Privacy Notice

Draft prepared with AI assistance; not legal advice. To be reviewed by a lawyer.

Last updated: draft of 3 November 2026.

Who we are

Fileherald is the name under which this service is offered ("we", "us", "our"). We sell business-to-business subscriptions built from official public records about companies. This notice covers our website at fileherald.com, our free samples, our subscriptions and our emails, and it explains how we treat the public-records data itself. Questions and requests go to hello@fileherald.com.

In brief

We collect only what we need to run a business-to-business service: what you tell us, billing records from our payment processor, and email delivery logs.
Our website has no advertising trackers and no analytics cookies.
We do not sell personal information about our customers, website visitors or the people we email.
The records we sell are about companies. We build them to leave out information about individuals.
Anyone can ask us to see, correct or delete their information, or to correct or remove a record from our service. We honor these requests wherever you live.

What we collect

When you ask for a free sample

Your name, email address (a company address for the equipment-finance feed; any address, including a free one, for the Florida construction feed), company, the feed and filters you choose, any message you add, your agreement to be contacted about the sample, and the date and time. To stop repeated or automated submissions, our request service also keeps a scrambled code (a one-way hash) made from your IP address and a secret, for up to 24 hours. The IP address itself is not stored in our database.

When you unsubscribe

Your email address, the date, and how you unsubscribed (for example, the link in an email or the form on our website). We keep this on a permanent suppression list so that we never email that address again.

When you subscribe

The names and work email addresses of your contacts, your company name and billing address, your plan, filters and delivery settings, your payment history, and any credits or refunds. Payments are handled by Stripe, which collects your card or bank details directly. We receive only limited details from Stripe, such as the card brand, the last four digits, the expiry date and whether a payment succeeded.

When we email you

Delivery logs: the address, when an email was sent, and whether it was delivered, bounced or marked as spam. Our digests and service emails may also record whether an email was opened or a link in it was clicked, so we can find delivery problems and notice customers who have stopped using the service. You can block this by turning off images in your email program, or ask us to switch it off for your account. We also keep the emails you send us and our replies.

If we emailed you first

We email businesses that may want our service. For that we use business contact details (a work email address and, where it is published, a name and role) from a company's own website, from public business and license registers, or from the public records themselves (for example, a lender named on filings). We check each address with an email-verification service before we send. Every such email says who we are, gives our postal address and a way to opt out (reply "no thanks", or use the one-click unsubscribe your mail app shows), and we honor every opt-out within 2 business days.

When you visit our website

Our website uses no advertising trackers, no analytics cookies and no third-party scripts that follow you around the web. Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, processes your IP address and basic request details (such as the page asked for and your browser type) to deliver the pages and protect the site from attacks, and it may set a strictly necessary security cookie for that purpose. When you check out, you are on Stripe's own pages, which are covered by Stripe's privacy policy; Stripe uses cookies there to prevent fraud.

How we use it

To review and send the free samples people ask for.
To provide subscriptions: digests, files, support and credits.
To bill you, collect payments and prevent fraud.
To send service messages, such as receipts, renewal reminders and notice of changes to our terms.
To send business marketing email to business contacts, with a way to opt out in every message.
To keep the service secure and stop abuse.
To meet our legal, tax and accounting duties and to enforce our terms.

We do not use personal information for targeted advertising, and we do not make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about anyone by automated means. No AI model reads or categorizes the public records today: categories come from fixed written rules. AI tools may help us draft replies to emails; a person reviews every outgoing message before it is sent.

Who we share it with

We share personal information only with service providers that process it for us under contract, and only as much as they need:

Stripe: payments, invoices and subscription management.
Cloudflare: website hosting, our request-handling service and database, and security.
Email services: a delivery service for digests and service emails; an outreach platform, and the mailbox providers behind it, for our business outreach emails; and an email-verification service that checks addresses before we send.
Google Workspace: our own inbox and documents.
An AI service provider: helping us draft replies to emails, when we use one. It does not read or categorize the public records.
Professional advisers, such as lawyers and accountants, under a duty of confidentiality.

A current list of the providers we use is available on request. We may also disclose information when the law requires it (for example, a valid subpoena), to protect the rights or safety of people or of our business, or to a buyer of the business, who must then honor this notice.

How long we keep it

Sample requests that do not lead to a subscription: 12 months.
Customer account, billing and invoice records: while you are a customer, then 7 years for tax and accounting.
Email delivery logs: 13 months.
Emails between you and us: 3 years after the last message.
Rate-limiting codes made from IP addresses: 24 hours.
The suppression list (unsubscribes): permanently, so we keep honoring your choice. Only the email address, the date and how you unsubscribed are kept.
Records of correction and removal requests: permanently, kept to the minimum (the company name or official record number), so a removed record does not come back.

