Verinode Data Use Policy

Effective date: 2026-04-11 Version: 1.0 Plain-language commitment to every operator using Verinode.

This page is written to be read, not skimmed. It's short on purpose. If you have questions after reading it, ask us — we'll answer in the same plain language.

Read this first

Verinode exists to flip the data alignment of the restoration industry.

For decades, the companies that own restoration data have used it against contractors. The dominant pricing software is owned by a company whose main business is selling contractor data back to insurance carriers. Contractors are measured by that data, penalized by that data, and get nothing in return.

Verinode is the opposite of that.

You own your data. We do not. You can see it, export it, delete it, and stop contributing to peer benchmarks at any time.
We will never sell your data to insurance carriers. Not Verisk. Not Cotality. Not Liberty Mutual. Not Allstate. Not anyone carrier-aligned. This is a binding commitment in our terms of service and we cannot quietly change it without notifying you and giving you the right to delete your data first.
When you contribute anonymized data to peer benchmarks, you get something back. Benchmarks for your business. Free research reports. Feature credits. Priority support. We call this the data dividend, and it is not optional on our side — if we use your data to build a benchmark, you get access to that benchmark free.
Your data governance is controlled by operators, not by Verinode. Our Operator Advisory Board — a group of active restoration contractors — governs what we can and cannot do with aggregated data. Not us.

That is the whole pitch. Everything below is the operational detail that makes those four commitments enforceable.

What data we collect from operators

When you use Verinode, you give us access to three categories of data:

1. Your business data

Data that describes how your restoration company operates:

Jobs and claims — claim numbers, insured names, addresses, carriers, TPAs, categories, statuses, dates, amounts
Financial data — revenue, costs, margins, payment history, AR, cost profiles
Supplements — submitted, approved, denied amounts, reasons, response times
Vendors — who you buy from, what you pay, satisfaction ratings
Equipment — inventory, utilization, maintenance, purchases
Team members — names, roles, certifications, training history
Certifications — business-level, subcontractor, team member, CEC credits
Safety — incidents, insurance policies, compliance tracking
Documents — the originals you upload (emails, PDFs, CSVs, photos) and the LLM-extracted structured data derived from them

This data is stored in a region-deployable PII database (pii.* schema in our engineering terms). It is scoped to your operator account. Other operators cannot see it. Carriers cannot see it. Verinode's engineers can see it only when providing support and only with operator consent.

2. Your interaction data

Data that describes how you use the Verinode platform:

Pages you view, features you use, how long you spend on tasks
Decisions you accept or reject from our AI agents
Chat conversations with specialist agents
Survey responses about vendors, carriers, and TPAs
Corrections you make to LLM-extracted data

This is used to improve the product and to train our agents to give better recommendations. Anonymized interaction patterns flow into the intelligence layer; individual interactions do not.

3. Your team's contact information

Only what's necessary for the platform to function:

Authorized user names and email addresses
Role and permission assignments
Login history (for security auditing)

We never use your team contact information for marketing outside of Verinode product updates you've opted into.

How we use that data

There are exactly three purposes. No others.

Purpose 1 — Run the product you pay for

Your raw business data is used to power the Verinode product you pay for: dashboards, signals, AI advisory, decision workspace, job management intelligence, cost analysis, compliance tracking, all of it. This is the obvious one.

Purpose 2 — Build anonymized peer benchmarks (opt-in)

With your explicit, revocable consent, we include your business data in aggregated cross-operator benchmarks like:

"Median days-to-pay for Liberty Mutual in the southeast region"
"Average labor cost ratio for water mitigation jobs"
"Supplement approval rates by carrier"
"Vendor pricing trends over the last 12 months"

These benchmarks are built by hashing your operator ID, bucketing your addresses to city or region level, stripping all personally identifiable information, and aggregating across many operators so no individual contributor can be identified. If fewer than 5 operators contribute to a specific benchmark, we do not publish it — the minimum cohort size protects everyone.

You can opt out at any time. When you opt out, your contributions are removed from future benchmark calculations within 7 days. Past benchmarks that include your data cannot be retroactively rebuilt (that would require us to recompute everything), but you can request deletion and we will ensure your data is not included in any benchmark calculated after your opt-out date.

In exchange for opting in, you receive:

Free access to every benchmark you contributed to, scoped to your own comparisons ("how does my carrier payment speed compare to the peer group?")
Free access to the quarterly State of Restoration research report
Priority feature credits and product access
A public "contributing operator" recognition in our data use reports (if you choose to be named; anonymous contribution is the default)

This is the data dividend, and it is how we ensure you benefit from every contribution you make.

