Privacy Policy

• Account: your name, email, and a securely hashed password (we never store your password in plain text).
• Sublease details: the address, dates, rent, and terms you enter, plus the name and email of anyone who opens the invite link you share.
• Identity and bank details, if you are the one being paid: before the payment company can send you money, it has to verify who you are. That check is required by law of anyone who receives payments, and it is not a credit check. On our setup page you type your legal name, date of birth, the last four digits of your Social Security number, your home address, your phone number, and your bank routing and account numbers. Your browser hands those values straight to Stripe. They never reach an Avouch server, we never store them, and no one here can see them. Section 10 explains exactly how that works. What we keep afterward is only the name of your bank, the last four digits of the account, and Stripe's reference codes.
• If you open an invite link: a sublease invite can be shared with more than one person, and whoever finishes first takes the place. If you open one, we store the name and email you enter, and, if you connect a bank to hold your place, the name of your bank, the last four digits, and Stripe's references. If someone else finishes first, we disconnect your payment method at Stripe so nothing can be charged to it, and we keep the rest of that record so we can show what happened. You can ask us to delete it.
• Signature record: your typed e-signature, the date and time, your IP address and browser, and a fingerprint of the exact terms you signed, kept as legal evidence that the agreement is authentic.
• Condition photos: the photos you upload. For JPEG photos we strip the embedded metadata, including GPS location, before storing the file, and we keep only a small summary (camera make and model, the device-reported capture time, and whether location data was present, never the coordinates themselves). Photos in other formats (such as PNG or HEIC) are stored as you send them and may retain whatever metadata your camera saved. The timestamp we rely on is always the time our server receives the photo.
• Landlord approval: if you choose to upload proof of your landlord's consent, we store that file and show it only to the parties to your sublease.
• Messages to us: emails and support requests you send.
• Usage and security logs: events such as logins, signatures, and invites, with timestamps and IP address, to keep accounts secure and understand the flow.

To provide the service, send you transactional email (confirmations, invites, password resets, and reminders about your own in-progress sublease, which you can ask us to stop), keep accounts secure and prevent fraud and abuse, meet legal and tax obligations, and understand and improve how Avouch works. We do not sell your data or use it for third-party advertising.

Service providers that help us run Avouch process data on our behalf, under contract and only as needed: database and file-storage hosting (Supabase), email delivery (Resend), application hosting (Vercel), error monitoring (Sentry), and payments and bank account connections (Stripe).

Stripe is different from the others in one respect. When you set up to receive rent, your identity and bank details travel from your browser straight to Stripe without passing through us, and Stripe uses them to meet legal duties of its own to verify the people it pays. For that data Stripe is acting on its own account and not only on ours, and Stripe's privacy policy applies to it alongside this one.

We also disclose information when required by law or to protect rights and safety, and we may transfer data as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of the business. We do not sell your personal information.

We use as many as five first-party cookies, all of them http-only, which means scripts on the page cannot read them. One keeps you signed in for seven days. One holds your place for six hours while you work through a sublease invite before you have an account. The other three last thirty days each, and we set them only if they apply to you: they record how you first reached Avouch, meaning the domain of the site that linked you and the page you landed on, any campaign tag or partner code in the link, and any creator referral code you entered. We keep only the domain of the referring site, never the full address you came from, and we record it once on your first visit rather than following you around.

We also use Vercel Analytics to count page views. It is cookieless: it does not set cookies, fingerprint your device, or follow you across sites, and it shows us aggregate counts rather than individual browsing.

We set no third-party advertising or tracking cookies, we run no ad networks, and we do not sell or share this information. Because we do no cross-site tracking, we do not respond to browser Do Not Track signals; there is nothing for them to turn off.

Passwords are hashed with scrypt; your session rides in a signed, http-only cookie that scripts cannot read; traffic is encrypted in transit (HTTPS); access to a sublease is limited to its parties and to whoever holds the invite link the lister shared, which is why that link shows the full agreement and the move-in photos and should be sent only to people you would hand the place to; and we rate-limit sensitive actions to slow abuse.

The most sensitive values the flow touches never reach us in the first place: we do not store Social Security numbers, full bank account or routing numbers, or card numbers anywhere, and our error monitoring runs only on our servers, so it cannot see anything you type into the payment setup form.

No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable measures to protect your data. If personal information about you is exposed in a security breach, we will email you at the address on your account, and notify any regulator that requires it, as promptly as the law requires and without unreasonable delay once we know what happened and what was affected. We will tell you what was involved, what we have done about it, and what you should do.

We keep your data for as long as your account exists, and we keep the record of a sublease after that. We do not delete data automatically on a schedule. The agreement, the signature evidence, the condition photos, the payment history, the security logs, and the copies of the emails we sent, one of which contains the full signed agreement, are the record of a real transaction between two people, and either side may need them later, so we keep them. Your contact details persist inside those records. You can ask us to delete what we hold at any time by emailing support@avouchsublease.com, and we will delete everything we are not required to keep.

You can delete your account yourself from your account settings once you have no active subleases. That deletes your login, and on your past subleases it replaces your name with “Former user” and removes your email. It does not delete the subleases themselves. The agreement, the signature evidence, the condition photos, the payment history, the name of your bank and the last four digits of the account, and the security logs all stay, because the other party to those agreements has a claim on that record too. If you set up to receive rent, the Stripe account opened in your name, and the identity details you gave Stripe, stay with Stripe under Stripe's own rules and are not ours to delete. You may also email support@avouchsublease.com to request access to, correction of, or deletion of your data, or to ask a question. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights over your personal information; we will honor those that apply to you.

Avouch is for adults. It is not directed to anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect data from children.

Avouch and its providers are United States companies and your data is processed in the United States. If you use Avouch from elsewhere, you consent to that processing.

If you are paying rent. Your bank or card is connected on Stripe's own hosted page, not ours. Stripe collects those details directly and Avouch never sees them. From Stripe we store the bank or card name, the last four digits, and Stripe's references for the saved method and the payment authorization.

If you are receiving rent. The setup page here is ours, so it is worth being precise about what happens on it. You type your legal name, date of birth, the last four digits of your Social Security number, your home address, your phone number, and your bank routing and account numbers into a form on an Avouch page. That identity check is required by law of anyone who receives payments, and it is not a credit check. When you submit, code published by Stripe and running in your browser sends those values from your browser straight to Stripe and hands back two one-time reference codes. Only those two codes are sent to us. The numbers themselves never reach an Avouch server, are never written to our database or our logs, and cannot be seen by anyone here. Using the codes, we open a Stripe account in your name to receive your rent. What we store from all of this is the Stripe reference for that account, the name of your bank, and the last four digits of the account.

The one-time contract fee. The lister pays it on Stripe's hosted page. We never see the card number.

Where the money goes. Rent is charged to the person paying and lands in the receiving person's own Stripe account. It never sits in an Avouch account, and we never hold a security deposit or escrow of any kind.

We may update this policy; material changes will be posted here with a new date. For any privacy question or data request, email support@avouchsublease.com.