Privacy & legal: consents, data use, and exports

What this page is

Privacy & Legal is where you control exactly how your data moves through Verinode: what you have agreed to let Verinode do with your inbox and your work account, what stays encrypted versus what reaches peer benchmarks, a copy of every legal document you have accepted and when, and (if your company sits inside a franchise, association, or other network) the literal contract for what your parent organization can and cannot see about you. It is also where you download a full export of your own account data, with a pointer to Settings › Your data, where the account can be emptied or closed.

Nothing on this page is marketing copy. Every toggle here changes a real database flag, every number reflects your actual account, and every download pulls live data. Treat it as the terms of the relationship between you and Verinode, written down and editable.

Where to find it

Open Settings from the sidebar, then look in the Data & Privacy group for the Privacy & Legal row. Its subtitle reads "Consents, data use, exports" until you have made at least one consent choice, after which it shows a live count like "2/3 consents." Click through and you land on /settings/privacy.

The page has no hero banner. It flows as a stack of grouped sections: Consents, Your Data, Your Network, and (only if it applies to you) a franchisor visibility card above all of them.

Your franchisor's visibility contract (network operators only)

If your company belongs to a franchise, association, or other Verinode-managed network, a card titled "Your franchisor · [network name]" appears at the very top of the page, above the Consents section. It reads: "Exactly what your network sees about your operation." If you are an independent operator with no HQ affiliation, this card never appears and the page starts directly at Consents.

The card is a literal, two-column disclosure:

What your franchisor sees:

• Your benchmark percentile. Where your margin, cycle time, cert posture, and reputation composite sit against your network's median, the same number you see about yourself on your own Benchmarks page.
• Bottom-quartile flag with driver. If you land in the lower band on a tracked metric, your franchisor sees the flag plus the one or two metric drivers behind it (for example, "margin below network median, runway shorter than typical"), so they see the why, not just the what.
• Cert and compliance posture. Whether your tracked certifications are current, expiring, or missing, the same view you see on your own certifications page.
• Survey response counts, anonymized. When your franchisor runs a survey or poll, they see the aggregated per-question distribution across the network, never your individual answer.
• Item 19 cohort participation (franchise operators only). Whether you opted in to a specific FDD-year Item 19 cohort. Your anonymized numbers feed that cohort's distribution; your franchisor never sees your individual figures.
• Plan and intervention status. Whether you have acknowledged, started, or completed each playbook your franchisor pushed to you, and how long each has sat at each stage.
• Public reputation aggregates. Your Google and Yelp star ratings and review counts, public information regardless of Verinode, rolled up across the network.

What stays operator-private, even to a franchisor with full Verinode access:

• Individual customer reviews and the sentiment text behind them
• Per-job records and claim numbers (your franchisor sees aggregated cycle time, never job-level detail)
• Your individual answer to any survey or poll (only the aggregated distribution crosses over)
• Your team's individual names, contact details, and role assignments
• The specific rates you negotiated with a vendor or carrier
• Free-text incident notes and supplement narratives
• Full property addresses and customer contact details (your franchisor sees ZIP3 and state only, for territory analysis)

If your franchisor publishes its own data-use terms, a link to their site appears under the card. The card closes with Verinode's standing position: Verinode is structurally on your side of the operator-to-franchisor relationship, an independent data trust rather than a franchisor tool, and never sells your data to insurance carriers, never exposes your identity alongside your metrics, and never lets any AI model be trained on your data.

The three consents

The Consents section is the first thing every operator sees on this page, whether or not a franchisor card is present. A line under the section header reads "X of 3 granted. You control how Verinode uses your work-account data," followed by three toggles that are always fully visible, never hidden behind a summary or a "manage" link.

Allow Inbox Forwarding

Controls whether Verinode can receive the emails you forward from your work account at all. This is the on/off switch for the whole inbound pipeline: turn it off and Verinode stops accepting new forwarded email from you the moment the change saves. It is required for a data-contributor account to function at all, since a data contributor's only path into Verinode is a forwarded inbox. See Forwarding documents for how the forwarding address itself works.

Process Email Content

Controls whether Verinode extracts structured data (jobs, supplements, adjuster details) out of the emails you have already allowed in. Inbox Forwarding lets the email arrive; Process Email Content lets Verinode actually read and structure it for your team's analytics. See Connecting your data for the full picture of how ingestion turns into usable data.

Help Improve Verinode

Anonymized usage telemetry on how you interact with the contributor surface itself, clicks, navigation, feature use. This one is optional and has no bearing on whether ingestion or benchmarks work.

Toggling any of the three shows a brief confirmation, "Consent granted." or "Consent revoked.", directly under the toggles. If a save fails, the message reads whatever specific error the server returned instead.

What's encrypted versus what reaches peer benchmarks

Under Your Data, a disclosure titled "What we share, and what never leaves your walls" opens to the full breakdown (click it to expand; it starts collapsed with the summary "Encrypted PII stays yours; only anonymized aggregates reach peer benchmarks"):

What is encrypted. Your customers' identities and contact details, claim numbers, adjuster names, your team's personal information, full street addresses, and free-text incident and supplement records. All of it is column-encrypted at rest under a key scoped to you. No other operator or carrier can read it, Verinode never sells it, and only audited automated systems ever decrypt it to do the work you asked for.