Purpose 3 — Train our AI agents to be smarter

Our specialist agents (margin analyst, carrier scorecard analyst, insurance advisor, safety coach, etc.) get smarter when they have access to a bigger corpus of real operator situations to learn from. With your consent, we use anonymized records of operator situations and outcomes to improve the retrieval layer that our agents consult at inference time.

Importantly: we do NOT send your raw data to any third-party model for training. We do NOT give any external AI company a copy of the Verinode dataset. We use the data internally to build our own retrieval indexes and internal evaluation harnesses. If we ever change this, we will notify you in advance and give you the right to delete your data before the change takes effect.

What we will NEVER do

These are the commitments that make Verinode structurally different from Verisk, Cotality, and every other data vendor in the restoration space. We have built them into our terms of service and cannot change them without notifying you and giving you deletion rights first.

We will never sell your raw business data to insurance carriers. Ever. Not Verisk. Not Cotality. Not Allstate, State Farm, Liberty Mutual, Travelers, USAA, Farmers, Chubb, Erie, or any other primary insurer. Not to any carrier-aligned third-party data broker. Not to any entity whose business model involves selling to insurance companies.

We will never sell your operator identity alongside your business metrics to anyone. Benchmarks are aggregated and anonymized before they ever leave the PII database. The transformation is one-way: once data enters the intelligence layer, the link back to your operator account is severed via cryptographic hashing. Even we cannot reverse it to identify individual contributors.

We will never share your data with Xactimate, Verisk, or any Verisk subsidiary. If Verisk ever acquires Verinode, every operator will be notified 90 days in advance and every operator will have the right to export and delete their complete data before the acquisition closes. This is written into our terms of service as a "change of control" protection.

We will never publish benchmarks with cohorts smaller than 5 operators. Small cohorts risk identifying individual contributors through inference. 5 is our published minimum; for sensitive categories (financials, labor costs, profit margins) we use a minimum of 10.

We will never use your data to train external AI models. Your data stays inside Verinode's infrastructure. We do not send it to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or any model vendor for training purposes. We use frontier models for inference on your data (to extract information from documents you upload) under their enterprise zero-retention terms, but your data is never added to any external training corpus.

We will never use your team members' contact information for external marketing. No lead list resales. No partnerships with third-party vendors who want to pitch your team. No "we noticed you use Verinode" cold outreach from our investors or partners.

We will never change this policy without telling you. Material changes to data use are announced at least 30 days in advance with a summary of what's changing and why. If you disagree, you can delete your data before the change takes effect.

What you get back — the data dividend

The fundamental bargain: if we use your anonymized data to build something, you get free access to it. No tricks.

Specifically:

Free peer benchmarks for every metric you contribute to. Your own dashboard shows how you compare to the peer cohort for every benchmark you're included in.
Free quarterly State of Restoration report. Delivered to every operator on the platform, whether you pay for the product or not. Based on aggregated data from all contributing operators.
Free access to market price research as it matures. Once Verinode has enough cost data to publish actual-market-price research for restoration line items, every contributing operator gets free access as a negotiation tool with carriers.
Priority feature credits. Operators who contribute substantial data receive feature credits that can be redeemed for premium capabilities, advisory hours, or partner discounts.
Advisory board eligibility. Active contributors are eligible to join the Operator Advisory Board and participate in governance of data use policy.

Your rights

You have four concrete rights, exercisable at any time:

1. Opt in or opt out of peer benchmarks

By default, new operator accounts are opted out of peer benchmark contribution. You must explicitly enable contribution from your account settings. You can turn it off at any time. Turning it off removes your contributions from future benchmark calculations within 7 days.

2. Export your data

Your complete operator data is exportable at any time in CSV and JSON formats. Includes all jobs, costs, supplements, vendors, team members, certifications, safety records, surveys, and parsed documents. No fees. No artificial delays. No "data retention" lockups.

3. Delete your data

You can request complete deletion of your operator account and all associated data at any time. Deletion is permanent and is processed within 30 days. Deletion removes your data from:

The PII database (your raw business data)
The intelligence layer (your anonymized contributions, removed from future benchmark calculations)
Backup systems (within 90 days of deletion request)
LLM processing caches (within 7 days)

We cannot retroactively rebuild historical benchmarks that included your data prior to your deletion request — that would require recomputing every benchmark we've ever published. But we can and will ensure your data is excluded from all future calculations.

4. See what we have on you

You can request a complete report of what data Verinode holds about your operation, what anonymized benchmarks include your contributions, and which Verinode team members have accessed your account in the last 90 days. Delivered within 14 days of request.

Governance — the Operator Advisory Board

Verinode's data use policy is not set by Verinode alone. A group of active restoration operators — the Operator Advisory Board — governs what we can and cannot do with aggregated data.

