Privacy Policy
This site asks for a fair amount of information, and some of it is genuinely personal: what you earn, what you owe on your house, how old you are. You should know exactly why it is asked for, where it goes, and how to get it back or delete it. That is what this page is for. It is written to be read, not to be skipped.
The short version. We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it with data brokers. What you enter in your account is visible to you and to us, and to nobody else except service providers described below when needed to operate Watchdog or measure campaigns, unless you turn that off. Property tax records shown on this site are public records published by the State of New Jersey and are not about you. You can download or delete everything we hold at any time through Watchdog Privacy Support.
On this page
- 1. Who we are
- 2. What we collect
- 3. Financial profile information and consent
- 4. Why we collect it
- 5. Public property records
- 6. Who we share it with
- 7. What we do not do
- 8. Cookies and tracking
- 9. Your rights
- 10. How long we keep it
- 11. Security
- 12. Children and teens
- 13. Not a consumer report
- 14. Paid features
- 15. Things not built yet
- 16. Changes
- 17. Contact
1. Who we are
Watchdog Property Info, available at WatchdogIndex.com, is owned and operated by Watchdog Property Info LLC, a New Jersey limited liability company. In privacy law terms we are the controller of the information described here, which means we decide what is collected and why.
Real estate brokerage services and advertisers on this site, including Greentree Mortgage, an HMA Company, are separate businesses. Clicking their links takes you to them, and what happens there is governed by their own privacy policies, not this one.
2. What we collect
Nothing in the account or profile sections is required. You can use the property lookup, the calculators and the estimators without giving us anything at all.
| Category | What it includes | How we get it |
|---|---|---|
| Account | Name, email address, profile photo | From Google when you sign in with it, or from you when you use an emailed sign in link |
| Contact | Name, email, phone, your message, the property you asked about | You, when you submit a form or request a proposal |
| Saved properties | Address, block and lot, parcel ID, assessment, tax figures, your notes, and a history of how those figures changed over time | You, when you claim a home or add one to a watchlist |
| Profile, optional | Household size, dependents, filing status, birth year, income, mortgage balance and terms, escrow, insurance, credit range, veteran status, benefits you already claim, prior tax appeals, buying or selling plans, goals, and contact details for professionals you work with | Only what you type in. Every field can be left blank or cleared later |
| Ownership verification | A one time code we mail to a property address, and whether it was redeemed | Only if you ask to verify that you own a property |
| Technical | IP address, browser and device type, pages viewed, referring site, approximate location from your IP, campaign or referral information, privacy-preserving ad attribution identifiers, and anonymized recordings of how pages were used | Automatically, through analytics and optional measurement tools described in section 8 |
3. Financial profile information and consent
Some optional profile fields are personal financial details, including income, mortgage balance and terms, escrow and credit range. We treat those fields with extra care, but we do not describe every financial fact as statutory sensitive data under the New Jersey Data Privacy Act. The Act's sensitive financial-information category is narrower and includes financial account or access information that, together with required security or access credentials, could permit access to a consumer's financial account.
Watchdog does not ask for bank account numbers, card numbers, financial account passwords, security codes, Social Security numbers or government ID numbers. The ordinary profile figures we do ask about are still personal data when linked to your account, so they are optional and blank by default. Saving them authorizes us to use them only for the purposes explained in section 4. You can clear them later or ask us to delete them.
We use a data-protection assessment process for higher-risk personal-data uses and review new purposes, profiling and material connectors before expanding how account data is used. We also keep these profile fields separate from public property records and do not make them public or searchable.
Some benefit programs depend on income, age, household or other eligibility thresholds that can change over time. We ask for the information needed to answer the question you requested rather than treating the profile as a requirement to use the rest of the site.
4. Why we collect it
- To answer the question you asked. Estimating a benefit or screening a tax appeal needs your age, household and income, because those are what the statutes turn on.
- To keep track of your properties and show you how their assessments move over time.
