Privacy Policy
The short version: we collect almost nothing. PolityLens is a public-data tool, not an advertising business. There is very little about you for us to want.
What we collect
Almost nothing. To count how many people view a given bill, we record a one-way hashed version of your IP address. That hash cannot be reversed into your real address and is never tied to your identity. We use no tracking cookies and run no advertising pixels.
What we don't collect
No accounts. No names, no logins, no profiles. We do not track you across the web, and the home address you enter to find your representatives is never stored. It is used once, in the moment, to look up your district, and then it is gone.
The contact form
If you choose to write to us through the contact form, your message and your email are stored in a separate, isolated database used only to read and respond to messages. It is not merged with any browsing data, because we do not keep any browsing data to merge it with.
Third-party services
A few outside services make the site work. We list them so you know exactly who is involved:
- U.S. Census geocoder: translates the address you type into a congressional district.
- Google Places: powers the address autocomplete as you type. To surface nearby addresses first, your approximate location (derived from your IP, never a precise GPS fix) may be sent with the lookup. It is used only to order suggestions in that moment and is never stored.
- Cloudflare: delivers and protects the site (content delivery, security, and bot protection). All traffic passes through it, and it derives the approximate location referenced above from your IP address.
- Stripe: processes voluntary donations.
- Sentry: error monitoring. When something breaks, a diagnostic report that may include your IP address and the page you were on is sent to Sentry so we can fix it. It is never used for advertising or profiling.
Where our data comes from
All of the civic information on PolityLens (votes, bills, finance, executive actions) is public record published by the U.S. government. None of it is derived from PolityLens users. We hold no proprietary data about you.
Questions about privacy
If anything here is unclear, or you want to know more about how a specific feature handles data, write to us through the contact page. We are happy to explain.