Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 2026

Who we are

Terrible Utah Landlords is a tenant advocacy resource offering free tools and information for renters dealing with a difficult landlord.

Not intended for children

This site is intended for adults. It is not directed at, and we do not knowingly collect information from, anyone under the age of 18.

What we collect

Contact form and comments: If you choose to leave a comment or contact us, you may voluntarily include identifying information such as your name or email. This is never required, and we don't use it beyond responding to you.

Lease scan survey data: If you use the free lease scan, we ask you to complete a short anonymous survey about your housing situation — including your ZIP code, type of home, rent range, household size, income bracket, race, ethnicity, and gender identity. Most of these questions require you to make an active selection, though "prefer not to say" is always offered as a valid answer. Questions about disability status, citizenship status, and use of a housing voucher or rental assistance program (such as Section 8) are always fully optional and can be skipped entirely. None of these responses are linked to your name.

Optional landlord information: When using the lease scan, you may optionally tell us the name and city of your landlord or property management company. This is separate from your uploaded lease document and is used only to help us identify patterns across multiple tenants, as described below.

Lease documents: If you use the free lease scan and opt in to our research project, we retain a redacted copy of your uploaded lease in secure, encrypted storage. Before analysis, tenant and landlord names, property addresses, and other personal identifiers are automatically stripped from the document — this happens regardless of whether you provide the optional landlord information above. Access to stored lease data is limited to the specific staff who need it for analysis, and all reported findings are based on aggregate data only.

Payment information (paid lease scan): If you choose the paid option to skip the survey, your payment is processed by a third-party payment processor (Stripe). We do not receive or store your card number — the processor handles that directly, under its own privacy and security practices. Your uploaded file is held temporarily while you check out and is deleted after your scan is processed. If you don't finish paying, we delete it within about a day. For paid scans, we keep your results page so your results link keeps working, but we do not keep the redacted text of your lease and we do not use paid scans in our research.

Landlord reviews: If you submit a review, the following is published on the site once it is approved: the landlord or company name, the city, your rating, the year you rented (if you gave it), any issue tags you chose to show, and the experience you wrote. Don't include information in a review that you wouldn't want made public.

Private information with a review: When you submit a review you may also answer a private checklist about other things that happened, and optional questions about you (race, ethnicity, gender identity, income range, household size, type of home, rent range, use of a housing voucher, and whether you have a disability). All of these are optional. They are never shown on the site. We store them separately from the published review, they are not linked to your name, and we use them only in combined statistics. We do not ask about citizenship status on the review form.

Contact messages: If you write to us through the contact form or by email, we collect your email address, your name if you give it, and what you write. An AI tool (Anthropic's Claude) reads each message to sort it and draft a reply, so that a person can focus on the messages that need attention. Simple general questions may get an approved automatic answer. Anything about your situation, a payment, a review, or your data is read and answered by a person. Please don't include Social Security numbers, bank details, or your full lease in a message.

Review reference code: After you submit a review, we give you a one-time reference code. We store only a scrambled (hashed) version of it, not your name or email, so we cannot look up or recover a lost code. You can use the code to remove your review and delete the private answers that go with it, as described below.

Bot protection and server logs

To block automated spam, our forms use Cloudflare Turnstile, which may process your IP address and information about your browser to tell people from bots. We also limit how often the same connection can submit forms.

Like most websites, our web server keeps standard logs that include IP addresses, pages requested, and browser details. We use them for security and troubleshooting, and they are kept for a limited time and then deleted. We do not link server logs to survey answers, lease scans, or reviews.

How we use collected information

• We use aggregated, anonymized survey, lease, and review data to identify trends in predatory leasing practices, hidden fees, and renter complaints across different communities and demographics in Utah.
• We may publish these trends in reports, visualizations, or advocacy materials — never with names, addresses, or specific documents attached.
• Our research reports are aggregate only and never name a landlord or property management company. Landlord names are used only on the site itself, in the reviews that reviewers choose to publish.
• We use contact messages only to respond to you and to improve how we answer common questions.
• We never sell your data. We share it only with the service providers that help us run the site, listed below.

Landlord reviews and disputes

Reviews and complaints on this site are submitted directly by users and reflect their own experiences and opinions — we do not independently verify each claim before publication. If you are a landlord or property manager and believe a review about you is false or violates our terms, contact us with the specific listing and your concern. We will review disputed content and may remove or update listings that violate our posting guidelines. Repeatedly reported content may be removed pending review.

Third-party services

We use Anthropic's Claude AI model to redact personal information from and analyze leases submitted through our lease scan tool. When you submit your lease, its content is sent to Anthropic's API for processing. We do not share your personal identifying information with Anthropic beyond what's contained in the lease document itself, and leases are processed according to Anthropic's own data handling practices for API usage.

We also rely on Stripe (payments), Cloudflare (bot protection), Amazon Web Services (hosting), and an email service provider that sends and receives our email. Each handles information under its own privacy and security practices.

Data security

Lease documents and survey data are stored using encryption at rest. Access to stored lease data is limited to the personnel who need it to conduct research analysis. While we take reasonable steps to protect your information, no method of storage or transmission is 100% secure.

Your rights and choices

You can opt out of our data use policy at any time by using the paid version of the lease scan instead of the free version. If you've already submitted a lease or survey response and would like it deleted, contact us and we will remove it from our records.

Removing a review: Go to Remove my review and enter your reference code. We will take the review off the site and delete the private checklist answers and optional answers about you that came with it. Removal can't be undone.

Utah residents may have additional rights under the Utah Consumer Privacy Act (UCPA), including the right to know what personal data is collected and to request its deletion.

Website analytics and fonts

We may collect general site usage data (for example, page views and device type). This site loads its fonts from Google Fonts, which means your browser requests them from Google's servers, and Google may receive your IP address when it does.

Embedded content and links from other websites

Links on this site may lead to other websites (such as official Utah court resources). Embedded or linked content behaves the same as if you visited that site directly — those sites may collect data, use cookies, or track your interaction with them independently of this site's practices.

How long we retain your data

We retain anonymous survey responses and de-identified lease data for as long as necessary to support our mission of tracking housing trends and advocating for tenant protections in Utah. Contact messages are kept for up to 12 months and then deleted. Published reviews stay on the site until they are removed. The private answers that come with a review are kept for research for as long as the review exists, and are deleted if the review is removed with its reference code. Apart from the server logs described above, we do not retain personally identifiable information — lease documents stored for analysis are stripped of names, addresses, and other direct identifiers as part of our processing.

Contact us about privacy

If you have questions about this policy, want to dispute a review, or want your data deleted, contact us through our contact page.