Last updated: September 24, 2026
GridWatchdog makes a device that tells you when the electricity at a location you own has gone out. This page explains exactly what we collect and why.
That's the complete list. The device has no microphone, no camera, no location sensor, and no connection to your home network.
If you sign in at my.gridwatchdog.com/account to check on your units, that adds a few things:
The sign-in link itself is never stored — it's a signed token that expires 7 days after we send it. Until then it works for anyone who has the email, so don't forward it.
Ordering a device adds the information any mail-order purchase needs:
Your card number never touches our servers. Payment happens entirely on Stripe's checkout page; what we receive back is a confirmation of the payment, never the card details. To ship your order we pass your name and address to Shippo, which prints the postage label.
When a device you ordered is set up, we record a coarse region for it: the first three digits of the shipping ZIP code (or the state, if there is no ZIP) and the regional grid operator for that state. We use it to see where outages cluster. The device's record never holds the full ZIP code or the street address.
The store also measures how people find it. While the store is open, this website keeps a random identifier in your browser's local storage and sends it to us when you visit the store, start a checkout, and complete a purchase. With it we receive any campaign tags in the link you arrived by (the "utm_" parameters) and the name of the website that sent you — the site's name only, not the page address. The same tags and referring site, and your answer to the optional "how did you hear about us" question, are saved with your order and passed to Stripe with the checkout.
This website uses Google Analytics to help us understand how visitors find and use the site. Google Analytics sets cookies in your browser and collects usage data such as the pages you view, how you arrived here, your approximate location, and the device and browser you're using. This applies only to browsing this website — Google Analytics is not in the device, and not in your alert emails. You can read how Google handles this data in the Google Privacy Policy, and opt out entirely with the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on.
We don't put tracking pixels in your alert emails, and we don't record when you open them. The mute link in an alert email carries a short tag naming the kind of alert it came from, such as "outage". When you open that link in a browser, we record that the link was clicked, on which device, and from which kind of alert. It is stored with the rest of your device's records, not sent to Google Analytics, and it tells us whether alerts lead people to act.
To send you power alerts, to show you your device's status, and to diagnose problems when you contact support. We also look at it in aggregate to see which features get used, where outages cluster, and how people find the store, as described above. Nothing else.
Six service providers:
Device event history — each power loss and restore, check-in, and alert — is kept for 90 days and then deleted automatically.
A record of each email we send you — its type, subject line, and whether it was delivered — is also kept for 90 days and then deleted automatically.
Each device also keeps an outage history: when each outage began and ended, to the second, and when we emailed you about it. It has no fixed end date. It is kept for as long as the device is registered, and deleted when the device is removed from the service or when you ask us to delete your data.
We also keep one daily summary per device — battery, memory, signal strength, restarts, and how many outages it saw and how long they lasted — indefinitely, so we can tell when hardware is aging badly. The summaries contain no names or addresses, and no clock times — just the date, how many outages the device saw, and how long they lasted in total. They stay after a device is removed.
Your email addresses, device names, time zone, and sign-in times are stored with each device's record and are deleted with it — when the device is removed from the service, or when you ask us to delete your data. They are not removed just because a device stops checking in or its service ends. When a device is removed we keep a short note that it existed — its identifier, the name you gave it, and the dates it was set up, last checked in, and was removed — but no email address. Crash reports, and the record of which SIM cards a device has used, have no fixed end date either: they stay after the device is removed, until you ask us to delete your data. Webhooks, API tokens, and a record of any past change to your alert address are tied to your email address rather than to a device: when your last device is removed, your tokens are revoked and your webhooks are switched off, but these records stay until you ask us to delete them. Order records are kept longer — they're the business's tax and accounting records.
Statistics about the alert emails we send hold the device identifier and your email's domain (the part after the @), never the full address, and expire on their own after about three months.
Backups. Once a day we copy the whole database — including your email addresses and your devices' outage history — so the service can be restored if something fails. Cloudflare holds our latest 60 daily copies, and each day's copy also goes to a second, off-site backup at Backblaze. Each off-site copy is deleted automatically about a year after it is made. Backups are never edited, so a copy made before you ask us to delete your data still holds it until that copy is deleted.
Every device authenticates with its own cryptographic key. Messages are signed so they can't be forged or replayed. Admin systems are separately protected.
GridWatchdog is a household product not directed at children, and we don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.
If this policy changes materially, we'll email active customers.
Questions or requests: support@gridwatchdog.com