Privacy Policy
RatingSentinel is review-analysis software for businesses, currently operated by Nick Reinig in Washington State ("RatingSentinel", "we", "us", "our"). We are not yet incorporated and expect to form a Washington entity before the product goes live, at which point this policy will be reissued in its name.
Where things stand today
RatingSentinel is built and in pre-launch. This website is informational: there is no sign-up, no account and no form to submit, so the only information we handle through it is the ordinary web server data described in section 2, "What we collect today".
Part Two describes how the service handles information in operation. We publish it in advance so that anyone evaluating RatingSentinel can see exactly what we commit to before granting us access to anything.
What this policy does not cover
Once the service is running, the Business Profile data a customer authorizes us to read — and the analysis we derive from it — is information we process on that customer's behalf, not information we control. It is governed by our Data Processing Addendum, which forms part of the customer agreement and is published in full. The addendum is the complete account: it covers Google and every other provider we send customer data to, and it names each of them.
Section 6 below still describes our use of Google user data on its own. Google is the source the whole product reads from, so it is set out here as well rather than only in the addendum.
Part One — today
1. Who this applies to
Visitors to this website, and anyone who emails us at one of the addresses on our Contact page. The site offers no account, sign-up or form, so there is no other category of person whose information we hold through it.
The service will be sold to businesses, will initially be offered in the United States, and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If we begin offering it in another country, we will update this policy before doing so.
2. What we collect today
Web server data
Our web server records the usual request data — IP address, user agent, requested page, referring page and timestamp — for security and for diagnosing faults. This is logged automatically by the server; we do not use it to build a profile of you.
No cookies, trackers or forms
This site sets no advertising cookies, uses no cross-site trackers, and contains no forms.
This site does load its typefaces from Google Fonts. Your browser fetches the font files from Google, and Google receives your IP address as part of that request. We receive nothing from it and we make no use of it.
Email you send us
If you write to us, we have your message and your email address, and we keep them long enough to answer you and to keep a record of the exchange.
3. How we use it today
To keep the site available and secure, to diagnose faults, and to reply to anyone who writes to us. We do not sell or rent any of it, we do not use it for advertising, we do not send marketing email, and we do not use it to train machine-learning models.
Part Two — the service in operation
The commitments in this part govern the service from the day it opens. They describe how the software is built to behave, and they are published in advance so they can be evaluated before anyone grants us access to a Business Profile.
4. Information we will collect from customers
Account data
Name, work email address, a hashed password, job title where given, organization and location names, and settings.
Billing data
Billing contact, billing address, plan and invoice history. Payment card details will be collected and stored by our payment processor; we will never receive or store full card numbers.
Product usage data
Server logs, error reports and basic feature-usage records tied to the account, used to operate the service, diagnose faults and understand which features are used.
5. How we will use it
Solely to create and administer accounts, provide and support the service, process payments, secure the service and detect abuse, respond to what customers send us, and meet our legal obligations. Not for advertising, not for sale or rent, and not to train machine-learning models.
6. Google user data
When a customer connects a Google Business Profile, they authorize us on Google's own consent screen to read, for the locations they select: business location details, review text, star ratings, reviewer display names, review timestamps, review replies, and profile performance metrics. We also store the resulting OAuth tokens, encrypted separately from everything else. We never see or store a Google password, and we do not currently write to a Business Profile.
We request a single scope,
https://www.googleapis.com/
Use. Google user data is used solely to generate and display the analysis in that customer's own dashboard and the reports they request.
Storage. Everything we fetch from the Business Profile APIs — review text, reviewer display names, location details and performance metrics — is cached only where doing so is needed to keep the dashboard and the analysis fast, for no more than 30 calendar days from the time we fetch it, and is then deleted automatically. We do not maintain a permanent copy, index or archive of it. What we retain while an account is active is derived data — scores, signal strengths, sentiment counts, review counts over time, and the Google-assigned identifiers needed to retrieve a review again.
Sharing. Review text is sent for sentiment analysis to the language-model provider named in our sub-processor list, with reviewer names, location names and the customer's identity removed first. Under that provider's published terms, data sent through its API is not used to train its models and is kept only for a limited period rather than stored long term. It is disclosed to no one else.
