Privacy

The short version

• No account, no login, no profile.
• Google Analytics counts visits, with the two settings that would feed Google’s cross-site advertising switched off. There is no advertising network, no advertising cookie and no advertising pixel on the site today.
• Nothing you type is kept unless you deliberately send a message through a form or sign up for the newsletter.
• Personal information is not sold, is not rented, and is not shared for cross-context behavioural advertising.
• Owner names are not published anywhere on this site, and the pipeline that builds it does not request the field they come from.

Owner names: deliberately excluded

PLUTO carries an owner name on every tax lot in New York City. For a large building that is usually a company. For a smaller residential building it is very often a private individual's name at their home address.

That field is not on this site. It is not hidden behind a click, not held back for a paid tier, and not stored in a file that could be exposed by a bug: the pipeline that builds this site does not request the column from the City's servers, so there is no copy of it anywhere in the system.

Three reasons.

• It adds nothing for the reader this site is for. A buyer needs to know what apartments in a building have sold for, how the building is classified and how big it is. Who personally owns it is not part of that question.
• Republication at scale is a different act from public availability. A record being obtainable one lot at a time from an agency is not the same as tens of thousands of individuals' names being assembled, indexed and served to search engines by a private publisher.
• It is a real liability with no offsetting benefit. Names attached to home addresses are the raw material of harassment and of fraud. There is no version of this site that is better for having them.

What is published about a building

The lot identifier, the street address as recorded by City Planning, the building classification, unit counts, storeys, year built and year altered, lot and building areas, assessed and exempt values, zoning district, coordinates, and the transfers recorded against the lot with the consideration, date, unit designation and instrument type as filed. Also the condominium name where the Digital Tax Map records one, which is the name of a legal entity rather than of a person.

A unit designation such as 14B identifies an apartment, not an occupant. No occupant name, no purchaser name and no seller name appears anywhere on this site.

What is collected about you

Three categories, and this is the complete list.

• Usage and device information. Page paths, an approximate location derived from your IP address, browser and device type, and referring site, collected by the analytics described below. The hosting platform also keeps ordinary, short-lived server logs, which include an IP address, in order to serve pages and defend against abuse.
• What you send through a form. Your name, the email address you give for a reply, the topic, the building you asked about where relevant, the page you sent it from, and the message itself.
• A newsletter address. The email address you enter, and the fact and date of the signup, held by the newsletter platform.

No special category data is asked for anywhere on this site, and no form here collects a financial account, a government identifier, a precise location or a telephone number.

What it is used for

The information described above is used to operate and improve this publication and the business that supports it. In practice that means:

• serving pages, keeping the site available, and defending it against abuse;
• measurement and analytics: understanding which pages and which buildings are read, and how people arrive;
• answering messages and enquiries, and keeping a record of having answered them;
• routing a building enquiry to the single named advertising partner for that area, where there is one, which the enquiry form states before anything is sent;
• sending the newsletter and other email to people who asked for it, and measuring whether those messages are opened and their links followed;
• selling, delivering and measuring advertising, sponsorship and affiliate arrangements on the terms set out on the disclosures page;
• producing aggregate and de-identified statistics, including audience figures shown to advertisers, which do not identify any reader;
• complying with law and enforcing the terms of use.

What is not done: personal information is not sold or rented, and it is not shared for cross-context behavioural advertising. Those are commitments rather than descriptions of the current position, and they are also in what is refused.

Enquiries and the contact form

There are two forms. The contact form sends a general message to the publisher and to nobody else. The building enquiry form sends a question about one building, and states on the form, before you send it, who will receive it: the publisher alone, or the publisher and a single named advertising partner for that area.

What you send through either form is delivered as an email by a commercial transactional email provider. It is not sold, not rented, not put out to a pool of bidders, and not added to the newsletter list. Signing up for the newsletter is a separate act you have to take yourself.

The newsletter

If you enter an email address in the signup, it is passed to a commercial newsletter platform which holds the list on this site's behalf and sends the messages. Nothing else about you is collected at signup, and the address is not stored on this site.

Newsletter messages record ordinary delivery and engagement information: whether a message was delivered, opened, and which links were followed. Every issue carries an unsubscribe link. Unsubscribing removes the address from the list, and you can also ask for its removal through the contact form.

Cookies, analytics and advertising

One cookie, set by Google Analytics, which counts visits and shows which buildings people actually look up. It records a page path, an approximate location worked out from your IP address, and your browser and device type.

