What we keep, and why.

Cleared is run by Cleared to Open, Inc., in Denver, Colorado. For any question about this policy or your information, or to ask for a copy or deletion, write to info@clearedtoopen.com.

This site has no accounts, and two forms: the job application on our careers page, and the “Get updates” sign-up at the foot of each page (both below). Otherwise it keeps very little:

• A language cookie (cleared_locale, one year) that remembers whether you read it in English or Spanish.
• A campaign tag, when you arrive by a link or QR code that carries one (for example ?ref=oct13). Your browser keeps it for that tab until you close it, and passes it to the dashboard when you click through. It names the campaign, not you.
• Usage counts: which pages are read, how far the product tour is scrolled, which buttons are clicked, your language, and the name of the site that linked you (never the page). A random number that lasts only while the tab is open ties one visit's steps together. We do not use a cookie for this, the counts never include your IP address, and we cannot tell who you are from them. (To stop abuse, a scrambled form of your IP address counts how often counts are sent, and is deleted within the hour.)

If your browser sends Global Privacy Control, a setting that asks sites not to track you, this site does not count your visit.

When you use the dashboard, we keep:

• Your account: email address, name, business name, preferred language, and when you signed in. If you sign in with Google or Apple, we keep the email address they confirm and the account ID they give us. They also send your name (and Google your profile photo); we do not store those, though they travel in your sign-in cookie while you are signed in. We never see or keep a password.
• How you found us: the campaign tag or the name of the site that linked you, recorded once on your account and on any estimate you save.
• Estimates: the license class you looked at and, if you give it, the email address we send a copy to.
• Your business: its legal name, type, Colorado Secretary of State ID, EIN and formation date; your premises (address, size, lease); the people who own or run it (name, email, share of ownership, title and role); your licenses and their history; and the records you keep with us, such as staff training, inspections, enforcement notices and hearings.
• Applications, renewals and change reports: your answers to the city's and the state's questions. For a liquor renewal this includes your answers, and any explanation you give, about taxes owed, criminal convictions of the people on the license, and past license actions.
• Documents you upload or sign, stored privately. Some state forms (DR 8404-I, DR 8495, and a signed renewal form DR 8400, which includes DR 8495) carry Social Security numbers, dates of birth and personal history. Only the business owner and Cleared's staff can open them, never other members of your team, and every download is logged; a history form a person filled in on the dashboard opens only for that person and our staff. Once the agency has acted on the filing, we keep a copy with the Social Security number blacked out and delete the original. Our storage provider also logs each upload and download of these forms, with the IP address and browser it came from; that log is kept for 13 months, and no one can alter it.
• When you sign on the dashboard: the signed documents, with your drawn or typed signature on them; the name you sign with; when you reviewed and signed; your browser type; and a scrambled form of your IP address, as the record of who signed what. What you type on the signing screen only to go on a form (a Social Security number, a date of birth, a home address or phone) is written into the form on your device. We keep it only inside the signed form, never on its own.
• Your own history form (the state's individual history record, DR 8404-I), filled in on the dashboard through your own link or your own account: your answers (date and place of birth, five years of addresses and jobs, relatives in the alcohol industry, citizenship, a physical description, the money you put in and where it came from, and your answers about past licenses and convictions) are saved as you go, so you can come back to it. They are encrypted on their own, and only you can open them: not the business's owner, not the rest of the team, and not our staff, who see the signed form you upload. Your Social Security number, driver's license number and immigration numbers are typed on the last step and written into the form on your device; we never store them on their own.
• Forms finished on the page before you print them (such as DR 8442, or DR 8495 when you sign on paper): what you type there goes into the form on your device and is not saved.
• People you ask to sign, or to fill in their own history form: their name and email address, and the link we email them, which expires after 14 days or when you turn it off.
• Questions you ask us, with who asked and what they were about.
• Whether you want our email updates: your answer to the box on the “Before you start” screen (it is never ticked for you), to the one-time question when you next sign in, or on your Account page. See “Email updates” below.
• Your team: the people you invite (the email address and name you give), their role, and which locations they can see.
• A history of changes: when you or our staff change something, such as a license detail, an application's stage, a business record or someone's role, we record who changed it, when, and the value before and after. Only Cleared's staff see it. For your most sensitive answers it records only that they changed, never what they were.
• How you use the dashboard: the pages you open, the step of a form you reach, how you signed in, and errors you run into. Never what you type into a form. It is tied to your account so we can help if you get stuck, and it is deleted after 13 months. We do not record it from browsers that send Global Privacy Control.
• Security records: counters that limit how often a sign-in link or an estimate can be asked for, kept under a scrambled form of your IP address or email address and deleted within a day. Sign-in links expire after 15 minutes, team invitations after 72 hours.