Revocation and deletion. A customer can disconnect a location at any time in their dashboard, or revoke our access directly at myaccount.google.com/permissions. We call Google's token revocation endpoint and delete that location's data within 24 hours.
RatingSentinel's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. We use Google user data only to provide and improve the user-facing features visible in the customer's dashboard; we do not transfer it except as necessary to provide those features, for security purposes, to comply with applicable law, or as part of a merger or acquisition after obtaining the customer's explicit consent; we do not use it for advertising; we do not use it to train generalized machine-learning models; and no human reads it except with the customer's agreement, including when they ask us to look into something on their account, where it is necessary for security purposes such as investigating abuse, to comply with applicable law, or where the data is aggregated and used for internal operations in accordance with applicable privacy requirements.
7. Reviewers
Reviews are written by members of the public, who have no relationship with us and did not choose to be analyzed. This section sets out the limits we apply to their information.
- We use review text and display names only to detect patterns within one location's own review set.
- We do not enrich reviewer information against any other source, and do not attempt to identify a reviewer beyond the display name Google returns.
- We do not build profiles of individual reviewers, and we do not score, rank or characterize individual people.
- We do not retain reviewer display names or review text beyond the 30-day caching window in section 6.
- We never contact reviewers, and our product gives customers no means of contacting them.
- Our analysis is never used, and customers are contractually prohibited from using it, to make any decision about an individual person. We are not a consumer reporting agency and our output is not a consumer report.
If you have posted a review and want to know what we hold, write to privacy@ratingsentinel.com and we will explain what we hold and for how long. We cannot act on a request to change or remove review content, for two reasons. Google gives us only the display name shown on the review, so we have no way to confirm that you wrote it. And a review can be edited or deleted only by its author or by Google, not by us.
If you delete a review on Google, it leaves our cache within 30 days without you needing to contact us.
8. How we will disclose it
We will not sell or rent personal information, and we will not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We will disclose it only to the companies listed below, which help us run the service and are permitted to use what we send them only for that purpose:
| Provider | Purpose | Information involved |
|---|---|---|
| Render | Application, database and queue hosting | All stored data |
| OpenAI | Aspect sentiment analysis | Review text only, stripped of reviewer names, location names and customer identity |
| Resend | Service email and scheduled reports | Name, email, report contents |
| Sentry | Diagnosing failures | Technical logs |
| Stripe | Subscription billing | Billing details |
The providers that process customer data are listed separately in the Data Processing Addendum. We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, where it is necessary to protect the security of the service or our rights, or in connection with a merger or acquisition — and in the case of data obtained from Google, only as section 6 permits. If RatingSentinel is ever acquired, we will notify account holders before their information transfers or becomes subject to a different policy.
9. Requests from government and law enforcement
We are based in the United States and the service runs on infrastructure in the United States. We do not hand over information to any government or law enforcement agency unless we are compelled by valid legal process, or in a genuine emergency involving a risk of death or serious physical harm.
- We comply with a valid warrant, criminal subpoena or court order issued by a United States authority.
- We respond to a request from an authority outside the United States only where a United States authority compels us to through the applicable treaty process.
- Where the request concerns a customer's information, we notify that customer before disclosing anything, unless we are legally barred from doing so or there is an emergency as described above. Where we are barred, we tell them as soon as the bar lifts.
- We honor a preservation request only where it is made under proper United States legal process, and we destroy the preserved copy at the end of the preservation period unless valid process has arrived in the meantime.
- A tax audit may require us to disclose minimal billing information, such as a billing address.
10. Automated analysis and AI
The Health Score is produced by automated statistical analysis of a location's review corpus — arrival rates measured against that location's own history, rating distribution shape, text similarity, and specificity of language. The weights are hand-set and documented rather than learned from customer data.
