Who owns the data when private sewer lateral programs move to the cloud?

Privacy, security and data safety are key themes that come up in our demos of Forward Lateral to municipalities. It’s a common question and honestly a good question to ask. Without asking, the mind tends to wander.

The answer we’ve given since the inception of Forward Lateral is this: we preserve the status quo of PSL programs, we just do it digitally.

What does this mean?

It means that in a private sewer lateral inspection program, the property owner or real estate agent (or even construction contractor) hires a CCTV inspector to record the lateral and send it into the municipality for review. Nobody is selling the data, though it is being shared to the municipality (which is the entire idea in the first place).

Now that softwares like Forward Lateral are in the cloud, questions come up naturally about data. Do we sell that data?

The answer is NO. .

The best part about paying for something is that the company providing it doesn’t need to rely on some subtle tactic like selling data (looking at you, social media giants that sell advertising).

Simply, the property contact hires the CCTV inspector who authors the data for the municipality to review. We believe in privacy, and so should everyone else. Especially when it comes to ones own property.