Privacy Policy

We collect only what we need to check eligibility and file an appeal.

• Address or marina you enter. Used to determine which state and county would tax your vessel. We store it with a waitlist or eligibility record so we can follow up.
• Contact details. Name, email address, and phone number when you create an account or join a waitlist.
• Vessel and assessment details. Registration and hull numbers, year, make, model, length, engine type, mooring location, and the assessed value and tax amount from your county bill.
• Evidence you upload. Comparable listings, repair estimates, and your electronic signature on the agent authorization form.
• Payment details. Card information is collected and stored by Stripe. We never receive or store your full card number.
• Usage and advertising data. Pages viewed, actions taken, approximate location derived from your IP address, and advertising identifiers such as the fbclid parameter and UTM tags from links you click.

• Determining whether your jurisdiction taxes vessels and whether your assessment looks too high.
• Preparing, filing, and pursuing your appeal with the county assessor and assessment appeals board.
• Calculating and billing the contingency fee if, and only if, a reduction is verified.
• Sending you deadline reminders and status updates about your appeal.
• Measuring which advertising produces customers, so we do not waste money advertising in states that have no boat tax.
• Detecting fraud and meeting our legal and tax obligations.

We do not sell your personal information for money, and we do not use your vessel or assessment data for any purpose other than your appeal.

• County assessors and assessment appeals boards. Filing an appeal requires disclosing your identity, vessel, and evidence to the taxing authority. This is the core purpose of the service.
• Service providers. Supabase (authentication and file storage), MongoDB Atlas (database), Stripe (payments), and Vercel (hosting). Each is bound to use the data only to provide their service to us.
• Advertising platforms. We use the Meta pixel and Meta Conversions API to measure the results of Facebook and Instagram advertising. Where we send conversion events, contact details such as your email address are hashed before transmission. Under California law, this kind of cross-context advertising may be treated as “sharing,” and you can opt out at any time as described below.
• Geocoding services. Addresses you enter into the checker are sent to the US Census Bureau geocoder and the Photon geocoding service to resolve a state and county.

We use cookies that are strictly necessary to keep you signed in and to remember interface preferences. Unless you opt out, we also set advertising cookies, including Meta's _fbp cookie, and record the fbclid value from ad clicks in a first-party cookie so we can attribute a signup to the ad that produced it.

A notice appears on your first visit with a Decline option, and you can change your choice at any time using the “Privacy choices” link in the footer. Declining stops advertising events from both your browser and our servers, and does not affect your ability to check an address or file an appeal.

If you are a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the CPRA gives you the right to:

• Know what personal information we have collected about you and where it came from.
• Request a copy of that information.
• Request correction of inaccurate information.
• Request deletion, subject to our need to retain records for a filed appeal or for tax and legal compliance.
• Opt out of the sharing of your personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising.
• Not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights.

To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@boattaxappeal.com. We will verify your request against the details on your account before acting on it.

Appeal records are retained for as long as needed to pursue the appeal and then for the period required by tax and accounting rules. Waitlist entries are kept until you ask us to remove them or until we confirm that we will not be serving your area.

Uploaded documents and signatures are held in private storage buckets and are accessible only through short-lived signed links issued to you or to the agent working your case. Payment credentials never touch our servers.

The service is intended for vessel owners aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect information from children.

If we make a material change to this policy we will update the date above and, where the change affects how we use information you have already given us, notify you by email.

Questions about this policy can go to privacy@boattaxappeal.com, and anything else to hello@boattaxappeal.com. See also our terms of service.