Privacy Policy | SecondAppraisal

1. Introduction

SecondAppraisal Inc. ("SecondAppraisal," "we," "us," or "our") respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal information. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you use our website and services, including when an institution or another person or business refers you to us. In this policy, an "institution" is a lender, GAP provider, or similar institution that refers you to us, or arranges your Garage Hub Membership, through our Valuation Review Program.

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Personal Information You Provide

We collect information you voluntarily provide when using our services:

Contact Information: Name, email address, phone number, mailing address
Account Information: The email address or phone number you sign in with, your Google or Apple sign-in if you use one, and your account preferences
Vehicle Information: VIN, make, model, year, mileage, condition, photos, and where the vehicle is located
Insurance Information: Insurance company name, claim numbers, adjuster contact details, and the insurer's offers
Payment Information: Card details you enter go directly to our payment processor, Stripe (see Section 6). We keep limited details, such as the card brand and the last four digits. If you pay by check, we receive an image of the check, including the bank details printed on it.
Documents: Valuation reports, insurance documents, vehicle photos you upload
Communications: Emails, text messages, and chat messages you exchange with us, and, when a call is recorded, the recording and transcript of that call or voicemail

2.2 Information Collected Automatically

When you access our website, we automatically collect certain information:

Device Information: Browser type, operating system, device identifiers
Usage Data: Pages visited, time spent, click patterns, referral URLs
Location Information: IP address, general geographic location
Cookies: Session cookies, analytics cookies, advertising cookies, preference cookies

2.3 Information We Receive From Others

We also receive information about you from others:

An institution that refers you to us. If an institution refers you, or arranges your Garage Hub Membership, it sends us information such as your name and contact details, your vehicle, your insurer and claim details, your loan or contract details (such as the payoff amount), and how you agreed to be contacted.
A person or business that refers you. If an appraiser or another participant in our Referral Program refers you, it sends us information such as your name and contact details, your state, your vehicle's VIN, who is handling your insurance claim, your insurer's offer, how you agreed to be contacted, and, if you gave it to them, your insurer's valuation report.
An AI assistant or other agent acting for you. If an agent submits your request to us on your behalf, it sends us your contact details and the details of your total loss.
Your insurer and others involved in your claim. Valuation reports, offers, appraisals, and correspondence about your claim.
Vehicle-data providers and auction sites. Vehicle history, specifications, values, comparable vehicles for sale, and your vehicle's salvage-auction listing and photos.
Contact-lookup services. We may use a commercial lookup service to complete or confirm contact details, for example to identify who is calling us.
Advertising platforms. Identifiers that tell us which ad, if any, brought you to our website.
Google reviews. If you review us on Google, we receive your review, with the name and profile photo shown on it, and our staff may link it to your consultation.

3. How We Use Your Information

We use the collected information for the following purposes:

To provide and maintain our vehicle appraisal services
To create and manage your account
To process your consultation requests and payments
To communicate with you about your consultations and account
To send you important notices and updates via email or SMS
To respond to your inquiries and provide customer support
To report on your consultation to the institution that referred you, as described in Section 5.1
To review the quality of our calls and service, and to train our staff
To send you marketing about our services, such as membership offers, where the law allows and except as described in Section 3.2
To publish customer stories, as described in Section 5
To send you rewards you have earned, such as gift cards
To measure and improve our advertising, as described in Section 9
To improve our services and develop new features
To analyze usage patterns and optimize user experience
To detect, prevent, and address fraud or security issues
To comply with legal obligations

3.1 AI and Automated Tools

We use artificial intelligence (AI) and other automated tools to help provide our services. They:

read and extract information from documents, such as insurer valuation reports, title documents, and receipts;
research vehicle values and check comparable vehicles;
draft valuation content, messages to you and to others involved in your claim, and summaries of messages and calls for our staff;
transcribe and review recorded calls and voicemails;
help prepare customer stories, including the pictures and summaries shown with them (see Section 5);
run Jane, our AI voice assistant, who may answer your call, or call you if you ask for a call or have agreed to one; and
run our website's help chat.

To do this, these tools process the information involved. That can include your name and contact details; your vehicle, claim, and insurer details; your documents and messages; and call audio and transcripts. Some estimates, such as an instant or preliminary market estimate, are produced automatically. For a total-loss claim, our staff send you our appraisal report; it is not sent automatically. Section 10 describes the AI providers we use and what they receive.