Composition: 5-9 active restoration operators representing a mix of company sizes, geographic regions, business types (residential, commercial, large loss, franchise), and years in business. Minimum 18-month commitment with rotation to ensure fresh perspectives.

Responsibilities:

Review and approve material changes to this data use policy
Review requests from Verinode research, carrier partners, or franchise HQ customers to access aggregated benchmarks — and veto anything that doesn't pass the "would operators be OK with this?" test
Review the annual data use audit prepared by Verinode
Provide operator-side input on new product features that involve cross-operator data
Represent operator interests in any change-of-control discussion (acquisition, IPO, etc.)

The Operator Advisory Board has veto power over material changes to this policy. Verinode leadership cannot quietly loosen the data protections in this document without explicit approval from the board, and the board composition is operator-only (no Verinode employees, no investors, no carrier representatives).

The current board roster is published at https://verinode.ai/advisory-board (placeholder — to be published before seed round).

When you first sign up for Verinode, you'll see a consent flow that asks you to choose three things:

1. Do you want to contribute anonymized data to peer benchmarks?

Yes (recommended) — You get free access to all benchmarks, the State of Restoration report, and priority feature credits. Your data is hashed, bucketed, and aggregated before leaving your operator scope.
No — Your data stays in your operator scope. You see the product but not the peer benchmark features. You can change this decision at any time.

2. Do you want to contribute anonymized interaction data to improve our AI agents?

Yes (recommended) — Helps our agents learn from what works and what doesn't across the operator cohort. Your individual interactions are never exposed; only aggregate patterns feed the improvement loop.
No — Your interactions stay scoped to your account and do not inform agent improvements for others.

3. Are you willing to be recognized as a contributing operator?

Yes — Your company name may appear in public lists of contributing operators (e.g., in the State of Restoration report) if you're active during the data collection period.
No (default) — Your contribution is completely anonymous. We don't name you anywhere public.

All three choices are independent. You can opt in to #1 and not #2, or vice versa, or all three, or none. You can change any choice at any time from your account settings.

Jurisdictional notes

United States. Verinode complies with state-level privacy laws (CCPA in California, similar laws in Colorado, Virginia, Utah, Connecticut, and others as they take effect). Where state law grants you additional rights beyond what's in this policy, those rights apply to you automatically.

European Union / United Kingdom. Not currently supported. When Verinode expands to EU operators, a region-specific PII database (pii-eu) will be deployed in an EU region and GDPR-specific protections will apply. We will not onboard EU operators until the EU-specific infrastructure and DPA/SCC documentation is in place.

Canada. Supported with PIPEDA-equivalent protections. Contact us for the Canadian addendum.

Other jurisdictions. Contact us. We'll either confirm coverage under this policy or provide a jurisdiction-specific addendum.

Security posture

Fast summary, not a full security doc (that lives at docs/infosec-and-privacy-log.md):

All operator data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest (AES-256).
PII databases have row-level security (RLS) enforced at the schema level, with no authenticated access policies — all data access goes through service-role clients with explicit operator scoping.
Row-level security is audited by an external firm at least annually.
Verinode staff access to operator PII requires MFA and is logged.
Operators can request a complete access log for their account at any time.
Penetration testing is performed at least annually by a qualified third party.
Incident response plan: any data incident affecting operator data will be communicated to affected operators within 72 hours of discovery.

Contact

Data rights requests (export, delete, access report): privacy@verinode.ai
Data policy questions (clarifications on anything in this doc): policy@verinode.ai
Operator Advisory Board inquiries: advisory@verinode.ai
Security incidents: security@verinode.ai (monitored 24/7)
Everything else: hello@verinode.ai

All email contact details will be migrated to @verinode.ai once the domain is live. Until then, use the verinode.app domain for contact.

Revision history

2026-04-11 — Version 1.0 — Initial version. Published alongside the ingestion normalization layer launch. Covers the core four commitments (operator ownership, never-sell-to-carriers, data dividend, operator governance), the three purposes for data use, the six things we will never do, and operator rights (opt in/out, export, delete, access). Written at the moment the technical foundation for peer benchmarks became real.

In plain language, one more time

If you remember nothing else from this page, remember this:

Verinode makes money by helping operators make more money. Not by helping carriers squeeze operators harder. Every contribution you make to the platform is recorded, returned to you, and protected from the people who would use it against you. We will put this in writing, we will give you the right to leave with your data, and we will let operators govern how the data is used.

That's the deal. We're happy to explain any of it in more detail — just ask.

Last updated: 2026-04-11. This is a living document; check back periodically for updates. Material changes are announced 30 days in advance.