Privacy policy
ReLease is operated from Berkeley, California. This page says what the site collects, what it keeps, and who else can see it. It covers joinrelease.com and nothing else.
If you are only reading
Reading takes no account and no email. We record usage events so we can tell which buildings people are looking for, including the text typed into the search box. Those events carry no name, no email address, no IP address, and no identifier that links one visit to the next. They go into our own database, not to any analytics vendor. We use no third-party analytics, no advertising pixels, and no session recording.
We read your IP address to apply rate limits, and we do not store it. Our hosting provider records it in its own request logs, as any host does.
If you post a review
You verify an email address first. Some reviews, including every campus dorm review, require a berkeley.edu address. We store a SHA-256 hash of your address, the domain it came from, and the page you were headed to when you verified. We never store the address itself. We also store the review, the years of your tenancy, and when you filed it. The month and year you filed appear publicly alongside the review.
If you ask to be notified
The notify list is the one place we keep an email address as you typed it, because we have to be able to send you the message. We store it with what you asked about, and, when you signed up from a search that found nothing, the text you searched for. Unsubscribing stops the email. It does not delete the row.
Cookies
We set two, and only after you act. A sign-in cookie keeps you signed in for seven days. An admin cookie is for the site operator and lasts twelve hours. Neither is used for advertising, and neither follows you off this site. We set no third-party cookies, and our own code stores nothing else on your device.
Who else sees it
- Resend sends our email, so it receives your address and the contents of the message.
- Vercel hosts the site and handles the requests that reach it.
- Our database provider stores the records described above.
- The map background comes from OpenFreeMap. Your browser fetches it directly, so OpenFreeMap receives your IP address, your browser type, and the coordinates of the tiles you are looking at, which show which part of Berkeley you are viewing. It loads only when a map is at or near your screen.
That is the list as the site is built today. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for advertising.
Do Not Track
Some browsers send a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal. We do not respond to them, because we do not follow you across other sites in the first place. No third party collects information about your activity across other sites through ReLease. The tile provider above sees your IP address when it serves you a map, and that is the extent of it.
Reviews are not editable, by you or by us
Once you file a review you cannot edit it or take it down, and we do not edit the text of a review either. A record a reviewer can pull down is a record a landlord can pressure them into pulling down. We may still decline or remove a review under the terms, at our discretion.
If you want your account separated from what you wrote, email disputes@joinrelease.com and we will replace the stored hash of your address with a random value. Your reviews stay published, and nothing in our database points from them to your email address again. They remain grouped as coming from one account, which is not shown anywhere on the site.
A hash is not anonymity
The hash we store is a plain SHA-256 of your address. University email addresses are guessable, so someone holding our database and a name could test a guess and confirm it. Treat it as a lock on a filing cabinet, not as anonymity. Write reviews you would be willing to stand behind.
Legal process
We do not hand over identifying information in response to a demand letter, an email, or a phone call. Only valid legal process. When one arrives we make reasonable efforts to notify you first, with a copy and time to object, unless we are ordered not to.
If you are under 18
California law lets a registered user under 18 request removal of content they posted themselves. Email disputes@joinrelease.com from the address you verified and we will remove it.
How long we keep things
Reviews stay up indefinitely, because the record is the point of the site. Verification records and notify list entries are kept indefinitely too. Nothing expires or is purged on a schedule.
Changes
When what we do changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. Continued use of the site means you accept the current version.
Contact
Questions about any of this go to disputes@joinrelease.com.