- To respond to you when you ask for a valuation, a proposal, or an appeal review.
- To send you the alerts you chose, such as filing deadlines or a revaluation in your town. You control these in your profile.
- To improve the site and measure outreach, using aggregate product analytics and, unless you turn it off, conversion measurement that tells us whether a Watchdog campaign led to a registration, checkout or purchase.
- To meet legal and professional obligations, including real estate licensing recordkeeping.
We do not use your profile to make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you. The estimates on this site are informational, and a person reviews anything that turns into real advice.
5. Public property records
Most of what this site displays is not personal information at all. Assessments, tax bills, block and lot numbers, lot lines and recorded sales are public records published by the New Jersey Office of GIS and the Division of Taxation. They describe properties, not people.
We built it that way deliberately. Owner names are redacted from the public data under Daniel's Law, and we do not add them back. This site cannot be searched by a person's name and is not designed to identify who lives anywhere. We have no plans to change that.
When you look up an address, we record the property's public figures in an anonymous ledger so the site gets faster and can show assessment history over time. That record contains no information about you, not your identity, your IP address, or your session.
Ownership verification is the one place where a person is linked to a property, and only because you asked us to confirm it. That link stays inside your account. It is never published, never sold, and never made searchable.
7. What we do not do
- We do not sell your personal information, and never have.
- We do not share it with data brokers or people search sites.
- We do not use your Watchdog profile for targeted advertising or build advertising profiles from it.
- We do not publish owner names, or let this site be searched by a person's name.
- We do not sell or share the contact details of the professionals you list in your profile.
- We do not text or call you unless you asked us to.
Advertising displayed on Watchdog itself is fixed placement. Advertisers pay to appear; they do not receive your account information and cannot target you through us.
8. Cookies and tracking
We use cookies and similar technologies to keep you signed in, remember preferences, protect the site, measure product usage, and understand whether Watchdog campaigns lead to useful actions. Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity and OpenAI ad measurement are on by default. You can turn them off at any time with the Cookies link in the footer, and a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal keeps them off.
When a visit arrives with campaign information such as UTM parameters or a click identifier, we may remember the first and most recent campaign that brought the browser here. We use that info for Watchdog's own source and conversion measurement, not to sell an advertising profile.
ChatGPT ad measurement. On professional Watchdog pages, the OpenAI Ads Measurement Pixel can run unless you have turned off optional measurement. If a visit came from a ChatGPT ad, OpenAI can provide a privacy-preserving click reference (oppref) and browser reference (obref) that the Pixel stores in first-party cookies for attribution. We may measure important page views and the start of a checked checkout. After Stripe confirms a Founding Lifetime purchase, Watchdog can also send an order_created conversion from our server using the same event ID so duplicate browser/server events are counted once.
For a verified purchase, the server-side conversion is limited to the original OpenAI attribution references when available plus the purchase event details needed for measurement. Watchdog does not send account email, Watchdog user ID, or hashed account identifiers in this integration. Both browser and server conversion events are configured to opt out of future user-level personalization. The Conversions API credential stays on the server and is never exposed to the browser.
Microsoft Clarity records anonymized page sessions so we can see where the site is confusing. Clarity masks text entered into form fields by default, so your income and mortgage figures are not captured in those recordings.
You can reject or later disable optional measurement through Cookie preferences without losing core Watchdog functionality. Rejecting optional measurement stops future OpenAI measurement events and removes Watchdog-accessible OpenAI measurement cookies. Global Privacy Control. If your browser sends a GPC or similar universal opt out signal, we treat it as a valid request to opt out of any sale or targeted advertising, and we honor it automatically.
9. Your rights
If you live in New Jersey, the New Jersey Data Privacy Act gives you the right to:
- Know what personal data we hold about you
- Correct anything inaccurate
- Delete your data
- Take it with you in a portable, machine readable format
- Opt out of any sale, targeted advertising, or profiling
- Withdraw consent for sensitive data at any time
We extend these same rights to every visitor regardless of where you live, because drawing a line based on your address would be a strange thing to do.