3.2 If an Institution Referred You

If an institution referred you to us or arranged your Garage Hub Membership:

We use the information the institution sends us only to deliver our Valuation Review Program: to provide our services to you, to report to the institution as described in Section 5.1, and to produce statistics that do not identify you. We also use it to meet our legal obligations. We never sell it, and we never use it to market our other products or services to you unless you separately agree and the institution's agreement with us allows it.
We never give an advertising or ad-measurement service the information the institution sends us, in any form, including a scrambled (hashed) copy or a list, and we never use it to decide who sees ads, including to keep our ads away from you. Our servers don't report anything you do with us to advertising or analytics services. The pages you reach through a link we made for you, such as an activation or payment link, and every page you open while signed in, don't load their tags. Our public pages load advertising tags only for a visitor who isn't signed in, and the browser a referred borrower uses to activate or sign in is marked so that it loads no advertising tags on our public pages. On our public website, those tags work as Section 9 describes, but they never receive the contact details the institution sent us. We also don't publish your story on our website or social media.
We ask you to review our service, sign a petition, or refer a friend only if your institution allows it. We offer you Garage Hub Membership or another Garage Hub service only if your institution has chosen to offer it.
Even then, we send you such a request or offer in only one of two ways: with your own consent, which must name us and that request; or to contact details you gave us directly after you engaged us. Without your consent, we never use the contact details the institution sent us for it.
We still send the messages your consultation needs. You can ask us to stop any request or offer at any time (see Section 8).

3.3 Marketing Calls and Texts

With your separate permission, which you give by checking an unchecked box the first time you sign in and which is never a condition of buying anything, SecondAppraisal may call or text you at the number on your account about its own other products and services, including with prerecorded or artificial-voice messages and voicemails. We never sell your number or share it for anyone else's marketing, and you can withdraw that permission at any time, in any reasonable way, such as by replying STOP to any text from us or by emailing support@secondappraisal.com.

4. Phone Number & SMS Data

When you, or an institution or another person or business that refers you, provide your phone number, and when you consent to receive SMS messages, we collect and use this information as follows:

Collection

Phone number you provide during registration or consultation, or that an institution or another referrer gives us when it refers you
SMS consent status and timestamp
Opt-out requests and preferences

Use

Sending verification codes (OTP) for account login and security
Notifying you of consultation status updates
Sending secure links for photo uploads
Providing customer support communications
Calling you about your consultation

Message Frequency & Rates

Message frequency varies based on your account activity and consultation status
Message and data rates may apply depending on your mobile carrier
Check with your carrier for details about your text messaging plan

Who Sees Your Phone Number

Our staff, including the contracted personnel outside the United States described in Section 5.2, see your phone number and use it to contact you, for example about your consultation.
Our service providers receive it to deliver our texts and calls, verify sign-ins, record and transcribe calls, and provide our other services (see Section 10).
If an institution referred you, it may have given us your phone number. We do not give it any phone number you give us yourself.
We do not sell your phone number for money, rent it, or give it to anyone to market their own products to you.
All the above categories exclude text messaging originator opt-in data and consent; this information will not be shared with any third parties.

Your Rights

You can opt out of SMS at any time by texting STOP to any message. After one confirmation text, a STOP stops all text messages from us to that number, including text sign-in codes.
You can update your phone number or revoke consent in your account settings.

5. Information Sharing

We may share your information in the following circumstances:

