Privacy Policy
Effective Date: July 27, 2026 · Last Updated: July 27, 2026
At The Housing Signal (thehousingsignal.com), the privacy of our readers is a design constraint, not an afterthought. This policy sets out what we collect, why, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do about it. Where we do not collect something, we say so plainly.
1. Independent Publisher & RESPA Disclosure
The Housing Signal is an independent, data-driven real estate publisher and educational resource. We are not a mortgage broker, lender, bank, or settlement service provider.
- No financial advice. Our content, calculators, and analytical tools are for informational and educational purposes only.
- No steering. We do not accept payment to rank specific mortgage lenders or to steer readers into financial products.
- Affiliate relationships. We may participate in affiliate marketing programs. If you click an affiliate link and apply for or purchase a service, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. These relationships do not influence our editorial judgments or calculator outputs. Full detail is in our Advertising Disclosure.
2. Our calculators collect nothing
Every calculator on this site runs entirely in your browser. The values you enter — income, debts, down payment, home price, loan terms — are processed on your own device and are never transmitted to us, to any lender, or to any third party. They are not stored, not logged, not retained between visits, and not used to target advertising. No name, email address, or phone number is required to get a result.
There are no hidden lead-generation fields on this site.
3. Information you provide
Email. If you write to us, we keep that correspondence for as long as it takes to resolve the matter.
What we do not collect. Comments are closed across this site, and so are pingbacks and trackbacks, so we collect no commenter names, email addresses, IP addresses, or browser user-agent strings, and no commenter data is held from any earlier period. There is no contact form, no newsletter, no user registration, and no account system. We never request your Social Security number, and we do not ask for or store financial account details.
4. Information collected automatically
Analytics. We use Google Analytics 4 to understand which pages are read and how readers arrive: pages viewed, referring URL, approximate location, device and browser type, and time on page, using cookies beginning _ga. For visitors in the EU, UK, and Switzerland, Google states that Google Analytics does not log or store individual IP addresses — IP data is used transiently to derive approximate location, then discarded.
Advertising. The Google AdSense script is present on every page of this site. As of the date above, no advertising is being served — the account remains in setup and no ad has been displayed to any reader. The script nonetheless loads, which means Google receives a request from your browser, including your IP address, when you view a page. When advertising begins, we will update this section to describe it accurately, including whether ads are personalized and what choices you have. Google’s handling of advertising data is described at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.
Local Assets. To protect reader IP addresses from external transfer, web fonts, images and charts are hosted on our own servers rather than fetched dynamically from external third-party content delivery networks. Loading a page on this site sends no request to Google’s font services and transmits no IP address to Google for the purpose of rendering type, and no request to any external image or media host.
Server logs. Our host, Namecheap (EasyWP), maintains standard access logs including IP addresses, requested URLs, and timestamps, for security and diagnostics.
5. Cookies, Do Not Track, and third-party tracking
Cookies. Necessary cookies keep the site working — WordPress sets these for session handling. Analytics and advertising cookies are set by Google as described above. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings; doing so will not affect the calculators, which use no cookies at all.
Do Not Track. Some browsers transmit a “Do Not Track” signal. There is no industry-accepted standard for how a publisher must respond to one, and this site does not currently alter its behavior in response to Do Not Track signals. We disclose this rather than imply a protection we do not provide. The browser and opt-out controls in Section 8 do work, and we recommend those instead.
Third-party tracking across sites. Because the Google AdSense and Google Analytics scripts are present, third parties may collect information about your online activity over time and across different websites when you visit this site. We do not control that collection. Section 8 sets out how to limit it.
Consent. Visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland are shown a consent message before personalized advertising cookies are set, and visitors in US states with applicable privacy laws are shown the equivalent choice — a “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” opt-out link. Both messages are served through Google’s own certified consent management platform (Google LLC CMP, IAB Transparency and Consent Framework vendor ID 300), configured in our AdSense account. You can change your choice at any time using the privacy settings link the message provides.
What consent does not cover. Those messages govern advertising cookies. Google Analytics loads on all visits regardless of the advertising choice, and the opt-out message does not gate it. If you would prefer analytics not to run, the browser controls and Google’s own opt-out add-on described in Section 8 are the effective route, and they work.
6. Why we process this data
To publish and improve the site, to understand which analysis readers find useful, to keep the site secure, to display advertising once that begins, and to meet legal obligations. Where a lawful basis is required, we rely on our legitimate interest in operating and improving a publication, and on consent where consent is the applicable basis for cookies and similar technologies.
7. Sharing and retention
We do not sell your personal information. Data reaches third parties only as described above: Google (analytics and advertising) and our host. We may also disclose information where legally required, or to protect the rights and safety of the site and its readers.
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Email correspondence | Duration of the matter, typically ≤ 24 months |
| Google Analytics event data | 14 months, then purged automatically by Google |
| Server access logs | As set by our host, typically ≤ 12 months |
| Calculator inputs | Not retained — they never leave your browser |
8. Your rights and choices
California. The Housing Signal does not meet the revenue or data-volume thresholds to qualify as a “business” under the CCPA/CPRA, so those statutes do not apply to us. We comply with the California Online Privacy Protection Act, which does. We do not sell personal information. Our Do Not Track practice is disclosed in Section 5, and third-party cross-site collection in Sections 4 and 5.
EU and UK. We are a United States publication and do not target readers in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom. Where we process data of readers in those regions, we rely on legitimate interest in operating and securing the site. You have the right to request access to, correction of, or deletion of personal data you have provided, and to complain to your national supervisory authority.
Everyone else. We honor the following from any reader, anywhere, whether or not a statute compels us to — we think that is the right way to run a publication that asks people to trust its numbers. You may ask us to tell you what we hold about you, provide a copy, correct it, delete it, or stop processing it. In practice the only personal data we hold on a reader is email correspondence you have sent us, and we will delete it on request.
Advertising and analytics controls. Manage Google ad personalization at myadcenter.google.com. Opt out of third-party vendor advertising cookies at aboutads.info and optout.networkadvertising.org. Opt out of Google Analytics on all sites with Google’s browser add-on.
Email privacy@thehousingsignal.com with any of these requests. We aim to respond within 30 days, we will not discriminate against you for making one, and we will not require you to create an account in order to exercise a right.
9. Children
This site is a general-audience real estate and mortgage publication and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. With comments closed and no forms on the site, the only route by which a child could send us personal information is email. If you believe a child has done so, contact us and we will delete it promptly.
10. Security
The site is served over HTTPS. We apply security updates to WordPress core, themes, and plugins, and restrict administrative access. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure and we cannot guarantee absolute security. Our strongest protection is structural: because the calculators never transmit your financial figures, there is no store of reader financial data here to breach.
11. International transfers
This site is hosted in the United States and our service providers are US-based. If you access it from elsewhere, your data is processed in the United States, which may afford different protections than your own country.
12. Changes to this policy
When this policy changes materially we will update the “Last Updated” date above and note what changed. We will not apply a materially different practice to previously collected data without saying so first.
13. Contact
Privacy requests — access, correction, or deletion of personal data: privacy@thehousingsignal.com
Everything else — editorial questions, data disputes, and corrections to published figures: contact@thehousingsignal.com
Publisher: The Housing Signal
The Housing Signal is an independent publisher. It is not a mortgage broker, lender, or licensed financial advisor. See our Editorial Standards, Advertising Disclosure, and Disclaimer.