Privacy Policy

The short version

Dam-Smart stores the account info you give it (name, email, password — hashed, never in plain text) and republishes dam-inventory data that Georgia's and North Carolina's dam-safety programs already publish themselves. For North Carolina specifically, that state's own public record includes a dam owner's mailing address and phone number — see "Public dam records" below for exactly how that's handled. Dam-Smart doesn't sell your data, doesn't run ad trackers, and doesn't share anything with third parties except the payment processor and email provider needed to run the service.

Account information

Registering requires a name, an email address, and a password. The password is hashed with bcrypt before storage — Dam-Smart never has access to the plain-text value, including internally. Sessions are kept in an httpOnly cookie your browser sends automatically; it isn't accessible to page scripts. Failed login attempts, timestamps, and the IP address of your last login are recorded to detect and lock out brute-force attempts on your account.

Public dam records

The dam inventory searchable on this site is built from Georgia's and North Carolina's own public dam-safety filings — not something Dam-Smart collected independently. North Carolina's published data includes a dam's owner-of-record name, mailing address, and phone number; Georgia's does not publish an address at all. The public search and lookup pages on this site deliberately withhold that address and phone even though the underlying record has it — the state itself has already made the fact of who owns each dam public, but Dam-Smart doesn't make copy-paste-ready contact details easier to find than the state already does.

That same address and phone appear on a dam's compliance-summary PDF, but only once an account has verified a claim to that specific dam by supplying the ZIP code on the state's own record — see how it works. If you are the owner of a dam in this system and want your address or phone removed or corrected, contact us (below); note that the underlying record still exists in the state's own public filing regardless of what Dam-Smart does with its copy.

Inspections, photos, and filing documents

If you use the self-inspection tool, your browser's Geolocation API supplies the coordinates you explicitly capture at each checkpoint — Dam-Smart does not track location outside of that deliberate action. Inspection photos and documents an engineer files on your behalf are stored and served only to accounts with a claim or granted access on that specific dam — the same access check every other dam-specific page and download on this site uses.

Cookies

One cookie: authToken, functional only — it keeps you signed in. There is no advertising or cross-site tracking cookie on this site.

Who else sees this data

Nobody, today, beyond what's necessary to run the service: hosting and the database. When billing is enabled, payment details go directly to Stripe — Dam-Smart never stores card numbers. When outbound email is enabled, message delivery goes through a transactional email provider. Neither is wired to a live account as of this writing (see pricing); until then, no payment or email data leaves this system at all.

Your choices

You can unclaim a dam at any time from your dashboard, which removes your account's relationship to it (the underlying public dam record itself is unaffected — it's the state's, not Dam-Smart's). You can request account deletion by contacting us below.

Contact

This project is in early, pre-launch validation and does not yet have a dedicated support address. Until one exists, reach the operator through whatever channel referred you here.