Privacy policy

This policy covers theindustryalmanac.com and the Almanac application at app.theindustryalmanac.com, operated by The Industry Almanac. It explains what we hold about you, why we hold it, and what you can ask us to do with it.

Almanac is a business tool sold to companies. Most of the personal information we hold is workplace information — your name, your work email, and what you did inside the application.

• Account information. Your name, work email address, role, and a hashed form of your password. We never store your password itself.
• Organization information. Your company's legal and trading names, the states you operate in, your beverage classes, your logo if you upload one, and your billing tier.
• Content you put into Almanac. Compliance items, filing dates, notes, and any documents you upload to your vault — licenses, permits, filing confirmations, bonds, and similar.
• Questions you ask. The queries you type into Ask Almanac.
• Security and operational records. Sign-in times, failed sign-in attempts, and application logs used to keep the service running and to investigate abuse.

• We do not sell or rent personal information, and never have.
• We do not run advertising or analytics trackers. There is no Google Analytics, no advertising pixel, and no third-party tracking script anywhere on this site or in the application.
• We do not build advertising profiles or share your data with data brokers.
• We do not use your uploaded documents or your questions to train machine-learning models, ours or anyone else's.

We use one session cookie, set when you sign in, that keeps you signed in and is required for the application to work. It is not used for tracking.

We also store your light/dark theme preference in your browser's local storage so the correct theme renders before the page paints. It never leaves your device.

Because we set no advertising or analytics cookies, there is no cookie consent banner to click through.

We keep the list of processors short, and each one is here for a specific job:

• WorkOS — authentication and sign-in. Receives your email address and name.
• Amazon Web Services — hosting, the database, and storage for documents you upload. All infrastructure is in the United States.
• Anthropic — the language model behind Ask Almanac and behind our drafting of regulatory records. See the next section for what is and is not sent.

Almanac also draws on public legislative and regulatory data feeds. These are one-way into Almanac — no personal or customer information is sent to any of them, so they are not processors of your data.

Two parts of Almanac use a language model, and it is worth being exact about each.

Drafting regulatory records. We send public source material — statutes, regulations, agency pages — to the model so it can extract structured records. No customer data is involved at any point. A person then verifies every record against the source before it is published.

Ask Almanac. When you ask a question, we send your question and the published Almanac records relevant to it. Your uploaded documents are not sent. Other organizations' data is never sent. Your question is not used to train models.

Almanac holds many organizations in one system. Separation is enforced in the database itself through row-level security, not merely in application code, so one customer cannot read another customer's records.

Almanac staff can open your organization's account to support you — to see what you are seeing when something is wrong, and to fix it. This includes acting as a named user in your organization, so that the screen we are looking at is the screen you described. We do this at our discretion and do not ask your permission each time, which is the honest position: you should assume it is possible rather than be surprised by it.

Every such session is recorded. The log stores which member of Almanac staff it was, which of your users they acted as, and every action they took while doing so — attributed to both of them, never to your user alone. Sessions are time-limited and expire on their own (currently after one hour). Staff cannot use this to file or cancel a request to delete your account: those are statements about your own data, and only you can make them.

You do not have to take our word for it, or ask. Signed-in customers can read the record themselves under Account → Almanac access: every session, who it was, which of your users they acted as, and everything they did. Anything unclear, write to rawn@theindustryalmanac.com.

We keep your account and your organization's content for as long as the account is active. When an organization leaves, we delete its records and uploaded documents on request, and otherwise within a reasonable period of the account closing.

Security and operational logs are kept for a limited period for troubleshooting and abuse investigation. Backups are retained on a rolling basis, so deleted material can persist in backups for a short time after deletion from the live system.

You can ask us to:

• tell you what we hold about you;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• export your organization's data;
• delete your account, or your organization's data entirely.

Write to rawn@theindustryalmanac.com and we will respond. If you are in a place with specific statutory privacy rights, we will honor them; tell us which regime you are relying on and we will handle the request accordingly.

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes. Access to production systems is restricted, sign-in is rate-limited, and repeated failed attempts lock an account. Uploaded documents are stored in access-controlled storage and served through short-lived signed links rather than public URLs.

No system is perfect. If you believe you have found a security problem, please write to rawn@theindustryalmanac.com before disclosing it publicly, and we will work with you.

Almanac is a business tool for a regulated, adults-only industry. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page. For changes that materially affect how we handle your information, we will contact account holders directly rather than relying on you to notice.

Questions about this policy, or about anything we hold: rawn@theindustryalmanac.com.