When you apply for a role on our careers page (clearedtoopen.com/careers), we collect what the form asks for:

• Your name, email address and, if you give it, your phone number.
• Your answers to the role's questions. For the law clerk role: your law school, class year and earliest start date, whether you can work in Spanish, and, if you say, how you heard about the role.
• The files you attach. For the law clerk role: your resume, your cover letter (or the letter you type in), your writing sample and, if you send one, your unofficial transcript.
• That you confirmed you had read this policy.

We use it only to consider you for the role you applied for. It is not added to the dashboard or to any other list.

Where it goes: the site passes your application to our dashboard's server, which emails it, with your files, through Amazon SES (Amazon Web Services' email service) to the company inboxes of Cleared's two founders, and sends you a confirmation. We do not store your application or your files in our database or our document storage, and nothing of it is kept in your browser. To stop abuse, a scrambled form of your IP address and of your email address counts how many applications are sent, and is deleted within a day.

How long we keep it: we delete your application and your files from those inboxes one year after the role is filled.

To ask for it to be deleted sooner, or for a copy, write to elkan@clearedtoopen.com.

Now and then we send news and updates by email: to our clients and people who sign up on this site, and to our investors and partners. Each group is its own list.

Who gets them: only people who said yes. That means you said yes in the dashboard (the box on “Before you start”, the one-time question, or your Account page); you signed up at the foot of this site and clicked the link we emailed you to confirm; or you told one of us directly, and we noted how you agreed, who added you and when. Not answering counts as no. If you say no or unsubscribe, only you can sign up again; our staff cannot do it for you.

What we keep:

• Your email address, and your name if we have it.
• Which kinds of updates you get, and your language.
• A record of every yes, no and unsubscribe: what you chose, when, and how (in the dashboard, with this site's sign-up, with an email's unsubscribe link, or by telling us).

We keep these records after you unsubscribe, so we never email you again by mistake.

When you sign up on this site, the site passes your email address and language to our dashboard's server, which emails you a link to confirm. You are added only once you click it. To stop abuse, a scrambled form of your IP address and of your email address counts how many sign-ups are sent, and is deleted within a day.

How to stop: every update has a link that unsubscribes you in one click. You can also choose which updates you get on your Account page in the dashboard, or write to info@clearedtoopen.com. Stopping one kind leaves the others as they are, and never stops the email about your licenses and filings.

We do not track whether you open our emails or click their links. Images and our font in the emails load from our own server, at the same address for everyone, and we keep no log of who loads them, so loading them tells us nothing about you.

We draft the Spanish of our updates with help from Claude, Anthropic's AI model, run on Amazon Web Services (Amazon Bedrock). Only the update's own words go to it, never your information.

The emails go out through Amazon SES (Amazon Web Services' email service). We do not give your address to any other mailing service.

The dashboard sets cookies only to run the service: one to keep you signed in (up to 8 hours), short-lived ones that protect the sign-in itself (by email link, Google or Apple), one for someone signing, or filling in their own history form, with a link we emailed them (up to 8 hours), the language cookie (one year), how you found us (30 days), and, only inside the demo, two that hold the sample business for 12 hours.

Your browser also keeps drafts of forms you are filling in, so you do not lose work: an application for up to 30 days, a renewal for up to 14 days, and a renewal's answers until you close the tab. It also remembers where each premises sits on the map. Signing out clears all of these; otherwise they stay on your device until the form is submitted, they expire, or you clear your browser's data for the site.

