Privacy

Writing a review

A review stores what you typed, the ratings you gave, the building, and the date. There is no account, no name, and no email address, because none is asked for.

Your IP address is not stored. What is stored is a one-way cryptographic hash of your IP combined with your browser’s user-agent string, salted with a secret only the server holds. It lets us stop the same person posting fifty reviews of one building and nothing else. It cannot be turned back into an IP address, including by us, including under a subpoena — recovering one would mean brute-forcing the entire address space against a secret you would also need to have taken.

Reviews are public, permanently, and you cannot delete one yourself because there is no account to prove it was yours. If you want one removed, write to us and describe it well enough that we can find it.

Writing to us

The contact form stores the name, email address, subject and message you submit, plus the same one-way hash used for rate limiting. The address is used to reply to you. It is not added to any list, and there is no newsletter to add it to.

Reporting a listing or replying to a review as a landlord asks for an email address so we can verify the report and answer it. That address is deleted once the matter is resolved — the record of the decision is kept, the way to contact you is not.

What the site measures

There is no Google Analytics here, no advertising pixel, no cross-site tracker of any kind, and nothing that follows you to another website. The measurement is our own and runs on our own server.

What it records is which step of the review form was reached, which building page was viewed, the same one-way hash, and one of four words for where the visit came from — direct, search, social or other — derived from the referring site and then discarded. Not the page you came from. Not the search you typed.

The site sets no cookies at all unless you sign in to moderate it, which is one person. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

Who else sees anything

Three companies, and only these:

• Vercel hosts the site and therefore handles the requests your browser makes to it.
• Neon hosts the database where everything above is stored.
• Mapbox serves the map tiles on the map page only. If you open that page, your browser fetches images from Mapbox, and Mapbox can see your IP address the way any site you load can. Every other page loads nothing from anyone else.

Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared with landlords, management companies, brokers, advertisers or data brokers. If that ever changes it will be on this page before it happens, not after.

Public records

Building addresses, ownership, violations and complaint counts come from New York City open data and are already public. They describe buildings and companies, not tenants.

How long things are kept

Reviews and the moderation record are kept indefinitely — a rating that quietly loses its history is not checkable. Rate-limiting records are swept as they age out. Contact messages are kept while they are useful for answering you and for showing what we did about a complaint.

Asking for deletion

Write to eli@ratemylandlordnyc.com. For a review, describe it well enough to identify — we cannot look you up, which is the point. For a message you sent us, the address it came from is enough.

Children

This site is for adults renting apartments and is not directed at children.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected, the change will be described here rather than replaced silently.