What we deliberately don't collect

No names, no street addresses, no parcel numbers, no phone numbers. The tax check never asks who you are, and it works in full without an account. We set no advertising or tracking cookies and run no third-party analytics or ad scripts. We do not sell, rent or share data about visitors with anyone.

If you keep a check

You can keep a finished check so it stays on a page of your own and so we can tell you when your county does something that changes it. That is optional, and it is the only thing on this site that asks for anything about you. If you do, we hold three things: your email address; which saved checks you keep (the random keys, and any name you give them); and whether you want those emails. Signing in is by a link we email you or by Google — there is no password, so there is no password to lose.

We still hold no name, no street address and no parcel number, and a kept check is still the anonymous page it always was — keeping it attaches you to its key, never the key to you. Deleting your account is one button on your account page: it removes your address and the list, in one go. The checks themselves stay at their links, as anonymous as before, because other people may hold those links.

What we do record

Numbers you submit. A tax check stores the zip code, the taxing district, the values and any bill amount you type — and nothing that identifies you. Submissions join an anonymous pool; nothing from the pool is published for a zip code until it holds at least five reports, and then only as a middle value.

Saved analyses. A finished check gets a share link containing a random key. Anyone you give the link to can see that analysis — that is its purpose — so share it as you would any page of numbers you typed.

Page views. Each page load sends us the page's path — on a county’s page, with the name of the section you opened, such as “levies” — and we keep a one-way salted digest of your network address (we cannot turn it back into the address), a browser family like “Chrome”, a device class like “mobile”, and the state or country our network provider reports. No user-agent string, no exact location, no identifier that follows you between visits.

Levy calculations. When the levy calculator works out a result, we count it with the county, the school district and the kind of levy, and the same digest, browser family, device class and state as a page view. The home’s value you type is never kept.

Find my place. When you look a place up, we count what you looked it up by — a zip code, a name you typed, a county or a school district — and whether it was found, with the same digest, browser family, device class and state as a page view. The zip code or name you typed or chose is never kept.

Questions you ask. When you use the “Ask a question” box, we keep the words of your question for 14 days, with a street address and every number in it blanked out; and for 90 days, what the site understood it as, which page it took you to and how long that took, with the same digest as a page view. We read them to learn which questions the site cannot answer yet. Nothing else about you is kept with them. When the site cannot tell from the words which page you mean, the question is sent to Anthropic’s AI, Claude, with a list of the site’s own places to pick from — the question alone, with any street address taken out, and nothing about you or your connection.

Rate-limit counters. To keep abuse out, short-lived counters are kept against the same one-way digest.

What your browser stores

Only what makes the site work, none of it used to follow you anywhere else:

Your theme choice. If you switch between light and dark, your browser remembers which. It never reaches us.

Your county and school district. The last county and school district whose page you opened, so “My county” goes there and the question box can answer “my county”. It is sent with a question you ask, and is used only to answer it.

A security cookie on forms. Pages with a form, such as the tax check, give your browser a random code that proves the form came from this site. It holds nothing about you and is deleted when you close your browser.

If you sign in. A sign-in cookie that lasts up to 90 days, or until you sign out. Your browser also keeps a note that you are signed in, with the random keys of the checks you keep, so every page can mark them. Signing out clears the note.

Who else touches the traffic

The site is served through Cloudflare, which sees requests the way any content-delivery network does and passes us the coarse location described above. Their handling is governed by their own privacy policy.

Anthropic receives the questions described above that the site cannot place by itself, and nothing else. Their handling is governed by Anthropic’s own privacy policy.

Retention and questions

Submitted numbers and page-view records are kept so the analyses and their history keep working; backups age out on a rolling basis. Without an account we hold nothing that identifies you, so we cannot look up “your” data; with one, your account page shows everything we hold and deletes it. Questions about any of the above are welcome through the site's contact form.