What we collect, and what happens to it

Who this policy is from

Chicago Trusted Trenchless runs this website. It takes a description of a drain that is blocked or broken and hands it to a sewer contractor working locally, and it does none of the work itself. Both halves of that are set out further on the about page, and in legal terms on the terms of use page.

There is no office to write to and no premises to visit, so the way to reach us about anything in this policy is the same form the rest of the page is about. Put whatever you need to say in the message field and it will be read by a person.

What the form collects

The estimate form appears in two places, as a panel that opens from any estimate button and as the form on the contact page. They are the same form and they collect the same things:

• Your name. Required, because somebody has to know who to ask for.
• A phone number. Required. It is used to call you back about this request and for nothing else.
• Your email, if you use one. Optional. It is a second way for the contractor to reach you and is used for nothing beyond replying about this request.
• Which service is closest, if you pick one. Optional, and nothing is pre-selected. Leaving it blank is a normal answer and often the accurate one.
• What the drain is doing. Required. This is the part that decides whether the next step is a camera, a rod or a call to the City, so the more of it the better.
• Photographs, if you add any. Optional, and only on the contact page. Usually a picture of the cleanout or of the drain that is backing up.

There is also one field you will not see. It is hidden from the page, from the keyboard and from screen readers, and it exists so that automated submissions can be told apart from real ones: a bot fills it in and a person cannot. If it arrives with anything in it, the request is treated as spam. Whatever is typed into that field is never stored, which is why it is described here rather than listed above.

Nothing else is asked for. There is no address field beyond whatever you choose to type into the message, and no question about what you earn, own or intend to spend.

What gets recorded alongside it

Four things are attached to a request without you typing them, and it is worth being plain about them because a policy that lists only the visible fields is describing a form rather than a record:

• Which page you sent it from. A request off a suburb page and one off a guide are different conversations, and knowing which is which is the difference between a useful first call and a generic one.
• The address your browser connected from, your IP address. It is used to tell a real submission from an automated one and it is not looked up, resolved to a person, or matched against anything.
• Which browser sent it, the line every browser announces itself with. Same purpose.
• The page your browser said it came from. Also part of the spam check, and it is why a request forwarded from somewhere unexpected gets looked at rather than trusted.

Those four are stored on the request itself and go to the contractor with it. A submission that fails one of the spam checks is still kept and still answered by a person: it is marked for a look rather than thrown away, because a filter that is wrong about a real customer loses a request nobody ever finds out about.

One of those spam checks is an AI model that a third-party provider runs as a service. It is shown what you entered in the estimate form (your name, contact details and the description of the drain) plus the page it came from, and it decides only whether the request is a real job or a sales pitch aimed at us. The provider handles that text under its own terms, the model's answer is never used instead of someone here going through what you sent, and if you have a concern about it, say so through the form.

Who sees it

One sewer contractor, chosen for the part of the metro your address sits in. A request is not put out to a group of companies to bid on, it is not handed to a second contractor if the first one is busy without telling you, and it is not sold or licensed to anybody, lead marketplaces and data brokers included.

The contractor uses your details to contact you about the work and becomes responsible for them once they have them. Anything you agree with them after that, including the estimate and the job itself, is between you and them.

Photographs

Photographs you attach are stored privately and are used to understand the problem before somebody drives out to it. They are not published on this site, not used in marketing, and not used as a before or after picture. That last one matters more here than it sounds: a photograph of a real customer's pipe presented as an example of our work would be a claim we are not entitled to make, and every picture on these pages was made by an image model instead.

Cookies and measurement

This site sets no cookies of its own, on any page, for any reason. There is no Google Analytics, no advertising pixel, no social button, no embedded map and no third party font network: the typefaces are served from this domain rather than borrowed from somebody else's. You can check all of that in your browser's own developer tools, which is worth more than a sentence in a policy.

It does keep a count of which pages get read, without a cookie and without anything stored in your browser. The next section says exactly what that count looks at.

There is one exception and it is worth stating plainly rather than burying. The form is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that a request came from a person rather than a script, and its code is loaded from Cloudflare on every page of this site because the estimate panel can be opened from any of them. That means Cloudflare sees the request for that file. Turnstile is designed as a replacement for the puzzles that do profile you: it sets no advertising cookie and it does not follow you to other websites. Most of the time you will not see it at all, and it shows you a checkbox only when it is unsure.

The company that hosts this site keeps ordinary server logs, in the way every web host does: the address of the request, the page asked for, the time, and the browser that asked. Those are used to keep the site up and to see whether something is broken.

What a visit itself records

Reading a page on this site, even one you never send a form from, records a handful of things about that one visit. Nothing is set as a cookie and nothing is written to your browser's own storage; every one of these is read once, when the page loads, and kept on the server rather than with you:

• The page you asked for. Just the path, such as /services/pipe-bursting/. Never the full address and never anything typed after a question mark.
• Where the link came from. The host of whatever sent you here, a search engine or another site, for example. Never the full address of that other page.
• How wide your browser window is. Enough to tell a phone from a desktop. Nothing more specific than that.
• The rough location your connection is registered to. The town, region and country your network connection is registered to, not GPS. A VPN or a mobile carrier can put this a long way from where you actually are, and often does.
• Your browser and operating system. The line every browser announces about itself, the same thing a web server has always seen.
• A one-way key, so a few pages read the same day count as one visit. Made by mixing your network address and browser with the date and a secret kept on the server. It cannot be turned back into your address, your address is never itself stored, and tomorrow the key is a different one with no relation to today's. Nothing here can follow you from one day to the next.

What this does not do: it does not read or write a cookie, it does not touch your browser's storage, and your IP address itself is never kept, only the one-way key above is. There is no third party analytics service behind any of this, no advertising tag and no way for it to follow you onto another site. The script that does the counting is served from this domain, the same one the page came from, and it contacts nothing else.

One thing worth being straight about: blocking that script does not stop the recording. Five of the six are read by this site's own server while it hands the page over, whether or not any script runs. The width of your window is the only one that has to come from the browser, because it is the only one the server cannot see.

How long it is kept

A request is kept while there is a reason to have it, which means while the contractor is still dealing with it and for a period afterwards in case you or they have a question about what was said. It is not kept indefinitely for the sake of a list.

You can ask for a request to be deleted at any time and it will be. Send the form again and say so in the message, with enough detail to find the original, and it goes.

What this site does not do

• It does not sell, rent or trade your details.
• It does not add you to a newsletter or a marketing list.
• It does not send your request to several contractors so that they can compete for it.
• It does not ask for a payment, a card number or a deposit. Nothing on this site is bought.

Children

This site is for property owners and occupiers arranging work on a building. It is not aimed at children and it does not knowingly collect anything from them.

Changes to this policy

If the form, or what a plain visit records, starts collecting something different, this page changes on the same day and the date at the top changes with it. That date is the date the wording last changed, not the date the site was last published.