What we store

Your email address

When you post a review, we send a code to your school email to check that you're a student. We use the address for that one message and then it's gone. What we keep is a one-way cryptographic hash of it, mixed with a secret key that isn't stored in our database.

That hash can't be turned back into your address. We can't email you, we can't tell anyone who you are, and if a court or anyone else demands your address, we can't produce it. We don't have it. All the hash does is stop the same person reviewing one landlord twenty times.

Your review

Reviews are stored with no author attached. There's no profile, no post history, and nothing linking two reviews to the same person in any readable way.

The link in your confirmation email is the only way to delete your own review. We can't resend it, because we don't know which review is yours.

What we can't protect you from

If you include the address you rented and the years you lived there, your landlord knows who was in that unit at that time. No amount of anonymity on our end changes that.

The address field is optional for exactly this reason. If naming the place would put you in a difficult position, especially if you're still on the lease, leave it out. Your review still counts.

One more thing we'd rather say than have you assume: the companies that host the site and carry its traffic keep ordinary server logs, and those include IP addresses. We don't use them to work out who wrote what, and nothing in our database ties an IP address to a review. But the logs exist, they're kept under those companies' own policies, and they aren't ours to delete.