Most of it you can do yourself. Your profile is editable at any time, saved properties can be removed with one click, and signing out ends the session. For anything else, submit a request through Watchdog Privacy Support and identify it as a privacy request. We respond within 45 days, and will tell you if we need longer, which the law allows in limited cases.
We will not charge you for a request, deny you service for making one, or give you a worse experience because of it. If we refuse a request we will explain why, and you may appeal by replying to that message. If you are still unsatisfied you can contact the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs.
10. How long we keep it
- Account and profile: until you delete your account, or after three years of inactivity, whichever comes first
- Saved properties: until you remove them or close your account
- Form submissions and correspondence: up to three years, or longer where real estate recordkeeping rules require it
- Verification codes: 30 days, then they expire
- Analytics and campaign measurement: according to each provider's applicable retention settings and policies
- The anonymous property ledger: kept indefinitely, because it contains only public property figures and no information about any person
11. Security
Accounts are protected by row level security, which means the database itself enforces that you can only ever read or write your own rows. That is not a setting in our code that could be bypassed; it is a rule inside the database. Connections use HTTPS. Sign in is handled by Supabase Auth, and we never see or store a password.
No system is perfectly secure, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. If we ever have a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you and the appropriate authorities as the law requires.
12. Children and teens
This site is meant for adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If we learn we have, we delete it.
For anyone we know to be between 13 and 17, we will not sell their data, use it for targeted advertising, or profile them, which New Jersey law requires consent for and we simply do not do at all.
13. Not a consumer report
This is important, so it gets its own section. Nothing on this site is a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and none of it may be used to make decisions about a person.
Specifically, you may not use this site or anything exported from it for tenant screening, employment screening, credit decisions, insurance underwriting, or any similar purpose. We are not a consumer reporting agency. The data here describes properties, not people, and using it to judge a person is both a violation of our terms and potentially of federal law.
The estimates, valuations and appeal screenings on this site are informational. They are not appraisals, not legal advice, and not tax advice. Confirm anything important with your municipal assessor, a licensed appraiser, an attorney, or your accountant before acting on it.
14. Paid features
Some Watchdog features require a paid plan or Founding Lifetime purchase. New Agent and Professional recurring plans and Founding Lifetime purchases use Stripe-hosted Checkout, and supported payment-method, invoice, plan and cancellation actions are handled through Stripe's Customer Portal where applicable. Watchdog does not see or store your full card number or bank credentials. We receive the Stripe customer/subscription/payment identifiers, selected plan, payment-state events and other billing records needed to reconcile your account and provide support. Teams enrollment is handled separately and is not currently open for self-service purchase.
15. Things not built yet
This site is actively being developed. Rather than quietly expanding what we collect later, here is what may be added, and the commitment attached to each:
- Document uploads, such as a tax bill for verification. Stored privately, visible only to your account, deletable by you.
- Text message alerts. Opt in only, with a clear way to stop.
- MLS or IDX listing data. Would be governed by MLS rules in addition to this policy.
- Profile photo uploads. Stored privately, not public.
- Data exports and reports containing your own saved information.
Two things will not change. We will not start selling personal information, and we will not make this site searchable by a person's name. If either ever became necessary, we would notify you in advance and ask for your consent rather than burying it in an update.
16. Changes
When this policy changes we update the date at the top. For anything material, such as a new category of data or a new party we share with, we will email account holders and post a notice on the site before it takes effect. Previous versions are available on request.
17. Contact
Privacy questions, requests, or complaints:
Watchdog Property Info LLC
Privacy requests: Contact Watchdog
Identify the request as a privacy request so it can be routed appropriately.
This policy describes our actual practices in plain language. It is not legal advice, and it does not create rights beyond those the law already gives you.