Privacy Policy

1. Who We Are and What This Covers

We represent owners of residential and commercial property in appeals of their property tax assessments. To do that, we analyze county assessment records, prepare and file appeals, and communicate with county assessors and appeals boards on an owner's behalf.

This Policy covers information about property owners and their representatives, people who contact us or use our website, and — for our legacy property management services — the individuals whose data flows through that platform. It does not cover the practices of county governments, which are subject to their own laws and public records rules.

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Information you give us

• Property identification: the property address, parcel or assessor identification number, county, and property type.
• Owner and contact information: your name, the name of the owning entity, email address, phone number, and mailing address.
• Documents you choose to provide: assessment notices, tax bills, photographs, and — for income-producing property — rent rolls, leases, and income and expense statements. We ask for these only when they support the appeal.
• Authorization and agreement records: when you sign an authorization permitting us to act for you and our services agreement, we retain the signed documents together with the electronic signature record described in our Terms of Service, which includes your name as typed or drawn, the date and time, and the IP address used.

2.2 Information from county and public records

Property assessment data is public. We obtain assessed values, valuation history, property characteristics, recorded sales, permit records, ownership records, and comparable assessments from county assessors, recorders, and other government sources, and from commercial data providers that aggregate those records. We may look up a property from its address before you become a customer, and we may do so without your involvement, because this information is publicly available.

2.3 Information collected automatically on our website

• Usage and device data: pages viewed, links clicked, referring page, approximate location derived from IP address, browser type, operating system, and device identifiers. We use a product analytics provider for this.
• Scheduling data: if you book a call, our scheduling provider collects your name, email, phone number, and any information you enter, including a property address.

2.4 Communications

We keep records of our communications with you, including emails, text messages, voice calls, call recordings and transcripts where permitted and disclosed, and notes about those communications.

2.5 Payment information

We use a third-party payment processor to store payment credentials. When you place a card on file, your card details go directly to that processor. We receive and store only a customer reference, the card brand, its last four digits, and its expiration date. We do not store full card numbers or security codes.

3. How We Use Information

• To assess whether an appeal is worth filing, by comparing a county's valuation against its own comparable assessments and public sale records.
• To prepare, file, and pursue an appeal, including preparing evidence, corresponding with the county, and representing you at a hearing.
• To communicate with you about your property, your appeal's status, filing deadlines, and requests for documents.
• To calculate and collect our fee when an appeal produces a reduction, on the terms of your services agreement.
• To operate, improve, and develop our services and products, including analyzing which properties are likely to be over-assessed, improving the accuracy of our analysis, training and improving our own models, and developing new products and features.
• To create aggregated and de-identified data — information that no longer identifies you or your property's confidential details — which we may use for market analytics and other lawful business purposes.
• To market our services, including contacting property owners about a possible appeal, subject to Section 7 and to applicable law.
• To comply with law and to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.

4. How We Share Information

• County assessors, appeals boards, and courts. Filing an appeal requires submitting information about you and the property to government bodies. See Section 5.
• Service providers who work on our behalf, under contract and limited to what they need: cloud hosting and storage, our payment processor, email, text message, and telephone providers, our scheduling and analytics providers, and providers of artificial intelligence services used to analyze records and draft communications.
• Professionals we engage for your matter, such as appraisers or, where a matter proceeds beyond an administrative appeal and you agree, counsel.
• When the law requires it, including in response to subpoenas, court orders, or lawful government requests.
• In a business transfer, such as a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, in which case information may transfer to the acquiring party subject to this Policy.
• Aggregated or de-identified information that does not identify you, which we may publish or share, for example to describe assessment patterns in a county.

5. Appeals Become Public Records

6. We Do Not Sell Your Personal Information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are used in California law. We do not sell or rent customer lists, and we do not sell personal information that identifies you to other property tax firms, lenders, insurers, or contractors.

We may create, use, license, and commercialize data products and aggregated or de-identified data derived from information we hold — including analytics, benchmarks, and risk scores — provided they never identify you as the source of information, never disclose your documents or financial information in a form attributable to you, and never include information identifying individual tenants or residents. Under California law, aggregated and de-identified data is not personal information.

If this ever changes, we will update this Policy before the change takes effect and, where the law requires it, offer you a way to opt out.

This section describes our property tax appeal services. Information we process on behalf of property management clients is governed by our Privacy Policy for Property Management.