Our Staff and Contracted Personnel: Our staff, including contracted personnel outside the United States, work with customer records in our systems (see Section 5.2)
Service Providers: Companies that help us operate our business and provide our services, including hosting, storage, communications, payments, and AI providers (see Section 10)
The Institution That Referred You or Arranged Your Membership: When an institution referred you to us or arranged your Garage Hub Membership, we share information about your consultation with it, as described in Section 5.1
The Person or Business That Referred You Through Our Referral Program: If a business such as a credit union introduced you, it receives only the dates you allow us to share: when you activated your request, when we confirmed two-way contact with you, and when we delivered your free consultation. If you allow it, it may also send us documents for your consultation. It does not receive your report, valuation, recommendation, payments, or settlement. Any other referrer, such as an appraiser, sees your name and where your referral stands, for example whether you signed up, whether you hired us, and whether your claim settled in a way that earned its referral reward. It does not see your documents or your conversations with us.
An AI Assistant or Other Agent Acting for You: If an agent submitted your request on your behalf, we may send it the status of that request and a preliminary market estimate
Your Insurer, Appraisers, and Umpires: When you hire us for an appraisal, we share information about you, your vehicle, and your claim with your insurer and its representatives, with the appraiser you appoint, and, if one is needed, with an umpire, as part of the service you asked for
Customer Stories: If you post a public review of us, we may quote it on our website and social media pages, with your name as shown on your review (or your first name and last initial), the profile photo shown on your review, your city or state, your vehicle, and your insurer, and, on our website, your insurer's offer and your final settlement. We may also show a case's figures, city, vehicle, and insurer without a name. A story may include a short summary we write of what happened. The main picture with a story on our website is made with AI. It is not one of the photos you sent us, though our AI tools may read those photos for details such as your vehicle's color. We share the photos you sent us, or your own account of your case beyond your public review, only with your written permission. To have a story removed, email privacy@secondappraisal.com.
Advertising Platforms: As described in Section 9
Legal Requirements: When required by law, court order, or governmental authority
Business Transfers: In connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets
With Your Consent: When you explicitly authorize us to share information
Statistics: We may share or publish statistics that combine information about many customers and do not identify you, including with institutions and with partners that introduce institutions to our program

All the above categories exclude text messaging originator opt-in data and consent; this information will not be shared with any third parties.

Important: We never share your personal information with insurance companies unless you explicitly authorize us to do so as part of our appraisal services, or the insurance company is the institution that referred you or arranged your membership, as described in Section 5.1.

5.1 What the Institution That Referred You Receives

If an institution referred you to us, we share information about your consultation with that institution. It may see this information in its account with us, receive it through our data connection (API), or receive it through a technology platform it has authorized to act for it; such a platform receives only what the institution allows. The institution handles what it receives under its own privacy notice.

The institution may receive:

Contact progress: whether we invited you, and whether the invitation was accepted or expired; when and how often we tried to reach you, and whether we reached you; and, if we stop contacting you because you asked us to, the fact that we stopped. We do not tell the institution how you asked us to stop, or why.
Your decisions: whether you signed up, asked for our free review, declined our help (for example, by telling us "no thanks"), or hired us as your appraiser, with the dates, and which version of our notices and terms you were shown
The review: the result of our free review of your insurer's offer, including whether we recommend challenging it and the figures behind that recommendation, such as the insurer's offer and the value we found
Claim progress: milestones such as receiving your insurer's valuation report and your photos, completing our appraisal report, invoking your policy's appraisal clause, the insurer's response, the appointment of appraisers and any umpire, the award, and the final settlement
Figures and fees: the insurer's initial and later offers, the appraised value, the award and final settlement, your loan payoff and deductible, and the fees for your consultation, including what the institution paid and what you paid
Your appraisal report: only if you authorize it in writing

The institution does not receive from us:

your documents, messages, or call recordings, other than an appraisal report you authorize us to send;
contact details you give us yourself (it keeps the ones it sent us);
your text messaging opt-in data or consent; or
whether another institution also referred you. If two institutions refer the same loss, for example your lender and your GAP administrator, we report to each of them without telling either one about the other.

If an institution arranged your Garage Hub Membership, we report your enrollment status and dates to it and, for any consultation under your membership, the information listed above.

If you no longer want us to report to the institution, tell us at privacy@secondappraisal.com. We will tell you what, if anything, our agreement with the institution still requires us to report, and we will stop sharing the rest.

5.2 Contracted Personnel Outside the United States

Some of our consultation work, including customer calls and vehicle research, is done by contracted personnel outside the United States. They work in our systems with access to customer records, including those of customers an institution refers to us. Those records include your contact details; your vehicle, claim, and insurer information; your documents and messages; and recordings of your calls. A staffing company we contract with provides these personnel.