Two settings are switched off deliberately rather than left at their defaults. Google signals is what would let Google join a visit here to its cross-site advertising identity for you, and ad personalization signals is what would let the data feed ad targeting. Both are disabled, so this stays first-party measurement and is not sharing for cross-context behavioural advertising.

There is no advertising script, no social embed, no session recording and no cross-site tracker on the site today. Advertising here is flat-fee and labelled, sold directly, and served from this site rather than by a network, which is why there is nothing to set a cookie. The search box downloads a static index file the first time you type in it; that file is the same for every reader and the request carries no identifier. Any content blocker will stop the analytics, and nothing on this site depends on it working.

If measurement, advertising or affiliate technology on this site changes in a way that changes what is collected, this policy is updated and the date at the top of the page moves with it.

Processors and disclosures

Service providers process information only to provide their service to this site, under contract, and are not permitted to use it for their own purposes. The categories are:

• a hosting and content delivery platform, which serves the pages;
• a transactional email provider, which delivers messages sent through the forms;
• a newsletter platform, which holds the mailing list and sends the newsletter;
• an analytics provider, described above.

Beyond those, the only other disclosure is a building enquiry passed to the single named advertising partner for that area, which the enquiry form states before you send it. Information may also be disclosed where the law requires it, to protect the rights or safety of a person, or as part of a sale or reorganisation of the publication, in which case this policy travels with it.

How long things are kept

• Server logs: a short period set by the hosting platform, then discarded.
• Analytics: the retention period configured in the analytics account, in aggregate form.
• Messages sent through a form: as long as it takes to answer, and to hold a record of having answered, and then no longer than needed for that purpose.
• A newsletter address: until you unsubscribe or ask for its removal.

Your rights

To make a request, write to privacy@apartmentsforsalenyc.com, or use the contact form. We answer to the address the request comes from, and we do not require an account or any other identifier to make one.

Depending on where you live you may have the right to know what personal information is held about you, to get a copy of it, to correct it, to delete it, to opt out of its sale or sharing or of profiling, to limit the use of sensitive information, and not to be treated differently for exercising any of these. Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia and Texas have these rights by statute, and readers elsewhere are given the same route in practice.

This site does not sell personal information and does not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, so there is no opt-out link to provide. It does not use personal information for profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects, and it does not collect sensitive personal information.

To exercise a right, use the contact form and choose the privacy topic. A request is answered within the period the applicable statute allows. Because this site holds no account and no profile, in practice a request usually means a copy or the deletion of a message you sent, or removal of a newsletter address. If a request is refused, the reason is given, along with how to appeal it.

Children

This site is a reference work for adults dealing with property. It is not directed at children, and no form here asks for an age. Personal information is not knowingly collected from a child under 13, and if it emerges that an address in the mailing list or a message in the inbox came from one, it is deleted.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS. Form submissions are delivered over an encrypted connection to the email provider and are not written to a database on this site, which means there is no store of reader messages here to breach. Credentials for the email and newsletter platforms are held as server-side environment variables and are never sent to the browser. No system is perfectly secure, and no guarantee of security is given.

Where data is processed

This publication is operated from the United States and its service providers process information in the United States and in other countries where they operate. If you are outside the United States, using this site or sending a message through it involves a transfer of information to the United States, where the legal protections may differ from those where you live. Providers used here rely on standard contractual clauses or an equivalent mechanism where one is required.

Requests to remove a record

This site publishes the City of New York's own records. It cannot alter them and it does not remove them on request, because a records publication that quietly deletes rows on demand is no longer a record of anything.

Two things it does.

• Correct a mistake made here. If this site has misread, misjoined or misprinted what the City published, that is a defect, and it is fixed and logged on the corrections page.
• Follow the agency. If the City's own file is wrong and the agency corrects it, this site carries the corrected version at the next refresh.

If you believe a page presents a specific and serious risk to your personal safety, send the page and the circumstances through the contact form and it is considered on its merits.

Changes to this policy

This policy may be updated as the publication changes: new features, new service providers, new commercial arrangements, or a change in the law. The current version is always the one on this page, and the review date at the top of it shows when it last changed. Where a change is material, the date is what marks it. Continuing to use the site after a change means accepting the policy as it then stands.

Contact

Privacy questions, access requests and safety concerns go through the contact form, which asks for a name, an address to reply to, a topic and a message, and nothing else.