On this site, your browser remembers for 30 days how smoothly the 3D scene at the top of the home page ran on your computer: which quality setting it used, or that it was too slow to show. Your next visit starts there. It says nothing about you, and it is never sent to us.

Neither site uses advertising cookies or outside analytics services.

• Preparing and filing your applications, renewals and change reports, and tracking them with the agencies.
• Tracking your licenses' deadlines and emailing you before they come due.
• Sending email updates to people who asked for them.
• Getting your questions to an attorney and back to you.
• Keeping the service and your information secure.
• Understanding how both sites are used, so we can make them better.

We do not sell your information, and we do not use it for advertising.

• The City and County of Denver and the Colorado Liquor Enforcement Division, or any other agency you ask us to file with: what the filing requires, submitted by our staff, with the letter you sign naming the staff who sign for your business.
• An attorney: a question that needs legal judgment goes to a licensed Colorado attorney, who may work outside Cleared.
• The companies that run Cleared for us: Amazon Web Services (storage, database and email, in the United States), Netlify (hosting both sites), and Google Workspace (our staff email, which receives notices about new accounts, estimates, applications, licenses you add, and questions, and job applications from the careers page).
• Google or Apple, if you choose to sign in with them.
• Apple Maps: to draw the small map of your premises, your browser sends the premises street address and ZIP code to Apple, which also sees your IP address.
• Anyone the law requires us to tell, such as under a subpoena or court order.

We keep your information while your account is open, and afterwards for as long as the law requires us to keep licensing, tax and business records. Some things go sooner:

• The original of a form carrying a Social Security number, once the agency has acted on the filing (the blacked-out copy stays).
• Sign-in links, after 15 minutes; team invitations, after 72 hours; links to sign or to fill in a history form, after 14 days.
• Your saved answers on a history form: once our staff accept the signed form, when the application is issued or removed, or 30 days after you last saved them, whichever comes first.
• Security counters, within a day.
• Dashboard usage records, after 13 months.
• A zip of your whole file, a day after you ask for it.
• A job application and its files, one year after the role is filled.

One thing stays longer: the record of your answers about email updates, kept after you unsubscribe so we never email you again by mistake.

Backups: we back up the database every night and keep a copy each month, in two places in the United States (Ohio and Oregon). Nightly backups last 35 days and monthly ones 12 months. Documents you upload are also copied to Oregon, where a deleted one is kept for up to a year. These copies are locked: no one, including us, can change or delete them early, which protects your records from mistakes and attacks. So information we delete, even at your request, leaves our backups only as they expire, at most a year later. Forms carrying a Social Security number, and saved answers on a history form, are never copied into backups, so once they are deleted they are gone.

Until September 2026 this site had a Get Started form. If you filled it in, we still hold what you sent (your type of company, whether it was already registered, whether you had a space, the licenses you were interested in, your email address and phone number). Write to us and we will delete it.

Your information is stored encrypted, in the United States, and the database uses encryption keys we manage. The explanations you give about taxes, convictions and past license actions, your answers on forms you sign, and your saved answers on a history form, are encrypted again on their own. Locked backups in a second region protect it from loss. Documents sit in private storage that can only be reached through links that expire within minutes. Signing in takes a link sent to your email, or Google or Apple, never a password we hold. Staff access is limited to people who need it, and opening a file that carries a Social Security number is logged. If your information is ever exposed, we will tell you as Colorado law requires.

• See and correct your account and business details in the dashboard, or ask us to.
• Ask for a copy of what we hold about you, or for it to be deleted, by writing to info@clearedtoopen.com. We will delete everything the law allows us to; some filing and business records must be kept, and what we delete leaves our locked backups within a year.
• Turn on Global Privacy Control in your browser to stop the usage counts on both sites.
• Stop email updates with the unsubscribe link in any of them, on your Account page in the dashboard, or by writing to info@clearedtoopen.com.

Cleared is a service for businesses and is not meant for children.

If this policy changes, the new version appears here with a new date. If we change how we use information you have already given us, we will email account holders first.