Privacy policy

You don’t need an account to use Plain Votes, and you can read every page without telling us anything about yourself. We count visits with a tool that sets no cookies and doesn’t identify you. We don’t use advertising or tracking tools, and we don’t sell or rent anyone’s personal information, or use it for advertising.

We only collect what you choose to give us, to look up your representatives, contribute or send us a message, and what every web server records about the requests it gets.

When you enter your address on Find your members of Congress, we send it to the U.S. Census Bureau’s geocoder to find your congressional district, and show it back to you on the page. We don’t store your address or write it to our logs, and it isn’t sent in the page’s web address, so it doesn’t appear in the server’s request log either.

The Census Bureau receives the address from our server, not from your browser, so it doesn’t see your IP address. Its privacy policy covers what it does with the request.

When you contribute, we keep the amount, the date, whether the payment went through, the transaction ID from our payment processor, and your email address if you give one for a receipt. We only use the email address to send your receipt, and to answer you if you reply to it.

Payments are processed by Braintree, a PayPal service. The payment form on the support page sends your card details straight to Braintree, and they never reach our server. Braintree handles them under the PayPal Privacy Statement. See our contribution and refund policy for refunds.

When you email us at hello@plainvotes.org, or use our contact form to report an error or send us a message, we keep what you wrote, the page it’s about and the source you point to, if you give them, and your email address if you want a reply. A message sent with the form is also emailed to the people at Fusani Applications, LLC who handle reports. We only use your email address to reply to you.

Like most web servers, ours keeps a log of the requests it gets: your IP address, the time, the page you asked for, the page that linked you there, and your browser’s description of itself (its “user agent”). The site also logs errors it runs into, which can include the page you were on. We use these logs to keep the site running, fix problems and stop abuse, such as someone sending hundreds of requests a minute.

We keep the request logs for 30 days and the error logs for 14 days, then delete them.

To see how many people use the site, which pages they read and how they found it, each page loads Cloudflare Web Analytics. It sends Cloudflare the page’s address, the page that linked you there, your browser’s user agent and how quickly the page loaded. Cloudflare, like any web server, also sees your IP address, which it uses to tell us which country a visit came from.

It doesn’t set cookies or store anything in your browser, and Cloudflare says it doesn’t identify you or follow you from site to site. We only see totals, such as the number of visits to each page. If your browser or an ad blocker stops it from loading, the site works the same. Cloudflare’s privacy policy covers what it does with this data.

The site sets two cookies, both needed for it to work, and neither used to track you:

• A session cookie, which links your requests together while you use the site, for example so the forms remember what you typed if something needs fixing. The session, with your IP address and user agent, is stored on our server, and expires after 2 hours without a visit, then is deleted soon after.
• A security cookie (XSRF-TOKEN), which stops other sites from submitting our forms in your name.

Counting visits doesn’t use cookies. The payment form on the support page is provided by Braintree, which may set its own cookies to process the payment and prevent fraud.

We only share information with the services that run the site for us:

• Amazon Web Services hosts the site and its backups, and sends our emails, such as receipts and replies (AWS Privacy Notice).
• Braintree processes contributions.
• Cloudflare counts visits to the site.
• Google hosts our email inboxes, which hold the messages you email us and the copies of messages sent with our contact form (Google Privacy Policy).
• The U.S. Census Bureau finds the district for an address you look up.

We may also disclose information when the law requires it, for example in response to a valid court order.

• Addresses you look up: not kept.
• Contributions: 7 years, for our tax and payment records, then deleted.
• Messages and error reports, including email you send us: until we’ve dealt with them, then for 1 year, then deleted.
• Server logs: 30 days for requests, 14 days for errors.
• Visit counts: kept by Cloudflare, which shows us the last six months.
• Sessions: 2 hours after your last visit.

We back up the site’s database every night and keep each copy for 30 days. We also back it up before an update that changes it, and keep the ten most recent of those copies. Something deleted can stay in the backups until they’re deleted or replaced.

To ask what we have about you, or for us to delete it, email hello@plainvotes.org, use our contact form, or reply to any email we’ve sent you. Tell us the email address you used, and for a contribution, the date and amount or the transaction ID from your receipt.

We’ll delete your messages and error reports, and remove your email address from any contribution. We keep the rest of a contribution’s record (the amount, date and transaction ID) for the 7 years our tax and payment records need it.

Plain Votes is a general audience site, not one directed at children, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

If we change this policy, we’ll post the new version here and update the date at the top.

For a question about this policy or your information, email hello@plainvotes.org, use our contact form, or reply to any email we’ve sent you.