7. Calls, Texts, and Email

We may contact you by email, text message, and telephone about a possible appeal, an appeal in progress, or your account. Some of these communications may be sent using automated technology, and some may be placed or drafted with the assistance of artificial intelligence.

Your choices

• Text messages: reply STOP to any message to opt out, or HELP for help. Message frequency varies. Message and data rates may apply. Consent to receive marketing text messages is not a condition of buying anything from us. See our messaging program terms and consent information.
• Email: use the unsubscribe link in any marketing email, or email us. We will still send messages necessary to an active engagement, such as a filing deadline or a request for a document.
• Calls: tell us on any call, or contact us in writing, and we will add you to our internal do-not-call list.

Opting out of marketing does not end an engagement, and it does not stop communications we must send to represent you in a pending appeal.

8. Email Access for Referral Partners

Property managers and other referral partners can connect their own email account to their Castellan partner page, so that the personal introductions they review and confirm are sent to their property owners from their own address. We support Microsoft accounts (Outlook.com personal accounts and Microsoft 365 work or school accounts) and Google accounts (Gmail and Google Workspace). Connecting a mailbox is optional. For information we obtain through this connection, this section controls over anything else in this Policy.

8.1 The permissions we request

• Microsoft: the Microsoft Graph delegated permission Mail.Send, which lets us send email as you, together with User.Read, openid, email, and offline_access, which let you sign in, let us read your account's email address, and keep the connection working until you disconnect it.
• Google: the Gmail permission https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.send, which lets us send email as you, together with openid and email, which let you sign in and let us read your account's email address.

These permissions are send-only. We never request permission to read, search, list, modify, or delete your email, contacts, or calendars.

8.2 How we use it

We use this access only to send the introduction emails you review in a preview and confirm. Each one is sent from your mailbox with Castellan's shared inbox copied, and a copy stays in your Sent folder. We read your account's email address only to show you which mailbox is connected. For each email sent, we record the recipient, the copied addresses, the subject, the text sent, the time, and the delivery status and message identifier returned by your email provider, for your records and ours.

8.3 What we never do

We never read your mail. For information we obtain through this connection, we:

• do not sell it;
• do not use or transfer it for advertising, including retargeting, personalized, or interest-based advertising;
• do not use it to create, train, or improve artificial intelligence or machine learning models;
• do not use it to determine creditworthiness or for lending purposes;
• do not transfer it to anyone except as necessary to provide or improve this feature, and only with your consent; for security purposes, such as investigating abuse; to comply with applicable law; or as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, and then only after obtaining your explicit prior consent; and
• do not allow people to read it unless you have given us your explicit, affirmative agreement to view specific messages; it is necessary for security purposes, such as investigating a bug or abuse; it is necessary to comply with applicable law; or it has been aggregated and anonymized and is used for our internal operations in accordance with applicable law.

8.4 Security and disconnecting

The access and refresh tokens your email provider issues to us are encrypted at rest. You can disconnect your mailbox at any time. When you do, we immediately delete the tokens we store and stop any introduction emails that have not yet been sent. For a Google account, we also revoke our access with Google, and you can review or remove access at any time at myaccount.google.com/connections. Microsoft does not provide a way for an app to revoke the access you granted it, so for a Microsoft account we delete our copy of the tokens, and you can remove Castellan's access at account.live.com/consent/Manage (personal accounts) or myapps.microsoft.com (work or school accounts).

8.5 Google and Microsoft requirements

Castellan’s use of information received from Google APIs will adhere to Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. The use of information received from Google Workspace scopes will adhere to the Google User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Our use of information obtained through Microsoft Graph is limited in the same way, to the uses described in this section.

9. Call Recording

We may record or transcribe telephone calls for quality, training, accuracy of our records, and to capture details about a property. Some states, including California, require that everyone on a call consent to being recorded. Where a call is being recorded, we will tell you at the start of the call. If you do not want to be recorded, say so and we will either stop the recording or continue without it.