How we protect it

Encrypted connections (HTTPS) for our website and services.
Access limited to the people who run the business, with two-factor sign-in on the accounts that hold personal information.
No full card or bank numbers on our systems: Stripe handles them.
As little data as we can manage, deleted on the schedule above.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information, we will tell you and the authorities as the law requires.

Your choices and requests

Stop marketing email. Reply "no thanks" to any of our emails, use the unsubscribe option your mail app shows, use the unsubscribe page on our website, or email us. We act on it within 2 business days.
See, correct or delete your information. Email hello@fileherald.com. We confirm the request comes from you, normally by replying to the email address concerned. We never ask for sensitive identification such as a Social Security number or a copy of a driver's license. We answer within 30 days, and never later than 45 days. Some information we must keep, such as invoices for tax purposes and the suppression-list entry that stops us emailing you.
Opt out of any sale or sharing. We do not sell personal information or share it for targeted advertising. If any law treats something we do as a sale of your personal information, email us and we will stop it for your information.
Use an agent. Someone you authorize in writing may make a request for you.
Appeal. If we decline a request, reply to our answer and ask us to look again. We will reply within 45 days. If you are still unhappy, you can contact your state's attorney general.
Global Privacy Control. We do not track visitors, so there is nothing for this browser signal to switch off; where a law asks us to treat it as an opt-out request, we do.

Making a request will never affect the price or quality of our service to you.

The public-records data in our service

What it covers

Our subscriptions deliver official public records about companies, published by government offices: UCC financing statements that name companies as debtors, and building permits that name contracting companies. Our Sources page lists every source, and our Data Use and Sources Policy explains how records are prepared. We build the service to leave out individuals:

UCC filings against people are dropped: a contractor or debtor whose name has no company marker (such as LLC, Inc. or Corp.) is treated as a person and left out before anything is stored. We do not yet check names against company registers.
When a property owner on a permit is a person, we never show the owner's name or mailing or street address; the job site keeps only its city, ZIP code and the official record number.
We never add personal contact details such as personal mobile numbers or home addresses, and we never collect identification numbers such as Social Security numbers or dates of birth, even where a source file contains them.
We do not include records from California or Vermont.

Some records can still hold a little information about a person: for example, a company named after its owner ("Smith Excavating LLC"), or, on plans that include contact details, a company's main business phone line or a shared business email address such as info@ or sales@, taken from the company's own website.

Ask for a record to be corrected or removed

Anyone can ask, whether you are a business or a person, a customer or not. Email hello@fileherald.com with the company name or official record number, and tell us what is wrong or that you want the record removed. We do not ask for sensitive identification. If you ask us to remove a whole company from the service, we may check that you act for it, for example by asking you to write from the company's email domain. If a record names you personally, we remove it on request.

What happens next:

We act on your request within 10 business days, and usually sooner.
A removal applies across the whole service: future digests, files, samples and public pages, for every customer.
We send a removal notice to customers who already received the record. Our terms require them to delete it, or stop using it for outreach, within 30 days.
We keep a minimal note (the company name or official record number) so the record does not come back the next time the source publishes it.
If the error is ours, we correct it. If the error is in the official record itself, we tell you which office can correct it, and we can hold the record back meanwhile.

Removing a record from our service does not remove it from the government office's records. Only that office can change its own records.

We do not sell personal information

We do not sell personal information about our customers, website visitors or the people we email, and we do not share it for targeted advertising. The data we sell is about companies, and we design it to leave out personal information. If you think a record still identifies you, ask us to remove it and we will. If any state law treats part of our service as a sale of your personal information, the same email opts you out.

State privacy laws

Several US states give their residents rights over their personal information, such as the rights to see, correct and delete it and to opt out of its sale. Some of these laws apply only to businesses above certain size or data thresholds, and some treat information about people acting in a business role differently. We do not decide whether to help you based on which of these laws apply to us: we honor access, correction, deletion and opt-out requests from anyone, wherever they live, in the way this notice describes.

Children

Our service is for businesses and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16.

Where information is processed

We are based in the United States. Our service providers may process information in the United States and in other countries, under their own safeguards.

Changes to this notice

When we change this notice we post the new version here with a new date. If a change matters to our customers, we also tell them by email before it takes effect.

Contact

Fileherald
500 Brickell Ave, Unit 2907, Miami, FL 33131
Email: hello@fileherald.com