Privacy and safeguards
This is our Information Privacy and Safeguard Policy. It describes what we collect, what leaves our systems, and what never does. We publish it because IRS rules for online tax providers require it, and because a promise you cannot check is not worth much.
What we collect
The documents you give us and the facts we extract from them. Your contact details. Your Social Security number and those of anyone on your return, because a tax return cannot be filed without them.
We also collect your IP address and a hashed device identifier. That is not optional hardening on our side: the IRS requires both on every electronically filed return as an anti-fraud measure, and a return submitted without them is rejected.
What we never send to an AI model
Social Security numbers, taxpayer identification numbers, and account numbers are removed before any request reaches a language model. The one unavoidable exception is the document-reading step itself, whose literal job is to read the number off the page. That step is a short, isolated, structured request, and the value is masked before it appears anywhere else in the product.
Your data is not used to train any model. That is a contractual term with our model vendor, not a setting on a dashboard.
Consent, and why we ask twice
Federal law (Internal Revenue Code section 7216) treats sending your tax information to an outside service as a disclosure, and treats using it for anything other than preparing your return as a separate matter. So we ask for two separate consents, each naming what it covers and which company receives the information. We name the vendor rather than saying "our AI partners".
You can decline. Consent is not a condition of using TaxPad, and declining does not make the product unavailable to you. We run a complete filing path that involves no AI at all, and a return prepared that way is exactly as valid.
You can withdraw a consent at any time from your data receipt.
What we do not do
We do not sell your information. We do not share it with advertisers. We do not use your return to market financial products to you, and we take no referral fee from any financial product mentioned anywhere in the product.
Your refund never passes through an account we control. It goes from the government to you.
Seeing it for yourself
Your data receipt shows every document we hold and every consent you have given, and you can withdraw a consent from it. Two things it does not show yet, and says so on the page rather than omitting them quietly: the log of requests that left our systems with the vendor that received each one, and the history of what changed on your return. Export and deletion are requests to support today, not buttons.
If something goes wrong
If information is exposed, we notify you, and we notify the Federal Trade Commission and the IRS within the timeframes the law sets. We will tell you what happened and what it means for you, in plain language, not a press release.