Privacy Policy
Bearing Tree Data, Inc.
1. Who we are and what this policy covers
Bearing Tree Data, Inc. (“Bearing Tree”, “we”, “us”) runs a per-address property-tax lookup platform, a web app and an API, that states the property tax a single-family house is expected to owe after a sale, built from county parcel records, county tax bills and a county-by-county table of reassessment rules, and exports one row per address to the customer's Excel model. This policy explains what personal data we handle when we do that, and why.
Registered at 1311 Vine Street, Suite 300, Cincinnati, OH 45202, United States.
We handle personal data in two different situations, and different rules apply to each:
| Whose data | Our role | What applies | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Part A | People who visit this website, ask about the service or write to us | Controller: we decide why and how the data is used | This policy |
| Part B | Staff of our customers who hold accounts, and current owners whose names appear on the public county tax records of the addresses a customer submits | Set out in B.1, because it depends on the data | This policy and the data processing agreement we sign with each customer |
If the data processing agreement (“DPA”) and this policy ever disagree about Part B, the DPA wins.
2. Part A: this website and our contact with you
This part covers the personal data we collect for our own purposes: running this website, answering requests, and staying in touch with people who are or might become customers.
A.1 What we collect
What you give us. When you send the form on this site, we collect what you type into it, such as your name, email address, phone number or company, and the fact that you agreed to be contacted. If you email or talk to us, we keep that correspondence and any contact details in it.
What is collected automatically. Our web server records the IP address a request came from, the browser used, the pages requested, the page you came from and the time. These logs exist to keep the site running and secure.
We don’t ask for sensitive data (the “special categories” in Article 9 GDPR) through this website, so please don’t send any through the form.
A.2 Why we use it, and what allows us to
| Why | What | Legal basis (GDPR Art. 6) |
|---|---|---|
| Answering your request and working out whether the service fits | What you sent in the form, our correspondence | Art. 6(1)(b): steps you asked for before a contract |
| Looking after customers, billing and support | Contact details, correspondence | Art. 6(1)(b): carrying out a contract |
| Keeping the site running, secure and free of abuse | Server logs | Art. 6(1)(f): our legitimate interest in running a secure service |
| Contacting you about the service | Email address, company | Art. 6(1)(f): our legitimate interest in business-to-business marketing. You can object at any time |
| Meeting tax, accounting and legal duties | Billing and contract records | Art. 6(1)(c): a legal obligation |
Where we rely on legitimate interest, we have weighed that interest against your rights, and you can ask to see the assessment.
A.3 How long we keep it
- Requests from people who don’t become customers: 12 months from our last contact, then deleted.
- Customer contact and contract records: for the length of the agreement plus 6 years, to cover legal claims and accounting rules.
- Server logs: 30 days.
- A record that you objected or opted out: kept indefinitely, so we can keep respecting it.
A.4 Your rights
If you are in the EEA or the UK, you can ask to see your data, correct it, have it deleted, limit or object to how we use it, get a copy you can take elsewhere, and withdraw consent where we rely on it. Write to [email protected] and we will answer within one month.
You can also complain to a data protection authority. If you are in the EEA, that can be the authority where you live or work.
3. Part B: data inside the service
This part covers the data that passes through the service itself: the addresses, purchase prices and closing dates a customer submits, and the public county records we read to answer them.
B.1 What we handle, and in what role
For what a customer submits we act as a processor, on that customer's instructions and under the data processing agreement. For the county records dataset we compile from public sources we act as a controller. The service handles the following:
- Addresses, purchase prices and closing dates. What you type into the lookup form, upload in a list or send with your key. An address identifies a house and so, indirectly, the household in it. A purchase price tied to an address before closing is your confidential deal information and is treated as such.
- Owner names on public tax records. A county's roll record and tax bill name the current owner. We read that name only to confirm that we have matched the right parcel. It is never written into the file we deliver and is not searchable in the service.
- Account details. The names and work email addresses of the people at your company who hold accounts, and a log of which account ran which address and when.
We do not collect or receive data about tenants, rent rolls, leases, credit or payments. The service has no field for any of them.
We do not combine one customer's submitted addresses with another's, and we do not tell anyone which addresses a customer has run.
B.2 What we do with it
Matching and computing. A submitted address is matched to a county parcel, the parcel's public roll record and latest bill are read, and the county's rule row is applied to your purchase price to produce the tax line file. All of this runs on cloud infrastructure in Ohio.
Human review. When a parcel match scores under 0.92, or a parsed bill does not add up to its printed total, one of our data reviewers sees the submitted address and the candidate public records and confirms or corrects the match. Reviewers do not see your purchase price, which plays no part in the match.