What flows to peer benchmarks. Only the analytical dimensions: carrier and vendor names, equipment models, dollar amounts, dates, statuses, categories, ratings, and coarsened derivations (ZIP3, state, region, category enums). Your operator ID is replaced with a keyed hash first, and it is always aggregated across a cohort of peers before it appears anywhere. Verinode holds the hash key, so this is pseudonymization rather than full anonymization.

What IQ learns. Verinode learns; the model doesn't. No AI model is trained on your data, by Verinode or by anyone. What IQ learns is kept as records inside Verinode, which IQ reads when it answers you. What it learns from you (your conversations, your corrections, your preferences) stays in your account; across the network, only the scorecard is counted, which recommendations worked and by how much, with no one identifiable.

The AI models IQ runs on. Anthropic and OpenAI. They process your data only to answer your request and are contractually barred from training on it. They keep it for up to 30 days to watch for abuse and misuse, then delete it, and longer only where the law requires it or a request is flagged for misuse. Speech is transcribed by Deepgram with zero retention; if Deepgram is unavailable, a recording falls back to OpenAI under the same terms as above.

What Verinode never does. Sell to insurance carriers. Expose your identity alongside your metrics. Let any AI model be trained on your data. These are binding commitments in the Data Use Policy, linked from inside the disclosure.

For how those anonymized aggregates turn into what you actually read on the Benchmarks pages, see How benchmarks work and Benchmarks overview.

Exporting your data

Still under Your Data, above the disclosures, sits an Export My Data row with the note "Download everything Verinode holds for you" and a Download button. Clicking it downloads a JSON file named verinode-data-export-<your-user-id>-<today's-date>.json containing, in full:

• Your auth record (email, account creation date, last sign-in)
• Every operator account you belong to and your role on each
• Your user profile and notification preferences
• Your member record and recent member activity
• Invites you have sent
• Your consent state and full consent-change audit history, both the per-user consents above and the operator-level network consents below
• Every legal document you have accepted, with version and acceptance date
• If you also hold an HQ (franchisor or association) login: your HQ notification preferences, saved items, in-app notifications, and HQ Vault Key metadata (fingerprints and access log only, never the key material itself)
• Your LinkedIn connection metadata, if connected (scope and connection date only, never the OAuth tokens themselves)

Operator business data, jobs, costs, supplements, and similar, is owned by the operator account as a whole rather than by any individual user, so it is not part of this personal export. This download is specifically everything tied to your own login.

Accepted document history

Also collapsed behind a disclosure inside Your Data is "Documents You Have Accepted," summarized as "None on file yet" or "N on file." Expand it and each document you have accepted appears as a row: Version [number] as the label, the document's title as the value, and "Accepted [date]" as the meta note. The Data Use Policy row links out to its published page; other documents, like the Terms of Service, list without a link since their canonical text lives elsewhere.

If you have not accepted anything yet (rare, since sign-up itself records acceptances), the disclosure reads plainly: "No acceptances on file yet."

Need a formal export of your acceptance history for a compliance review, rather than the visual list here? Email privacy@verinode.ai.

Your network contribution

How your operator account takes part in the network as a whole, rather than your personal inbox, has its own page since 2026-09-21: Settings › Your network (/settings/network). This page carries one row under Your Network that opens it. What you find there:

• Peer benchmarks. Not a switch. Your anonymized data helps build industry benchmarks like median days-to-pay by carrier and supplement approval rates, and you read every benchmark you are part of. It is part of membership, so it ends only when you leave Verinode.
• Help IQ learn from what works. Your responses to recommendations (act, dismiss, how it went) add to the network's scorecard of which recommendations work. On by default. Turn it off and your responses stop shaping IQ's suggestions. Your benchmarks are unaffected.
• Public recognition. Be listed as a contributing operator in Verinode's data-use reports. Your company name appears, but none of your data is identifiable. Leave this off to contribute anonymously.

Below those rows sits What IQ has learned, a direct reciprocity view: everything the network has captured from you, described as yours to see any time. It shows three figures:

• Preferences remembered, the count of things your agent has retained about how you like to work, broken out by type (Preference, Fact, Pattern, Decision) underneath.
• Contributions to the network, the combined count of decision outcomes and specialist claims you have contributed, split out below the number.
• Verified rollup participations, how many distinct network findings your data has joined once other operators independently reached the same conclusion. Until your data has joined one, the hint explains that a rollup forms once independent agreement is reached across contributors, not from your data alone.

When there is recent activity, a "Recently learned" list shows up to a handful of specific items, each labeled by type (Preference, Fact, Pattern, Decision) with a plain-language description and, where available, a confidence percentage.

Turn off Help IQ learn from what works and the corresponding rollups stop growing within 24 hours. What IQ learns from your conversations, corrections and preferences stays in your account either way; only the scorecard and counts of conversations cross to the network, never the chat text.

Erasing your data

Erasing the business's data now sits beside closing the account, in Settings › Your data. Empty the account instead deletes every record and keeps the account, the membership and every sign-in, empty. Close account deletes the account too. Only the person the bill is in the name of can do either (any admin, if nobody is marked as the billing contact), after typing the company name and entering your password, and a fresh code from your authenticator app if two-factor is on. See Your data and account.

Related reading

• Forwarding documents
• Connecting your data
• How benchmarks work
• Benchmarks overview