6. Data Security

We use technical and organizational measures designed to protect your personal information, including:

Encryption of data in transit between your device and our website (TLS)
Encryption at rest by the providers that store our database, files, and backups
Sign-in with a one-time code or sign-in link sent to your email or phone, or with a Google or Apple account; our staff accounts support a second sign-in factor, such as a passkey or an authenticator app
Card details you enter are captured in payment fields hosted by Stripe and never reach our servers; Stripe maintains its own PCI DSS validation
Daily automated scanning of the software packages our application is built from for publicly known vulnerabilities, and the same scan before each release

Our staff, including the contracted personnel described in Section 5.2, can see customer records in our systems as part of their work.

No method of sending or storing information is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

7. Data Retention

We retain personal information only as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this policy and any applicable legal obligations. When we honor a verified deletion request, we erase operational account, consultation, message, call, document, and marketing data. We may retain a minimized, restricted record of the request, and suppression identifiers kept encrypted or as a coded copy, where needed to prove compliance, prevent future contact, or establish or defend legal claims. That retained data is not used for service delivery, sale, marketing, advertising, profiling, or rebuilding the deleted account.

If an institution referred you, it may keep its own records of what it sent us and what we reported to it, under its own policies. We keep the referral record the institution sent us, and a record of what we reported to it, for as long as our agreement with the institution and the law require, including after we delete your account, and we use that record only to meet those obligations.

8. Your Rights & Privacy Requests

Depending on your location, you may have the following rights regarding your personal information:

Access (Data Subject Access Request / DSAR): Request a copy of the personal information we hold about you
Correction: Request correction of inaccurate or incomplete information
Deletion (Right to be Forgotten / RTBF): Request deletion of your personal information (subject to legal requirements)
Portability: Request a machine-readable copy of your data
Restriction: Request restriction of processing in certain circumstances
Cease contact: Ask us to stop email, text, voice, direct-mail, automated, and marketing communications immediately

How to exercise these rights

Email privacy@secondappraisal.com with your request. Please include:

The type of request (access, deletion, correction, etc.)
The email address and phone number associated with your account
Any additional context that helps us locate your records

We respond to verified requests within 30 days. A credible cease-contact request is applied immediately while identity verification and deletion work continue. For deletion requests, our process removes personal information from active databases, cloud storage, authentication systems, and covered processors. Older backups are kept beyond use and can still hold copies of information we have deleted; if one is restored, our external encrypted suppression ledger must be reapplied before the restored system can contact customers or serve application traffic.

We may keep only the minimum encrypted request evidence and suppression identifiers needed to honor your request or meet a legal obligation. Access is restricted and audited. A later message from you does not automatically lift suppression; doing so requires a separately verified withdrawal and controlled review.

If you have an account, you can also delete it yourself from your account settings. Self-serve deletion starts a 7-day grace window (cancelable from the confirmation email) before the same erasure process runs automatically.

If an institution referred you, it may hold its own records about you under its own privacy notice. A request you make to us covers our records; to make a request about the institution's records, contact the institution.

9. Cookies, Tracking, and Advertising Platforms

We use cookies and similar tracking technologies to:

Maintain your session and remember your preferences
Analyze website traffic and usage patterns
Improve our services and user experience
Detect and prevent fraud
Measure and improve our advertising

You can control cookies through your browser settings. Disabling certain cookies may affect the functionality of our website. For a full breakdown of the categories of cookies we use and to manage your analytics & advertising preferences, see our Cookie Policy. You can decline analytics & advertising cookies there or via the consent banner; strictly-necessary cookies always remain on.

Sharing with advertising platforms. When you take certain steps, such as giving us your contact details, signing up, or paying, our website and our servers report that step to the advertising platforms listed in Section 10. The report can include a hashed form of your email address and, for some platforms, your name; an identifier for the ad you clicked; an identifier that we or the platform assign to you or your browser; and your IP address, your browser type, and the page you were on. Hashing turns these details into codes that a platform can match to accounts it already holds. The platforms use the reports to tell us which ads led to sign-ups and to improve the ads they show. In California, this can be a "sharing" of personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising. If you opt out through our cookie banner, our Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information page, or a Global Privacy Control signal, then, for activity in that browser, we stop sending these platforms your hashed contact details, from your browser or from our servers, and their tags on our website stop using advertising cookies. If an institution referred you to us or arranged your Garage Hub Membership, our servers don't report your steps to these platforms, and the pages Section 3.2 describes don't load their tags.

