Privacy Policy

Contact form data only

• The Roof Shepherd collects the name, phone, email, property address, message, and consent confirmation submitted through the Get Help form. This information is used exclusively to respond to the inquiry and coordinate services. After you submit, an automatic confirmation email is sent to the address you provided so you know your request arrived.
• No sensitive financial dataDo not submit Social Security numbers, financial account details, insurance policy numbers, or claim amounts through the website contact form.
• Technical request dataWhen the form is submitted, the server also records standard technical data: IP address, forwarded IP data, browser identification, referring page, browser language, and submission time. This data is used solely for security, spam prevention, and rate limiting, and is stored outside the public web directory. Rate-limit records are temporary and expire automatically.
• Analytics dataThis site uses standard analytics tools to understand traffic patterns, pages visited, time on page, and general geographic region. We do not ask these tools to collect names, addresses, or contact details, and we do not attempt to identify individual visitors from them.
• Session recording and heatmapsThis site uses Microsoft Clarity, which records how pages are used so we can see where the site is confusing or broken. That recording includes mouse movement, scrolling, clicks and taps, and the pages visited in a session, and it can be replayed as a video of the visit. It is behavior on the page, not a recording of your screen, your camera, or anything outside this site.
  
  Text typed into input boxes and drop-down menus is masked by Microsoft Clarity in all of its recording modes and cannot be unmasked, so what you type into the Get Help form is not captured in a replay. Even so, please do not enter sensitive information such as payment card details or government identification numbers into any field on this site. Nothing here asks for them.
  
  Clarity uses partial or obfuscated IP addresses to estimate general location and does not store complete IP addresses. Microsoft processes this data as a service provider under its own privacy terms.
  
  Clarity uses first and third-party cookies and similar technologies to recognize a returning session and to stitch a visit together. This site sets no advertising cookies of its own.
  
  If you would rather not be recorded, an ad or tracker blocking extension will block Clarity, and the site works normally without it. Clearing cookies for this site also clears the identifier Clarity uses to link a session together.
• No data sharingNo personal data collected through this site is sold, rented, or shared with third parties for marketing purposes. Form submissions are delivered by email through Google Workspace, site analytics are provided by Google Analytics, and session recording and heatmaps are provided by Microsoft Clarity. All three act as service providers rather than marketing recipients for us. The Roof Shepherd does not sell your data and does not run advertising campaigns built from it. Microsoft, however, states that data collected through Clarity may also be used by Microsoft for its own purposes including site optimization, fraud and security, and advertising, and that Clarity is operated alongside Microsoft Advertising. What Microsoft does with the data is governed by the , not by this policy.

See Microsoft Privacy Statement

What it is

• This site offers an AI assistant that answers general roofing questions and helps you decide whether an inspection makes sense. It is an educational tool. It is not a roof inspection, not a diagnosis, not an estimate, and not legal, insurance, or engineering advice. It cannot determine what your insurance policy covers.
• Answers are drawn from this websiteThe assistant answers from approved written material published on this site, together with a set of reviewed roofing guidance. Where it does not have approved information, it is designed to say so and direct you to speak with a person rather than guess.
• What is removed before anything is storedBefore a conversation is written to our records, an automatic process removes email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, unit numbers, policy, claim and account numbers, and card-style number sequences. This removal is automatic and pattern-based. It is thorough but not perfect: it cannot reliably detect a personal name typed into open text. Please do not type names, account numbers, policy documents, or financial details into the assistant.
• What is kept, and for how longConversation text, after the removal described above, is kept for up to 90 days and then deleted. A short record of questions the assistant could not answer is kept for up to 90 days so the site can be improved. Anonymous counts, such as how often a particular guidance topic was useful, contain no conversation text and may be kept indefinitely. Records of recurring question themes are removed after 365 days without recurrence.
• Photos you send in the chatYou can attach a photo of your roof, wall, gutter or attic to a question. The photo is reduced in size and re-encoded before it is stored, which removes camera details and any location data it carried. It is kept in a private folder that is not reachable from the web, for up to 90 days, then deleted. It is sent to our AI provider to produce the answer, under the same terms as the conversation text. Photos are used only to look at your property and to prepare a follow-up if you ask for one; they are not used for marketing. Please keep people, vehicles, house numbers and neighboring property out of the frame, and do not send photos of documents.
• Deletion requests for assistant conversationsWe want to be straightforward about a limitation. Assistant conversations are not stored against your name, email, or account, and the session reference is a one-way hash that cannot be reversed. Because of that, we have no way to locate a specific person's past conversations in order to delete them on request. The tradeoff is deliberate: the records are not linked to you in the first place. Information you submit through the Get Help form is different, is linked to your request, and can be deleted on request.
• Processing by our AI providerTo generate a reply, your message is sent to Anthropic, our AI provider, and processed under their commercial terms. Anthropic does not use commercial API traffic to train its models. Their handling is governed by their own published policies.
• Rate limiting and abuse preventionTo prevent abuse, the assistant records a one-way hash of your IP address combined with a value that changes daily. The original IP address is not stored, and the hash cannot be reversed to recover it. These records expire automatically.
• EmergenciesDo not use the assistant to report an emergency. For fire, structural collapse, electrical hazards, or immediate danger, contact emergency services or your utility first. For an active roof leak, call or text 512-575-5052.

What we store when you sign up

• If you sign up for our email newsletter, we store your email address, the page where you signed up, the date you signed up, and the date you confirmed. That is the whole record. We use a confirmation step: nothing is ever sent until you click the confirmation link we email you, and we send about one email a month.
• No tracking, on purposeOur newsletter contains no tracking pixels and no click tracking. We do not know whether you opened an email or what you clicked, and we prefer it that way. If that ever changes, this policy will say so first.
• Unsubscribing is one click and immediateEvery email includes a one-click unsubscribe that works instantly, with no login and no questions. When you unsubscribe, we keep a minimal suppression record, your address and the date, so our systems can guarantee we never email you again. Routine database backups may retain removed addresses for a limited period until backup rotation clears them.
• Emailing yourself an article is not a subscriptionAsking the website to email you a single article does not subscribe you to anything. We send the article once and do not store that address.
• Withdrawing consentTo withdraw consent or ask us to delete your information, use the unsubscribe link in any email or contact us at info@theroofshepherd.com.