Who we are
SignalBrief ("we", "us") sends weekly competitive briefs to local service businesses, such as dental practices, med spas, auto repair shops, law and accounting firms, and home-service companies. Contact: dylan@thesignalbrief.com, 229 Chrystie St, New York, NY 10002.
Information about competitors (what goes into a brief)
- We research businesses, not individuals, using public sources only: company websites, published offers and price pages, public review and rating pages, public job postings, business directories, government and weather data, and news.
- We don't use data brokers, buy contact lists, log in to anything to see private information, or bypass sites that block us.
- Briefs name businesses and their public offers. We don't name individual reviewers or employees.
- Anything we couldn't confirm is marked [Unverified], and each brief lists its sources.
How we contact businesses
- We find a business's contact email from public sources, usually the business's own website or listings it manages, and record where we found it. We don't guess addresses.
- Every email includes our postal address and a way to opt out (reply "unsubscribe", or use the link in the email).
Email tracking
We send email through Resend. Our emails may record when a message is delivered, opened (using a small tracking image) and when a link is clicked (links pass through a redirect). We use this only to see whether briefs are useful and to protect our sending reputation. Many email apps block or pre-load tracking images, so this data is approximate.
Our website
- Hosting and forms: the site is hosted by Netlify. When you fill in a form (signup, onboarding or unsubscribe), Netlify stores what you typed and we get a copy by email. We use it only to set up or stop your service.
- Quick Assessment: when you run the free Quick Assessment we store what you typed (business name, city, business type, website and your email) plus the results, so we can show you the result again, follow up with you about SignalBrief, and improve the service. Each email gets one free assessment. To enforce that, we keep a one-way scrambled code (a salted hash) of your email address and of your IP address, which can't be turned back into either one. We never store the IP address itself; the IP code is kept for about 30 days. To limit abuse we also keep a short scrambled IP code for about an hour. The assessment reads only public map listings (OpenStreetMap) and businesses' public websites, and it respects robots.txt and sites that block automated checks.
- Analytics (cookie-free): we run our own simple analytics. For each page view or button click we record the page, the referring website's domain (not the full address), any campaign tags in the link (like
utm_source), and whether the device is mobile or desktop. We don't use cookies, don't store your IP address, and don't build profiles. If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, we record nothing. Like most hosts, Netlify keeps standard server logs, which can include IP addresses, for security and operations. - Fonts: pages load the Inter font from Google Fonts, so your browser connects to Google's servers.
- Client login: client accounts use Netlify Identity. We store your email, name, and a securely hashed password, never the password itself.
Payments
Billing isn't set up yet, and we won't charge anyone without a separate confirmation. When billing goes live, payments will be handled by Stripe, and we'll never see or store full card numbers.
What we don't do
- We don't sell or rent personal information.
- We don't use advertising trackers or third-party ad cookies.
- We don't share client briefs with other clients or competitors.
How long we keep things
We keep business research and email records while they're useful for the service, and form submissions and analytics events for as long as we need them to run the business. We delete them sooner if you ask.
Your choices
- Unsubscribe: reply "unsubscribe" to any email, use the link in the email, or use our unsubscribe page. We stop emailing that address.
- Access or deletion: email dylan@thesignalbrief.com to get a copy of what we hold about you or your business, correct it, or delete it. We keep only your address on our do-not-email list, so we don't contact you again.
Changes
If we change this policy, we'll update the date at the top. For material changes, we'll tell active clients by email.