Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how PestPin ("we") collects, uses, and shares information when you use our website.

Information we collect

• Quote requests: name, contact details, location, and details about your pest issue, which you submit to be matched with a provider.
• Provider accounts: the email address you sign up with and your password, which we keep only in a one-way scrambled form. We cannot read your password, and we never email it to you.
• Claim submissions: when you claim a listing we collect your role at the business, a phone number we can use to verify you control it, and any verification detail you type in. The phone number is used to check the claim, not to market to you.
• Claim document photos. Proving ownership by photo is one option, never the only one: you can prove it by business email domain, by a DNS or file record on your domain, or by a one-time code to the phone the regulator published, and skip documents entirely. If you do photograph your license certificate, that photo is sent to our AI vision provider (OpenRouter) under the same no-retention settings described below, is processed in memory, and is never written to our database or any image store. What we keep is what the reader found: the document type, business name, license number, state, and whether those matched the public record. Those fields are attached to your pending claim and emailed to our own review team, because a document photo can be forged and a person still makes the decision.
• Provider billing: your lead-credit balance and the charge history behind it (top-ups, lead charges, refunds, and the billing provider's payment reference). Payment pages are hosted by Dodo Payments, our merchant of record, so your card number never reaches a PestPin server and we never store it.
• Consent evidence: when you submit a request, we store the exact consent wording you agreed to, together with the IP address and browser identifier (user agent) at that moment. This is the legal record that contact permission was given, and it is kept for the period the law allows contact-permission claims, even if you later ask us to delete other data.
• Usage data: pages viewed and general analytics (collected via Google Analytics with IP anonymization, only after you accept analytics cookies).
• Our own page counters: we also keep a simple count of how the site is used. Each count records only the type of page (for example "a city page" or "the request form") and the time it happened. There is no cookie, and we do not record your IP address, your browser details, or the exact page address with these counts. They cannot identify you or follow you between pages, so they run whether or not you accept analytics cookies.

How we use information

• To offer your quote request to eligible pest control providers, one at a time.
• To operate, improve, and secure the service.
• To communicate with you about your request.

Lead sharing & consent

When you submit a request, you consent to any provider that accepts it contacting you by phone, text, and/or email about that request. PestPin never sells your request as a shared lead or distributes it to several providers at once.

If you name a provider, we offer the request to that provider first. We do not offer it to someone else unless you separately consent to fallback matching. If you do not name a provider, or you consent to fallback matching, we may offer the request to eligible providers sequentially when an offer is declined, expires, or cannot be completed. An offer preview can include limited request information, such as the pest, city, and first name; full contact details are disclosed to the provider that accepts. More than one provider may receive a limited preview over time, but never at the same time through PestPin. A provider that has already received information may retain and use it to handle the request under its own privacy practices; PestPin cannot recall data already delivered.

The private tracking link lets you correct contact details or cancel an unaccepted request. Cancellation closes open PestPin offers and stops automated matching, but does not delete the audit record. Once a provider accepts and receives your contact details, online correction and cancellation close because PestPin cannot recall information already delivered.

Photo pest identifier

Our free pest identifier lets you upload a photo to get a careful best guess and a clear next step, including when the right next step is a wildlife, plant, or public-health specialist rather than a pest control company. We designed it to be privacy-preserving:

• Your photo is not stored. It is processed in memory to generate the result and then discarded. We do not save it to our database, our servers, or any image store, and we do not use it to train any model.
• Metadata is removed before upload. Your browser resizes the image and strips embedded metadata, including any GPS location, before it ever leaves your device.
• AI processing subprocessor. To analyze the image we send it to our AI vision provider (OpenRouter) with provider data collection denied and per-request zero-data-retention enforcement. That restricts model processing to endpoints whose declared policy does not retain the photo or use it for training. OpenRouter may keep request metadata such as token counts and latency under its own policy, but not the photo content under these request settings. The photo, note, and narrative result are returned to your browser and are not retained by PestPin. For quality and safety monitoring, we may log a random analysis ID with coarse fields such as which category we suggested, how confident the result was, which kind of professional we pointed you to, how long the result took, and whether you marked it helpful. Those quality records do not contain the photo, note, narrative result, network address, contact information, or account ID. Feedback requires a signed, expiring result token and can be counted only once. For abuse prevention, we keep a rolling request count in a non-unique counter slot produced by a keyed digest that rotates for every limit window. We do not store the network address or a stable address-derived hash. Slots are shared, reused, and rotate rather than acting as a stable per-address history.
• It is a pest tool, not a people tool. Please don't upload photos of people, skin, injuries, or bites. The identifier does not perform facial or biometric recognition. For a suspected venomous bite or sting, contact Poison Control at 1-800-222-1222 or seek medical care.

Business listings & provider data

Our source-linked pest control license-record directory is built from public state records published by state regulatory agencies (for example, departments of agriculture and structural pest control boards). For each listed business we may show the business name, license or registration number, license status, the city or county it is licensed in, and, where the public record includes it, a business phone or website. We may add contact details from public business-data sources. We did not obtain this information directly from the business, and a listing does not imply any relationship with or endorsement by PestPin.

