Privacy
Version 26, Oct 16, 2026.
Who this is
Dowser (dowserintel.com) is operated by Dowser Intelligence LLC, an Illinois limited liability company. Write to tobias@dowserintel.com about anything in this policy, and Dowser answers within thirty days.
What Dowser holds about you
Your account: the email address you sign in with, your name if you give one, the organization you belong to and your role in it, the terms version you accepted and when, your digest days and hour, the territories assigned to you, the records you watch and how your alerts about them reach you, your prospecting focus where it is your own rather than your organization's (one you set, or the one you had when an admin changed your organization's: which businesses your lists, the map, search, the downloads from your lists and your digest show you, while the daily feed follows your organization's), and what your organization writes about records (statuses and their notes, notes on businesses, the Team note, routes and their notes, home bases, and territories' notes); a status, a note on a business, the Team note and a route's note each keep the member who wrote it and when. A saved route keeps the settings it was built with, who it is assigned to, the day it is planned for and whether they have opened it, when it was marked done, and a history of who saved, changed, renamed, assigned, unassigned and marked it done, and who changed its note, and when; Dowser records no position and no visit at a stop. Every member of your organization can open its saved routes; a route someone else opens starts from their own home base, the organization's address or where they are, and never shows or links the home base of the member who built it, or how far the route runs from it. A route's maker or an administrator can delete it, and then the route and its stops are gone; its history stays in your organization's audit log, without the route's stops, its name or its note. A note marked private is shown only to the member who wrote it, and nothing your organization writes about records is shown to another organization. Your name, if you give one, and your email address are shown to the other members of your organization, where the organization's pages name who covers a territory and who belongs to it, and to no one else. For your organization, its prospecting focus, where new members start, and the answer it gave at checkout to what it sells. For your organization, a record of the leads its digests have carried, each with the member it went to, so that no digest sends a lead twice or calls one previously reported that was not; a member comes off it when they leave. For your organization, a record of which records it took in the last 30 days and by which route (a download or Route Builder): on a monthly plan so that its record budget counts each record once, and on a yearly plan to tell when it takes more records in a day than a month's budget for its seats, which decides whether the yearly plan can be refunded and whether a change to it earns a credit; it names no member, and each record comes off it 30 days after it last counted. When a yearly plan takes records in bulk, that way or by fetching the full daily feed, your organization's record keeps the day and why of the first time in each paid period, with the day that period began, and of the first time of all, deleted with your organization's records, and the audit log names the member who took them, when a member did. When you ask for help: what your request is about, its subject, your messages and Dowser's replies, any screenshot you add (its metadata, such as where a photo was taken, removed before it is kept), and, to help answer it, your organization's plan, the page you asked from, the version of Dowser running and your browser, with your email address for the replies; a screenshot is deleted 90 days after its request closes. When you report a problem with a record: the record and what is wrong, what you suggest and how you know, the page you reported from, the version of Dowser running and your browser, with your email address for the one email that says what was decided. When an admin invites someone to your organization: the address invited, recorded in your organization's audit log; and when the admin chooses the territory they will cover, the address and that territory, kept until the person joins, the invitation is revoked, or 31 days pass. When someone becomes a member of your organization with no territory while your organization requires every member to have one, Dowser emails your organization's admins that member's name and email address, so that one of them assigns a territory. Your use: an audit log of the actions your account takes on Dowser (a page viewed, an export downloaded, a setting changed), with the time, kept with your organization's records; a log of the digests and alerts Dowser sent you, kept 90 days; a record of each notice of a change to this policy that Dowser mailed you (its version and the day it named, when it was sent, the address it went to, whether the mail service took it, with the service's reference or its refusal, and how many tries it took), kept with your organization's records; your acceptance of the terms, with the time and the network address it came from, kept while your account exists and afterwards for as long as it may need to be proved. A sample request: the email you give, your answer to "Where do you sell?", when, and the network address and browser that made it; and for each browser that opens its sample link, the random number in that browser's cookie (see Cookies), when it first and last opened the link, and how many times. The network address and browser are kept 14 days, to bound the sends, and a request that brought no sample link goes then too; the rest is kept until 180 days after its sample link was last used, or for as long as the address belongs to a member of an organization on Dowser, and then it goes too, your answer and the link's views with it. An address that asked for no more sample mail is kept, so that none goes. Server logs: each request's path, time, status and network address, kept 14 days for operations. Nothing else is collected, and nothing is bought from or sold to anyone.
