Privacy
Short version: we collect what you give us in the survey, we use it to decide what to build, and we don't sell it.
What we collect
Your survey answers, the ranking order you set, the free-form text you write, and your email address. Optionally your name and home base identifier. Providers give a certificate number; owners give a tail number. Cloudflare Turnstile returns a pass/fail result confirming you're a person.
What we deliberately don't collect
No phone numbers. No addresses. No analytics, advertising pixels, session recording, or third-party trackers of any kind. We don't store your browser's user-agent string, your referrer, or anything else that supports fingerprinting. Your IP address is used to rate-limit submissions and is hashed before it touches storage — we never keep the address itself.
Your contact details are stored apart from your answers
Every submission is split in two. Your answers go into one place, tagged with a random identifier. Your email address and name go somewhere else, tagged with the same identifier. Anyone analysing the survey results is looking at responses with no name and no email attached to them. Re-joining the two takes deliberate action by someone with access to both.
Certificate numbers are never stored in full
FAA mechanic certificates issued before roughly 2000 often used the holder's Social Security Number. That makes the raw value genuinely dangerous to hold, so we don't hold it. When you enter a certificate number we compute a keyed one-way fingerprint of it and keep only that, plus the last four characters. The fingerprint lets us spot duplicate submissions; it cannot be reversed back into your certificate number, and the key that produces it is never stored alongside the data.
If your certificate number is your SSN, use the checkbox on the provider survey and leave the field blank. We'd rather have an unverified response than that number.
Tail numbers
Aircraft registrations are public record in the FAA registry, so a tail number on its own tells us nothing you haven't already published. We keep it because it's the only way to segment answers by airframe. It's stored on the answers side, away from your email address.
Where it goes
Responses travel over TLS to a Cloudflare Worker on our own domain and are written into a private Google Sheet inside a Google Workspace account we control. The sheet is not public, not link-shared, and access is limited to the people working on this. No data is sent to any other third party.
How long we keep it
Your email address and name are deleted eighteen months after you give them to us, automatically, whether or not you ask. Your survey answers are kept without contact details attached and become part of the aggregate. We’d rather delete things on a timer than rely on anyone remembering to.
Changed your mind about an answer?
Just take the survey again. Repeat submissions are allowed on purpose — the later one is the one we read, and we can tell the two are from the same person without you telling us. There is no edit link to lose and no support queue to wait on.
Deleting your data
Go to returntoservice.ai/forget. Three ways in, whichever suits:
- One click, if you’re on the browser you submitted from.
- Your response ID, shown on the thank-you page. Instant.
- A link we email you, if you have neither. Valid thirty minutes.
No human approves any of it and there is no inbox to wait on. A deletion request sitting unread is a promise being broken quietly; a button that works is a promise being kept.
We won’t accept a tail number, a certificate number, or a name as proof — aircraft registrations are public record, so a route built on them would let a stranger delete your response. The emailed link is different: it proves you can receive mail at that address, not merely that you know it. Same standard as any password reset.
Contact details are also deleted automatically after eighteen months, whether or not you ask.
Cookies
We don't set any. Cloudflare Turnstile may set a short-lived token for bot detection; it does not track you across sites.