If you are a listed business, or the person named in a sole-proprietor listing, you can ask us to correct, claim, or remove your listing at any time using our listing update & removal form, or by emailing hello@pestpin.com. To prevent a competitor from tampering with a listing, we verify requests before acting and act on verified requests within 45 days.

When we write to a listed business. We may email a listed business to tell it that its page exists and how to claim it. We send that notice only to the address the state regulator published in the license record, never to an address gathered from the business's own website, and never more than a first message and two follow-ups. Every one of them carries a one-click unsubscribe link, and using it stops the rest. A small number of earlier notices, sent before we tightened this in August 2026, reached addresses found on a business's own website; that no longer happens, and any address that asks to stop is suppressed.

Dataset licensing. We may license the business directory dataset to business customers, for example industry software companies, suppliers, or insurers. A licensed copy contains only the public-record business fields described above: business name, license or registration number and status, issuing state, the official source link, and, where the regulator itself publishes them, the business phone, website, and contact email. It never includes homeowner information, quote requests, provider account details, or any email address gathered from a business's own website. A business removed from the directory through the process above is excluded from future licensed copies.

Service providers

We keep the list of outside companies that handle your data short. These are the ones we use:

• Dodo Payments (billing and merchant of record): hosts the payment page and processes provider payments.
• Brevo (email): sends the transactional email behind quote requests, offers, verification, and account notices.
• Railway (hosting): runs the application and the database.
• Cloudflare (network and security): sits in front of the site and filters abusive traffic.
• Google Analytics (traffic measurement): loads only after you accept analytics cookies.
• Twilio (phone verification): sends one-time passcodes to a provider's phone number when they verify ownership of a listing.
• OpenRouter (photo identification and claim document reading): analyzes an uploaded photo under the no-retention settings described above.

Your privacy rights

We do not sell consumers' personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. There is no advertising network, data broker, or lead resale in our system: a quote request goes to one pest control company at a time, and only after that company accepts it. The one thing we may license is the public-record business directory described under Business listings & provider data, which is regulator-published business data, never consumer data.

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• Know and access: tell you what personal information we hold about you, where it came from, and who we shared it with, and send you a copy.
• Delete: delete your personal information. We delete what we can and tell you what we kept, because some payment and audit records have to stay where the law requires or permits it, and because a company that already received your request under your consent holds that copy under its own privacy practices.
• Correct: fix personal information that is wrong.
• Opt out of sale or sharing: for consumers there is nothing to opt out of, because we do not sell or share consumers' personal information. If you are a listed business, the Business listings section above explains what a licensed dataset copy contains and how removal works. We also honor Global Privacy Control signals: if your browser or extension sends one, we treat it as an opt-out and analytics never loads.

No penalty for asking. We will not deny you service, charge you a different price, or give you a lower level of service because you exercised a privacy right.

How to make a request. Use the personal data options on our listing and personal data request form (send me a copy, delete my personal data, correct my personal data), or email hello@pestpin.com. An authorized agent may submit a request on your behalf; we will ask for written permission from you and verify the agent's identity.

How we verify you. We match the email address on the request to the email address on the record, and we may email that address to confirm before we act. We do this so a stranger cannot pull or delete your information by typing your address. If we cannot match the request to a record, we tell you instead of guessing.

How long we take. We respond within 45 days. If a request is complicated and we need longer, we tell you why before that deadline.

Cookies and analytics

Essential cookies (sign-in and session) always run. Analytics is opt-in: Google Analytics does not load at all until you press Accept on the cookie banner. You can change your mind at any time with the Cookie Preferences control in the footer, which clears your stored choice and shows the banner again. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, analytics stays off and we do not prompt you. Our own page counters, described above, use no cookie and record only a page type and a time, so they are not covered by that choice.

Minimum age

The service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child under 13 gave us information, email hello@pestpin.com and we will delete it.

Assistants and apps that read PestPin

AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude can look up PestPin's public license records through a read-only connection. What the assistant sends us is the search itself: a city and pest, a company name or license number, or a phone number to check. No account is created and no conversation is shared with us. We keep a count of which tool was used, which assistant used it (for example Claude or ChatGPT), which pest, which state and, when the search matched one of our city pages, which city. Nothing else from the search is kept: the company name, the phone number and any place we could not match are not stored. ChatGPT also attaches a few details to each search, such as a rough location and anonymous IDs. We do not store or use any of them, beyond noting that the search came from ChatGPT. The connection cannot send a request for help or agree to anything on a person's behalf; a request is always made by the person, on this site, with their own consent.

Data retention & security

We retain information only as long as needed to provide the service and meet legal obligations, and we apply reasonable safeguards to protect it.

Contact

Questions about this policy? Email us at hello@pestpin.com, or use the contact form, which needs no email client and reaches the same people. To exercise a privacy right, the request form above is faster, because it opens a tracked case with the 45-day deadline attached.