Privacy Policy

Bernauer Insurance Agency is an independent insurance agency based in Minnesota. We are not an insurance company. We work on your behalf to compare coverage from multiple carriers, and we are paid a commission by the carrier you ultimately choose — not a fee by you.

Because we handle insurance applications, we are treated as a financial institution under federal privacy law. This policy explains how we handle your information.

When you request a quote, report a claim, or contact us, you may give us information such as your name, address, phone number, email, date of birth, household members, income, driving history, property details, business details, or health information. On the home and auto quote forms you can also attach a document — normally your current declarations page — instead of typing your coverage out.

Some of it is more sensitive than the rest. An auto quote asks for a driver’s license number and date of birth for every driver in the household, and a VIN for every vehicle. A health, Medicare, or life quote may ask about medical conditions, prescriptions, and the doctors you see. A commercial quote asks for payroll and revenue figures.

We ask for what a carrier needs in order to quote you accurately, and we try not to ask for more than that. Some questions look intrusive — annual income for a health quote, for instance — because subsidy eligibility genuinely cannot be calculated without them. We do not ask for Social Security numbers on this website, and you should never put one in a web form here. If a carrier needs one at application, we will collect it another way.

With your authorization, we may receive information about you from insurance carriers, consumer reporting agencies, motor vehicle records, claims history databases, and similar sources. This is a normal part of underwriting — carriers verify what is on an application before they issue a policy.

If you ask us to quote health, Medicare, dental, vision, or life coverage, we may collect information about your health, your medications, and the doctors you see. We treat this information as confidential, use it only to obtain and service coverage for you, and share it only with the carriers and administrators involved in that coverage.

We use the information you give us to:

• Obtain quotes from insurance carriers on your behalf
• Submit applications and place coverage you have chosen
• Service your policy, process changes, and assist with claims
• Contact you about your coverage, renewals, and things that affect them
• Meet legal, regulatory, and licensing obligations

We share your information with insurance carriers, general agencies, and administrators as necessary to quote, place, and service your coverage. We may also share it with service providers who work on our behalf — including the companies that host this website, deliver its forms to us, and store documents you attach, named under This website and Documents you attach below — and where we are required to by law, regulation, or a valid legal request.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with anyone for their own marketing purposes.

We limit access to your information to the people in our office who need it to do their job. We use reasonable physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect it.

We should be straightforward with you about one thing: email and web forms are not encrypted end-to-end. If you would rather give us sensitive information by phone or in person, that is always fine — call us instead. Documents you attach are held differently from the rest, and Documents you attach below sets out exactly how.

We keep records for as long as you are a client and afterward for as long as our legal, regulatory, and professional obligations require. If you stop doing business with us, we continue to handle whatever we still hold according to this policy.

Documents you attach to a quote form on this website are treated separately and more strictly: they are deleted from the website’s storage after 90 days, whether or not you become a client. If we save a copy into your client file, that copy is a client record like any other and the paragraph above covers it. See Documents you attach below.

You can ask us what we have on file for you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to stop contacting you for marketing purposes. Some information we are required to retain even if you ask us to delete it, because insurance records are subject to retention rules.

You can also opt out of the website measurement described under Cookies and analytics below, without affecting anything else — we will still answer a form you send us.

To make any of these requests, call or email us using the details at the bottom of this page.

This site does not require you to create an account, and there is no client login. You can read every page on it without giving us anything.

When you submit a form here, what you typed is delivered to our office by email through a form-delivery service called Web3Forms. Your answers pass through their systems on the way to our inbox. We do not use them for anything else, and we do not keep a database of form answers on this website — once the email arrives, our copy of your information lives in our office systems like any other client record. Documents you attach are the one exception, and the next section covers them.

On two-part forms, the answers from the first page are held in your own browser until you submit the second page, so a reload does not lose your work. That copy stays on your device, is not sent anywhere on its own, and is discarded when the form is submitted or the tab is closed.

The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which logs routine technical information such as IP addresses as part of delivering and securing the site.

On the home and auto quote forms you can attach your current declarations page instead of typing your coverage out. The file is stored by Cloudflare, on storage we control, and a hyperlink to it goes out in the email that reaches our office. It is not posted anywhere, search engines are told not to index it, and the storage cannot be browsed or listed from outside.

We delete attached documents after 90 days, automatically, and the hyperlink in our office email stops working at the same point.

If you attach a file and then close the page without finishing the form, the file has still been uploaded — nobody at our office ever receives a hyperlink to it, and it is deleted on the same 90-day schedule. If you change your mind while the form is still open, the × beside the attachment deletes it from our storage there and then.

A declarations page carries more than our form asks for: your policy number, your mortgage company, the drivers and vehicles on the policy. Attach it anyway — that is what it is for, and the real page is more accurate than anything either of us would type. If there is something on it you would rather we not have, the long form asks the same questions and takes a few minutes more.

One thing we would rather say plainly than leave you to assume: the hyperlink is what protects the file. It contains a long random code, the way a password-reset hyperlink does, so nobody reaches your document without having been sent it. That is not the same as a login, and we are not going to call it one.

We use Google Analytics to see how people find and move around this site — which pages get read, which ones get abandoned, roughly what part of the country visitors are in. It tells us that a page was read; it does not tell us who read it. Google Analytics sets cookies in your browser and sends Google information including your IP address, the pages you view, and general details about your device and browser. Google handles that data under its own privacy policy.

We may connect this measurement to our advertising, so that we can tell whether money spent on an ad actually resulted in somebody asking us for a quote. What we see from that is counts, not names.

The site also remembers one thing on its own: whether you chose light or dark mode. That preference is stored in your browser, never sent to us, and used for nothing else.

If you would rather not be measured, most browsers let you block or delete cookies, and Google publishes a browser add-on that opts you out of Google Analytics entirely. Blocking either one does not break this site or stop us from responding to a form you send us.

We do not sell information collected on this website, and we do not let anyone use it to build a marketing profile of you for their own purposes.

This site is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect information from children through it. We do collect information about minor children when a parent or guardian includes them on a household insurance application, which is a normal part of quoting family coverage.

We may update this policy from time to time. The effective date at the top of this page tells you when it was last revised.