State law privacy notice

Who this covers

This notice supplements our main Privacy Policy for residents of states with a comprehensive consumer-privacy law currently in effect: California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, and Utah. If your state has since passed a similar law and isn’t named above, we intend to honor the same rights and process described here for you too — tell us your state when you write in, and we’ll apply the closest matching law.

Categories of personal information we collect

We keep this list deliberately short, because our actual collection is small:

• Internet or network activity (analytics), only if analytics is enabled for a given deployment. IP address (anonymized before use), general device and browser type, approximate location at the country/region level derived from that anonymized IP, pages viewed, referring page, and a fixed list of named interaction events (for example, “a template was viewed” or “a calculator was used”). See Your Privacy Choices for exactly how this is shared and how to opt out.
• Information you volunteer through our contact page. Whatever name, email address, and message content you choose to include. We only use it to respond to you and, if relevant, to fix the error or answer the question you wrote in about.

We do not collect, and have no mechanism to collect:

• Account credentials or profiles — this site has no user accounts of any kind, so there is nothing to create, log into, or breach.
• What you type into any calculator, the debt tracker, or the “Find Your Situation” tool. Those run entirely in your browser and never transmit their inputs anywhere — see Security for how that’s enforced.
• Precise geolocation, biometric identifiers, government ID numbers, financial account numbers, health information, or any other sensitive personal information as those laws define it.

Sources of information

Directly from your browser (analytics, if enabled) and directly from you (anything you type into our contact form). We do not buy, license, or receive personal information about you from any third party.

Why we collect it

Analytics: to understand which guides actually help people, in aggregate, so we can fix or expand the ones that don’t. Contact-form information: to read and respond to your message, and to correct whatever you wrote in about.

Sale and sharing

We do not sell personal information for money. Optional analytics may count as a “share” under the CPRA’s broad definition, and as a form of targeted advertising disclosure under Virginia, Colorado, and Connecticut’s laws, even though we run no advertising ourselves — see Your Privacy Choices for the full explanation and the opt-out control itself.

Retention

We don’t operate a database that stores analytics data ourselves — there is nothing on our side to retain in the first place. How long Google Analytics itself retains data is a setting inside our Google Analytics account, not something this notice can display accurately without checking that console directly.

Your rights, by state

The five state laws below share a common core — access, deletion, correction, opt-out of sale/share/targeted advertising, and non-discrimination for exercising your rights — with real differences worth stating precisely rather than papering over:

• California (CCPA, as amended by the CPRA): right to know/access what we’ve collected, right to delete it, right to correct inaccurate information, right to opt out of sale/sharing, right to limit use of sensitive personal information (we don’t collect any, so there is nothing to limit), right to non-discrimination for exercising any of these, and a right to designate an authorized agent.
• Virginia (VCDPA): right to confirm and access, correct, delete, obtain a portable copy of, and opt out of the sale of, targeted advertising with, or profiling based on your personal information — plus a right to appeal if we decline a request.
• Colorado (CPA): the same core rights as Virginia, plus Colorado specifically requires businesses to recognize a universal opt-out mechanism — which is exactly what Global Privacy Control is, and exactly why our opt-out control honors it automatically.
• Connecticut (CTDPA): the same core rights as Virginia and Colorado, including the right to appeal a denial.
• Utah (UCPA): a narrower set — right to access, right to delete data you yourself provided, right to a portable copy, and right to opt out of sale or targeted advertising. Utah’s law does not include a right to correct inaccurate data or a right to appeal a denial, and we want to be precise about that rather than implying every state grants identical rights.

Other states. If you live somewhere not named above and your state has since enacted a comprehensive consumer-privacy law, write to us and say so — we intend to honor a request in the spirit of whichever law applies to you, even before we’ve updated this page to name your state specifically.

How to exercise your rights

We don’t operate a separate request portal, verification system, or toll-free number — building one for a site with no accounts and this little collected data would add complexity without adding protection. Instead:

1. Write to us through our contact page and tell us which right you’re exercising and under which state’s law, if you know it.
2. Because we don’t have accounts, we generally verify a request just by replying to the email address you contacted us from. If a request seems to involve information we don’t have a record of tying to you (which is likely, given how little we collect), we’ll tell you that directly.
3. We aim to respond within 45 days, consistent with the response window these laws set, and will tell you if a short, permitted extension is needed.
4. If we decline a request under a law that grants a right to appeal (Virginia, Colorado, or Connecticut), reply and ask us to reconsider. We’ll tell you the outcome and, if we still decline, how to escalate the appeal to your state’s Attorney General.

You can also use the analytics opt-out control directly, with no request needed at all: Your Privacy Choices.

Non-discrimination

We will never charge you a different price, deny you access, or provide a different level of service because you exercised a privacy right. There is nothing to lose by asking.

Children’s privacy

This site has no user accounts, no age gate, and no feature that asks for a birthdate or any other identifier of a child. Our content is written for adults dealing with credit reports, debt collection, and bankruptcy — not for children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13, consistent with COPPA, and if we learn that we have, we will delete it.

Publisher information

[owner to complete] This notice is issued by Credit Defense Hub. Add the formal legal entity name (if different from the brand name above), its state of formation, and a mailing address or registered-agent address here before this page is relied on for a BBB or regulatory submission — see docs/ATTORNEY_REVIEW_REGISTER.md, which already flags this as an open item.

Changes to this notice

If what we collect, why, or how you can opt out changes, we’ll update this page and the “Last updated” date above, and we’ll update Privacy Policy and Your Privacy Choices to match — the three pages describe one set of practices, not three different ones.