Who handles it for Dowser
Clerk signs you in and holds your credentials; Dowser never stores a password, and a sign-in with Google or Microsoft shares only your address and name with Dowser. If an admin uploads your organization's logo, Clerk stores it as your organization's image, and it is deleted with your organization. Stripe takes payment and holds your card; Dowser sees the subscription and its invoices, never the card. Resend delivers Dowser's mail (the digest, sample links, account mail) and reports back whether it bounced or was marked as spam, which stops further mail to that address. Dowser keeps each notice Clerk and Resend send it (a change to your account, a delivery report) for 14 days, and afterwards only the notice's identifying number, for 90 days, so that none is applied twice; of Stripe's notices it keeps only the identifying number, for 90 days. The U.S. Census Bureau's geocoder places an address you give as a home base, and the address an admin gives as your organization's, for route planning; Dowser asks it from its server, so your browser never speaks to it, and keeps its answer only with the home base or the organization's address it placed. It also places the business addresses municipalities publish on their agendas without a map point, so those applications show on the map and in Route Builder; these are public records, nothing about you. It also places the address of a business licensed by Chicago whose premises lie outside Chicago, or whose Chicago and state licenses disagree on its municipality or ZIP code, so that its page shows the municipality, county and ZIP code its premises are in; this too is a public record, nothing about you. It also places the addresses of the licensed premises on the State of Illinois's license list, so those businesses show on the map and in Route Builder; these too are public records, nothing about you. When you give Route Builder another address to start one route from, the geocoder places it the same way, for that route only: Dowser never stores the address or its answer and never writes either to a log, and a route you save from it keeps its stops and not the address. When you ask Route Builder to start from your current location, your browser sends Dowser its position for that one route: it chooses and orders the stops and is then discarded (Dowser never stores it and never writes it to a log), and a route you save from it keeps its stops and not your location. When you open a route in Google Maps, your browser gives Google the route's start and its stops, and Google's own terms then apply; a route from your current location names no start, and Google Maps starts it where you are. Adobe Fonts serves the typefaces Dowser's pages are set in: your browser fetches them from Adobe, which receives your network address, the name of your browser and Dowser's address (dowserintel.com, never the page you are on), and counts the page view for the fonts' license; it sets no cookie. Hostinger hosts the server Dowser runs on. Backups of Dowser's database are encrypted on that server, before they leave it, and kept in a private repository on GitHub. No advertising network, no analytics service and no tracking pixel runs on Dowser's pages.
Cookies
Dowser sets the cookies sign-in needs: Clerk's session cookies, a token that protects forms from forgery, and for a minute when a page sends you to sign in, a note that stops the sign-in page from sending you round in a loop. The page a sample link opens sets one more, a random number kept a year that counts the link's distinct viewers. There are no others; there is nothing to consent to, so there is no banner.
People in the records
The businesses, owners, officers and permit contacts in Dowser's records come from public records: Chicago's license records and building permits, with the name, role, city, state and ZIP code of each contact a permit lists, the board and commission agendas of the municipalities Dowser reads, and the State of Illinois's license records, reprinted as published: a name, a title, the licensed premises. For each license on the state's list, Dowser also keeps when it first appeared on the list and when it left it, with its number, its premises and the business's name as the list showed them then, so that a business's page can say a license is no longer on the state's latest list. For a business applying for a Chicago license, Dowser also keeps the City of Chicago's public food inspection records of it: the business's name, its premises, the kind of facility, the license number applied for, and the date, kind and result of each inspection, never the inspector's findings. Dowser adds no home address, no personal phone number and no profile, and does not read social networks, review sites, job listings or data brokers. If you are named in a public license record and want to know what Dowser shows, write to the address above; Dowser reprints the public record and cannot alter the municipality's or the state's publication.
Your choices
You can read and change your account details on your account page, turn the digest off, and leave an organization; an administrator can remove your membership. When you leave, or are removed, your membership, your digest settings, the records you watch and your alert settings, your home base, your territory assignments and your private notes are deleted, as is your own prospecting focus; the routes you built stay with the organization, without your home base, the routes assigned to you stay with it, no longer assigned to anyone, and so does the record of the leads your digests carried, without you; your statuses, your notes on businesses that are not private and a Team note you wrote stay, with your name and "(former member)"; and your support requests and problem reports stay with your organization, without your email address, as does the record of the policy notices Dowser mailed you. When your account is deleted, you leave every organization and the rest of what is yours is deleted too (your saved views, your territory requests, the log of digests sent to you and the record of the policy notices mailed to you), except your acceptance of the terms. When your organization stops subscribing, its statuses and notes, routes, home bases, territories, digest record, record of the records it took, support requests and problem reports, and audit log are deleted one year after the end of its last paid period, and its members, their digest settings, their watched records and alert settings with them, their own prospecting focus, and the record of the policy notices mailed to them. The organization at Clerk is deleted then too, with its memberships; your own sign-in account stays with Clerk until it is deleted, which you can ask for by writing to the address above. Billing records stay with Stripe for as long as the law requires, and Dowser's own stay for as long as the law requires too: the organization's name, plan and seats, its Stripe IDs, its paid-through and purge dates, and its contact credits and purchases. Its settings stay on that record too, naming no one: among them its prospecting focus with its Makers and Resellers boxes, and the answer it gave at checkout to what it sells. To ask for a copy of what Dowser holds about you, or for its deletion before then, write to the address above.
Where it lives, and changes
Dowser runs on a server in Boston, Massachusetts, and its encrypted backups are kept in the United States too; the data stays there. When this policy changes, the version and the date at the top of this page change with it, and a change that widens what Dowser holds is announced by mail to every member of a subscribing organization before it takes effect.