Re-issue while a house is under contract. If you mark an address as under contract, the platform keeps it on a watch list until the closing date you entered, re-runs it when the county's rates or rule row change, and emails the account that ran it. Nothing else is sent to anyone.
No onward sale. We do not sell, rent or share submitted addresses, purchase prices or account details. Subprocessors that host the service on cloud infrastructure in Ohio, send our email and take payment are named on our subprocessor list.
B.3 AI models: where they run and what they learn from
Where models run. The models that match an address to a parcel and read county tax bills are open-weight models we fine-tune ourselves and serve on cloud GPU capacity we control in Ohio. No address, purchase price, closing date or file a customer submits is sent to a third-party hosted model API. One task does use a third-party hosted model, under zero-retention and no-training terms and with the provider named on our subprocessor list: drafting a county's rule row from public statutes and county publications. That task sees no customer data of any kind.
Training. We do not train models on the purchase prices, closing dates, lists or files of our customers. The one exception is the labeled corpus our reviewers build, which holds two kinds of pair. When a reviewer confirms or corrects a parcel match, we keep the match pair: the address string as it was typed and the public parcel number it matched. The match pair carries no customer name, no price and no date, it is shared across customers, and it is used to train our own parcel-matching model and nothing else. When a reviewer corrects a parsed bill, we keep the bill pair: a region of the county's public tax bill and the value the reviewer confirmed for it. The bill pair holds nothing a customer submitted, and it is used to train our own bill-reading model and nothing else.
Where a person decides. The models propose and a person decides. A parcel match scoring under 0.92, or a parsed bill that does not add up to its printed total, is held for one of our data reviewers and is not delivered until that person has confirmed it. A county's rule row is never published by a model: a named rule editor reads the sources and signs it. The service makes no automated decision with legal or similarly significant effect on any individual; it produces a projection for a company's own underwriting.
B.4 Where the data is kept
Everything a customer submits, every file we deliver and the county records dataset are stored and processed on cloud infrastructure in Ohio, in the United States. Backups are encrypted and kept in the same place.
Payment details are held by our payment provider and never reach our systems.
The suppliers that handle data in the service are named on our subprocessor list, which comes with the data processing agreement and which we send to anyone who asks: write to [email protected].
B.5 How long we keep it, and what deleting can’t remove
Submitted addresses, purchase prices, closing dates and the files built from them are kept for the life of the account and 24 months after it closes, so that a file can be re-issued and checked against the bill that eventually arrives. You can ask us to delete them sooner and we will do so within 30 days.
A reviewer's decision is kept as a pair, and there are two kinds. A match decision keeps the address string as typed and the public parcel number it was matched to. A bill correction keeps a region of the county's public tax bill and the value the reviewer confirmed, and holds nothing you submitted. Neither pair carries a customer name, a purchase price or a date. Once a match pair is separated from your account it no longer points to you, and deleting your account does not remove either kind of pair.
The county records dataset is public information and is kept for as long as the county is covered, with each year's roll and rates retained so that an older file can be reproduced.
B.6 Requests from people whose data is in the service
If you are an owner named on a county tax record and want to know whether we hold it, write to us and we will tell you what we hold and where it came from. The record itself belongs to the county, and only the county can correct it. If your request concerns an address a customer submitted, we pass it to that customer, who decides how to answer, and we help them do so.
For everyone
4. Moving data between countries
Bearing Tree Data, Inc. is a company in the United States. When personal data from the EEA or the UK reaches us, for example because someone there writes to us or a customer there uses the service, it is protected by the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, a transfer impact assessment and the extra technical measures described in our security documentation. You can ask us for a copy of the clauses.
EU representative (Article 27 GDPR). Write to [email protected] with “EU representative” in the subject line and we will send you our representative’s details.
5. Security
We protect data in line with the risk. That includes encryption in transit and at rest, access limited to the people and systems that need it, each customer’s data kept separate from every other’s, and a log of every access to production systems.
If a personal data breach affects you, we tell you without undue delay, and at the latest within 36 hours of finding out, with the information you need to meet your own reporting duties.
6. Children
The service is sold to businesses and is not meant for children. We don’t knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16.
7. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. If a change matters, we email customers at least 30 days before it takes effect. The version number and date at the top of this page change every time.
8. Contact
Privacy questions and anything else: [email protected]
By post: Bearing Tree Data, Inc., 1311 Vine Street, Suite 300, Cincinnati, OH 45202, United States