10. Your Privacy Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the following rights regarding personal information about you:

• To know or access what personal information we hold about you, where we got it, why we have it, and who we share it with.
• To correct personal information that is inaccurate.
• To delete personal information, subject to exceptions — we may need to keep records of a filed appeal, a signed agreement, or a transaction to comply with law or to enforce our rights. Information already incorporated into aggregated or de-identified datasets cannot be withdrawn, because it no longer identifies you.
• To a portable copy of information you provided to us.
• To opt out of sale, sharing for targeted advertising, or certain automated decision-making. As stated in Section 6, we do not sell or share for those purposes.
• To be free from retaliation for exercising these rights. We will not deny you service, charge a different price, or provide a lesser quality of service because you exercised a privacy right.

To make a request, email info@castellan.so with the subject line "Privacy Request." We will verify your identity before acting, which usually means confirming information we already hold, and we will respond within the time the applicable law allows. An authorized agent may make a request on your behalf with written proof of authority.

Note that information about a property, including its assessed value and ownership of record, is public information held by the county. Deleting it from our systems does not remove it from public records.

11. California Residents (CCPA/CPRA)

If you are a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended gives you the rights described in Section 10. In the twelve months before the date of this Policy, we have collected the following categories of personal information: identifiers (such as name, postal address, email address, phone number, and IP address); commercial information (such as the property involved and our services engaged); financial information (such as payment card metadata held by our processor and, where you provide them, property income and expense records); internet and network activity (such as website usage); approximate geolocation derived from IP address; audio recordings, where a call is recorded as described in Section 9; and inferences drawn from the above, such as whether a property appears over-assessed.

We collect these categories from you, from your authorized representatives, from county and other public records, from data providers, and automatically from your use of our website. We use and disclose them for the purposes in Sections 3 and 4. We do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not knowingly collect the personal information of anyone under 16.

We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for purposes other than those permitted without a right to limit under California law.

California's "Shine the Light" law permits California residents to request information about disclosure of personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. We do not make such disclosures.

12. How Long We Keep Information

We keep information for as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it, and then for as long as we are required or reasonably need to keep it. In practice:

• Appeal files, signed authorizations, and services agreements are kept for at least the duration of the engagement and the period in which the outcome continues to affect you — in some states a successful appeal affects later tax years — and thereafter as needed for our records, tax, and legal purposes.
• Transaction and fee records are kept as long as required by tax and accounting rules.
• Consent and opt-out records are kept indefinitely, because we need them to honor your choices and to demonstrate that we did.
• Website analytics data is kept on our analytics provider's retention schedule.
• Aggregated and de-identified data is retained indefinitely and is not deleted when an engagement ends, because it no longer identifies you.

13. Security

We use administrative, technical, and physical safeguards intended to protect information against unauthorized access, use, and disclosure, including encryption of data in transit, access controls that limit who on our team can see what, and use of reputable infrastructure and payment providers. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If you believe your information has been compromised, contact us immediately.

14. Automated Processing and AI

We use software, including artificial intelligence, to read public assessment records, identify comparable properties, estimate whether a property appears over-assessed, draft documents and communications, and summarize calls. This helps us look at far more properties than we could by hand.

These tools inform our work; they do not replace it. A person at Castellan reviews the analysis before we tell you whether we believe an appeal is worth filing and before we file anything on your behalf. We do not use automated processing alone to make a decision that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you. Information we send to AI service providers is subject to contracts limiting their use of it, and we do not permit those providers to use your information to train their general-purpose models. We may use information you provide to train and improve our own models and analysis.

15. Legacy Property Management Services

Castellan previously provided artificial intelligence leasing and resident communication software to property management companies, and continues to support a small number of existing customers. Where we provide those services, the property management company is responsible for the data of its residents, applicants, and vendors, and we process that data on its behalf and under its instructions.

If you are a resident or applicant who received a call, text, or email in connection with a property you rent or applied to rent, that communication was sent on behalf of your property management company. Requests about your data are usually best directed to them, and we will assist them in responding. The detailed policy for those services is at Privacy Policy for Property Management, and the messaging program terms are at SMS Terms.

16. Children's Privacy

Our services are directed to property owners and are not intended for children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact us and we will delete it.

17. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Policy. When we do, we will change the "Last updated" date above. If a change materially reduces your rights or materially expands how we use information about you, we will provide additional notice, such as by email or a notice on our website, before it takes effect.

18. Contact Us

Reliable Intelligence Inc. (Castellan)
636 Presidio Ave, Apt 7
San Francisco, CA 94115
Email: info@castellan.so

For a privacy request, please use the subject line "Privacy Request" so we route it correctly.