them. Nightly database backups are kept for 14 days; the copies made when the site itself is updated are kept, on the server and at WeldonPC, until ten newer ones replace them. WeldonPC also keeps its own backups of the whole server, so deleted data can stay in those until they are replaced.

Reports keep the reason and details you give, and a salted one-way code made from your address so one connection cannot report a listing twice. They are deleted with the listing.

Cookies: one security cookie (__Host-lt_csrf) on pages that have a form. Nothing else.

Addresses: to limit abuse, Lintel counts requests per address per day as a salted one-way hash, kept for three days. The web server keeps standard access logs. Because a dashboard link is part of the page address, those access logs record the address of every page, dashboard links included, as on any website; they stay on the server and only WeldonPC can read them. Your browser's history keeps the link too, so do not open your dashboard on a shared computer. Dashboard pages ask your browser not to send their address to anything they load, so the private links do not end up in other logs.

No trackers: no tracking cookies, no analytics services, no maps and no outside fonts. Listing pages count page views as a plain number for their lister. The only thing that loads from another site is one banner ad on some public pages, described below.

Payments: not switched on yet. When they are, PayPal handles them; Lintel will not see card numbers.

Advertising

The home page, the listings search, pricing, about, fair housing and staying-safe pages show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company behind Lintel. For now the ads are for WeldonPC's own services. Listing pages, dashboards, editors, report forms, this page and the terms never show an ad or load anything from adengine.us.

To show an ad, your browser loads a script from adengine.us, asks it for one banner, loads the banner image, and reports once that the page was viewed and once that the banner was shown. Like any website, adengine.us receives your IP address, your browser type and the address of this site with those requests: the site's address only, never the page's.

• No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
• How your IP address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your IP address in a location database kept on its own server (nothing is sent to anyone else), so that ads meant for one area are shown only there. It also uses the address to count each ad view or click only once and to leave out robots and WeldonPC's own office traffic. The address is not stored with the counts; the temporary entries made from it expire within six hours and are cleared from the server within two days.
• What is kept. Daily totals only: page views for this site, and views and clicks for each ad. The adengine.us web server also keeps a standard access log (IP address, time, address requested, referring site, browser) for security; it is deleted on a rolling schedule.
• Clicking an ad passes through adengine.us, which counts the click, and then opens the advertiser's site, which has its own privacy policy.
• Nothing about you is sold or shared.