Privacy policy

Effective 19 August 2026  ·  Last updated 19 August 2026

desq is a tool for general contractors and builders. It reads the paperwork behind a construction job and turns it into a dated, cited record. Doing that means handling documents and correspondence that are commercially sensitive, and in some cases privileged. This page says plainly what we do with them.

We do not sell your data, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not use it to train general purpose AI models.

1. Who we are

desq is operated by Desq, Inc., a Delaware corporation, trading as “desq”. You can reach a human at hello@desq.ai for any question in this policy, including a request to delete your data.

2. What data desq holds

Data you give us directly

• Account details: your name, work email address, and the company you work for.
• Project information you enter: job names and numbers, parties, cost codes, dates.
• Documents you upload or photograph: contracts, change orders, invoices, receipts, lien waivers, pay applications, meeting minutes, schedules and so on.

Data that arrives at an intake address

Each project can have its own forwarding address. Anything sent to it is recorded, including messages that match no project and messages with nothing attached. We keep the sender, recipients, subject, date, message body and attachments. We deliberately record deliveries we could not route, because a document that arrives and vanishes silently is worse than one that never arrives.

Data from accounts you connect

If you connect a mailbox, a file storage folder, a calendar or an accounting system, desq reads what you have selected. Section 4 covers this in detail and is deliberately kept separate from everything else on this page.

Data we collect automatically

Server logs for security and debugging: IP address, timestamp, and which part of the application was called. This website sets no cookies, loads no fonts or scripts from third parties, and runs no analytics or advertising trackers of any kind. The application itself uses a single cookie to keep you signed in.

3. What we do with it

We use your data to run desq for you, and for nothing else. Specifically:

• To extract facts from documents and place them, with a citation, into your job record.
• To generate registers, reports and meeting packets you ask for.
• To detect duplicates, so the same invoice arriving twice is not counted twice.
• To keep the service secure, diagnose faults, and meet legal obligations.

We do not use your data for advertising, we do not sell or rent it, and we do not share it with anyone except the sub-processors listed in section 6.

4. How desq handles data from connected accounts

This section covers data obtained through Google APIs, Microsoft Graph, and other systems you explicitly connect. It is set out separately from our general practices on purpose.

Google user data

desq's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

In practice that means:

• We request the narrowest scopes that let the feature work, and we ask for access to files and folders you select rather than to your whole account wherever the API allows it.
• We use Google user data only to provide and improve the features you connected it for, visible to you inside desq.
• We do not transfer Google user data to third parties except as necessary to provide those features, for security purposes, or to comply with the law.
• We do not use Google user data to develop, improve or train generalized artificial intelligence or machine learning models.
• No human at desq reads your Google user data except with your explicit consent for a specific support issue, where required for security, or where the law requires it.

Microsoft data

Where you connect a Microsoft 365 or Outlook account, desq reads only the mail folders, file folders and calendars you select, using delegated permissions granted by you or your administrator. The same limits above apply: we use it to provide the features you connected it for, we do not sell it, and we do not train models on it. You or your administrator can withdraw consent at any time from your Microsoft account, and desq stops reading immediately.

Accounting data

Where you connect an accounting system, desq reads it and does not write to it.

Tokens

Access credentials for connected accounts are stored encrypted, are readable only by the server processes that need them, and are never exposed to the browser or to other customers. Disconnecting an account deletes them.

5. Automated processing, and the person in front of it

desq uses large language models to read documents and correspondence and to propose facts for your job record. Three things about that are worth stating clearly.

• Proposals are reviewed before they count. Figures and facts extracted from a document are held for review and do not affect any financial total until a person confirms them. This is a deliberate design choice rather than a temporary limitation.
• Untrusted documents are treated as untrusted. An invoice or an email arriving from outside your company is data, not instruction. desq applies protections against prompt injection and does not let the content of a document direct what the system does.
• Your data does not train anyone's model. Content you connect or upload is not used to train or improve general purpose models, ours or a vendor's.

6. Who else touches it

desq runs on infrastructure operated by other companies. Each one is bound by contract to process your data only on our instructions.

Provider	What for	Where
Supabase	Database, file storage, authentication	United States
Postmark	Inbound and outbound email	United States
Anthropic	Language model processing of documents	United States
Netlify	This website only. No customer data.	United States

We will update this list before adding a new sub-processor that handles customer content.

7. How long we keep it

A construction record is useful precisely because it accumulates, so by default we keep your job data for as long as your account is active. That said:

• You can delete individual documents and records at any time from within desq.
• You can ask us to delete your account and everything in it by writing to hello@desq.ai. We will do so within 30 days and confirm when it is done.
• Disconnecting a connected account deletes its stored credentials immediately.
• Backups are retained for a limited period and are overwritten on a rolling basis.

One deliberate exception: because desq is built to preserve a correction rather than overwrite it, deleting a record removes it from your registers but the fact that something was recorded and later removed remains in the audit history. That is the point of an audit history. If you need a record fully expunged, write to us and say so.

8. Security

• Data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
• Access is enforced at the database row level, so one customer's data is not reachable from another customer's session.
• Credentials for connected accounts are held in a dedicated secrets store, separate from application data.
• Write access to the historical record is restricted to server side processes. Application history is append only and cannot be silently rewritten, including by us.

No system is perfectly secure. If you believe you have found a vulnerability, write to hello@desq.ai and we will respond.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export or delete the personal data we hold about you, and to object to certain processing. Write to hello@desq.ai and we will act on it. We will not charge you for it and we will not make the service worse for you because you asked.

desq is operated from the United States and your data is processed there.

10. Children

desq is a business tool and is not directed at anyone under 18.

11. Changes

If we change this policy in a way that materially affects how we handle your data, we will tell you by email before it takes effect rather than quietly changing the date at the top.

12. Contact

hello@desq.ai