Aspect sentiment uses OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini through the OpenAI API. Review text sent for that analysis is stripped of reviewer names, location names and customer identity first. Under OpenAI's API data usage policies, data submitted through the API is not used to train their models unless we opt in, which we do not. OpenAI may retain API inputs and outputs for up to 30 days to provide the service and identify abuse, after which they are removed unless OpenAI is legally required to keep them. That window sits outside our own deletion timings, and section 11 of the Data Processing Addendum says so plainly rather than implying we can delete a copy we do not hold.
We may fit models, thresholds and calibrations to a customer's own data in order to produce that customer's analysis — a Health Score that learns a location's normal arrival pattern is more useful than one measured against a global average. Anything fitted this way serves only the customer whose data produced it.
We do not train models on one customer's data to serve another, and we do not pool data obtained from Google across customers for benchmarking, industry statistics or model development. Where we refine the scoring method itself, we do that against public and licensed research corpora rather than customer review text. We do not sell or share any of it, and our sentiment provider does not train on what we send.
11. How long we will keep it
| Category | Retention |
|---|---|
| Server and security logs | 90 days |
| Email correspondence | 24 months |
| Account and billing records | While the account is active, then as long as tax and accounting rules require |
| Content fetched from the Business Profile APIs (review text, reviewer display names, location details and performance metrics) | Cached only to make the dashboard fast. 30 calendar days from fetch, then deleted automatically. Held outside the backed-up database, so no copy survives in a backup |
| Derived scores, signals and sentiment counts | While the account is active |
| Encrypted backups | Deleted data ages out within 7 days. Content fetched from the Business Profile APIs is never in them |
Retention and deletion of customer data is set out in full in section 11 of the Data Processing Addendum.
12. Security
Data will be encrypted in transit and at rest, OAuth tokens encrypted separately from the rest of the data, and each customer's records isolated at the database layer by Postgres row-level security rather than by application code — an arrangement verified by automated tests on every build. Access to production systems is limited, authenticated with multi-factor authentication, and logged. The specific measures are set out in section 6 of the Data Processing Addendum, and we will complete a security questionnaire on request.
To report a suspected vulnerability, write to security@ratingsentinel.com.
If we become aware of a breach affecting your information we will notify you without undue delay and within the time applicable law requires, and tell you what happened, what was affected and what we are doing about it. Any statement we make about our record of security incidents describes what we are aware of as at the date of this policy.
13. Where information is held
In the United States. Customers are currently located in the United States, and we do not transfer information abroad. If that changes, we will update this policy and set out the arrangements that apply to the new location before any information is processed there.
14. Your rights and choices
You may ask us what personal information we hold about you, for a copy of it, to correct it, or to delete it. We will not discriminate against you for asking, and we extend these rights to everyone who asks, regardless of where they live. In practice, what we hold about a site visitor is a server log entry.
California
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended, you have the rights described above. We have collected the categories of personal information described in sections 2 and 4 — identifiers, commercial information, internet activity information and professional information — for the purposes described in sections 3 and 5. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for purposes that would require a right to limit. You may use an authorized agent, and we will verify any request against information we already hold. Where we process personal information on behalf of a business customer, we act as a service provider and the restrictions in section 4 of the Data Processing Addendum apply.
Washington
The Washington My Health My Data Act applies to consumer health data. RatingSentinel does not collect, process or sell consumer health data. The "Health Score" in our product refers to the statistical regularity of a business's review pattern — how closely arrival timing, rating distribution and language resemble that location's own history — and has nothing to do with any person's physical or mental health.
Other states
If you live in a state with a comprehensive privacy law, you have the rights that law gives you, including, where applicable, the right to opt out of targeted advertising, sale, and profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects. We do none of those three things.
How to exercise a right
Write to privacy@ratingsentinel.com and tell us what you need. We will verify who you are against information we already hold, respond as quickly as we can and within the time applicable law allows, and explain our reasoning if we have to decline.
15. Changes to this policy
We will post changes here and update the date above. Once the service is available, we will notify account holders by email at least 30 days before a material change takes effect.
We keep a dated summary of every substantive change to this policy at the foot of this page, so that what we promised at any point in the past stays checkable rather than being quietly overwritten.
16. Contact
RatingSentinel
privacy@ratingsentinel.com