10. Companies That Receive Personal Information

We use the companies described below to run our business and provide our services. Each receives personal information for the purpose shown. "When used" marks companies we use only for some customers or only when a feature is turned on. Some of these companies process information outside the United States. A company named in one row may also provide a service described in another row.

Purpose	Companies	Personal information they receive
Hosting and databases	Cloud hosting and database providers	All the information in our systems
Website delivery, security, and file storage	Website delivery, security, and file storage providers	Website and app traffic; the documents, photos, reports, and call recordings we store
Backups	Backup storage providers	Copies of our database, call recordings, and reports
Sign-in	Sign-in services	Name, email address, phone number, and sign-in identifiers
Email	Email delivery services, and our staff email service	Email addresses, messages, and attachments
Text messages and calls	Phone and text-messaging providers	Phone numbers, messages, and call audio and recordings
Fax	Fax services (when used)	Faxed documents about your vehicle and claim
Payments	Stripe	Card details you enter, your name and email address, and payment amounts
Mail	Printing and mailing services	Your name and postal address
Mailed payments	Mail and check scanning services (when used)	Images of checks and other mail we receive, including bank details printed on checks
Electronic signatures	Electronic signature services (when used)	Award letters we send for signature
Vehicle photo appointments	Photographer dispatch services (when used)	Where your vehicle is located, and a description of it
Rewards	Gift-card services (when used)	Your name and email address, to send you a gift card you earned, or, for some gift cards, only a reference number for a gift-card link we send you, not your name or contact details
AI	AI services, including the AI models they provide access to	Documents, messages, call audio and transcripts, and other consultation details
AI	AI voice and transcription services	Call audio and transcripts, and the text of voice messages we leave, which may include your name
AI	AI video-avatar services for Jane, our AI voice assistant (when used)	The audio of our AI assistant's spoken replies, which may mention your consultation
AI	An AI voice service (when our staff test our voice assistant using a real consultation)	Details of that consultation
AI	AI search services	Details of vehicles for sale that we compare with yours, not your name or contact details
Vehicle data	Vehicle history, valuation, specification, and listing data providers	Your VIN and vehicle details, and sometimes your ZIP code and mileage, not your name or contact details
Salvage-auction search	A web-scraping service, and the Copart and IAA auction sites we search through it	Your VIN, to find your vehicle's salvage-auction listing and photos
Contact lookup	Commercial contact-lookup services (when used)	The names, phone numbers, and email and postal addresses being looked up
Contracted personnel	A staffing company whose personnel work outside the United States (see Section 5.2)	Customer records in our systems
Internal alerts	Our staff messaging service	Customer names and consultation numbers, and the names and email addresses of people who apply for or ask about our programs, in alerts to our staff
Customer stories	The social media platforms where we post stories (when used)	What a story shows (see Section 5)
Software development	Code hosting and software development services, including AI coding tools and the AI models they provide access to	A copy of our database, including customer records, kept in a separate testing environment
Analytics and advertising	Google Analytics, Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Meta, Reddit, OpenAI, LinkedIn	Website activity, your IP address and browser details, and, as described in Section 9, hashed contact details and the steps you take

Some of these companies, including the advertising platforms, also use information under their own privacy policies.

11. Children's Privacy

Our services are not directed to individuals under 18 years of age. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe we have inadvertently collected information from a child, please contact us immediately.

12. California Privacy Rights (CCPA)

California residents have additional rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA):

Right to know what personal information is collected, used, and shared
Right to delete personal information (with exceptions)
Right to opt-out of the sale of personal information (we do not sell personal information for money)
Right to opt-out of the sharing of personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising — exercise it on our Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information page
Right to non-discrimination for exercising privacy rights

13. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of material changes by posting the updated policy on our website and updating the “Last updated” date. Your continued use of our services after changes become effective constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

14. Contact Us

If you have questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please contact us:

SecondAppraisal Inc.

Privacy Inquiries

Email: privacy@secondappraisal.com

Website: https://secondappraisal.com

This is the same channel used for Data Subject Access Requests (DSAR) and Right-to-be-Forgotten (RTBF) requests described in Section 8.