What NitrateSmart does with an address, a question, and the ordinary records of running this site. The short version: personal information is used to run the service and nothing else — and the specifics are short enough to say plainly, right here.
Effective August 5, 2026
On this page
The short version Your address Your questions Running the site Cookies Email Who handles it What we never do The data business Your choices Children ChangesNitrateSmart uses personal information only to provide, maintain, and protect this service, to answer what you ask, and to comply with the law. It does not sell or rent personal information, does not use it for targeted advertising, and does not build marketing profiles about readers. The business is the water data — never the reader.
When you type a street address into the lookup, here is exactly what happens to it. The address goes to NitrateSmart’s own server in the body of the request, not in the web address, so it does not land in the ordinary trail of URLs that browsers and proxies keep. Our server asks the U.S. Census Bureau’s geocoder where the address is, checks those coordinates against the EPA’s water-system boundaries hosted by Esri’s ArcGIS service, and pulls the public record of the community water system that serves the spot. The Census Bureau and Esri handle their part under their own policies.
We keep one deliberate record of the lookup: the address you typed, the address it matched, the water system found, and the time. We keep it because it tells us what people are looking up and whether the matcher is working — and we keep it for 30 days, no longer. Erasure is automatic: every new lookup first clears every entry past its thirtieth day. The log is never connected to advertising, never combined into a profile, and never sent to the AI provider. If you would rather leave no record at all, look up your water system by its name or PWSID instead — nothing about that identifies where you live.
One more line we draw deliberately: the lookup runs outside the assistant conversation. When you ask the assistant about your result, it receives the water system’s facts with the address fields removed. The assistant never sees your address, and it has no tool that could fetch one.
When you ask the NitrateSmart assistant a question, the question and the recent conversation needed to answer it go to the commercial AI service that powers the assistant. Two commitments hold there, and we state them as ours: your questions and answers are never used to train AI models, and the provider holds them for no more than 30 days.
NitrateSmart itself keeps no account and archives no chat transcripts; the conversation lives in your browser for the session. If you use the browser’s optional voice input, we receive the text it produces, never the recording.
The assistant can explain your water without knowing anything about you. Leave out what a question does not need — medical records, identification numbers, other people’s details. If you choose to mention pregnancy, an infant, or a health condition so the answer fits your situation, that is health information, and it is covered separately by the Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy.
Like every website, this one leaves ordinary technical footprints: your IP address, the page or service you requested, the time, your browser and device type, and security or abuse-prevention records. Cloudflare processes this traffic data to deliver and protect the site and keeps its own limited logs under its policies. Visitor-level logs under our control are kept for no more than 30 days unless a security incident, abuse investigation, or the law reasonably requires longer. We may keep counts that identify no one — how many requests arrived in a day, for instance. We secure these records with reasonable safeguards, but no online service can promise perfect security, and we will not pretend to.
NitrateSmart sets only the cookies a feature needs to work. Today that is a single access cookie for visitors using a shared link, lasting up to 30 days. There are no advertising cookies, no analytics trackers, and nothing that follows you across other websites.
If you write to us, we receive your address and whatever you choose to include, and we use it to answer you — to respond, to investigate a correction, to discuss data access or licensing. Ordinary correspondence is kept for up to 24 months after the matter closes; records tied to a contract, payment, dispute, or legal obligation are kept as long as business and law reasonably require.
Four service providers touch information for us, each for one job: Cloudflare delivers and protects the site; the U.S. Census Bureau geocodes lookup addresses; Esri’s ArcGIS service hosts the EPA boundary query; and our AI provider — a commercial AI service we name on request rather than in print, because providers change — answers assistant questions under the commitments stated above. These are service arrangements, not sales of personal information, and none of them may use your information for targeted advertising on our behalf.
Sell or rent personal information. Share it for cross-context targeted advertising. Build advertising or marketing profiles about readers. Combine addresses with water results into household dossiers. Use your conversations to train AI models — ours or anyone else’s. Sell personal health information. Use geofencing to identify visits to health-care facilities.
The water-system measurements, classifications, boundaries, and methods are not personal information, and NitrateSmart may charge for them — subscriptions, reports, data services, APIs, licensing, consulting. Aggregate statistics that identify no one may be used to run and improve the service. If NitrateSmart is ever sold, merged, or financed, information necessary to the transaction may transfer subject to this policy, and any materially different use of personal information would take a new notice and, where the law requires, your permission.
You can look up a system by name or PWSID instead of an address, and you can read every educational and system page without ever touching the assistant. You may ask what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or raise a concern, by writing to realperson@nitratesmart.com. Because we deliberately keep so little, the honest answer may be that we hold nothing that can be connected to you; we will ask for more information only when it is reasonably necessary to find and fulfill your request.
NitrateSmart is a general-audience educational service, not directed to children under 13, and it does not knowingly create accounts or profiles for children. A parent or guardian can ask anything about nitrate and infants without giving a child’s name or any detail that identifies the child.
This page is part of the site’s build and changes only with it, with a dated entry in the change log on How this is built. A change that would allow a new, unexpected use of previously collected personal information gets more than a log entry: additional notice, and permission where the law requires it. Corrections to the record itself are made in the open under Contact.
Educational information, not medical or personal safety advice. For your own tap or a private well, a certified-laboratory test is the only way to know.
Nitrate in community water systems, from the utilities’ own compliance reporting.
Results reaching back to July 2023 · current through August 9, 2026.
Educational information, not medical or personal safety advice.