Privacy
What we collect, what we never collect.
A civic-trust product cannot survive surveillance practices. This is what we do and what we will not do.
What we store
- Place cookie (
btpftp-place): your ZIP and the derived state, congressional district, city, county, and council district. First-party, lax SameSite, set when you click Set your place. You can clear it any time from the place picker. - Watchlist (browser only): the records you mark to watch are stored in your browser's localStorage under
btpftp-watchlist. Never transmitted unless you opt into server-side sync (not yet enabled). - Correction submissions: if you submit a correction with an optional email, we store the email server-side only to notify you when the fix lands. Never sold, never shared.
- Email subscriptions (opt-in): if you subscribe to the digest, we store your email, your chosen cadence (daily or weekly), and a snapshot of your ZIP and causes so the digest can be personalized. Stored in a managed Redis store, used only to send the digest you asked for. Double opt-in: nothing is sent until you click the confirmation link. One-click unsubscribe in every email deletes all of it. Never sold, never shared.
What we do not store
- No third-party advertising trackers.
- No fingerprinting libraries.
- No social-media login pixels.
- No session recording, no heatmaps, no mouse tracking.
Analytics
When analytics are enabled, we use privacy-respecting tooling (e.g. Plausible) that does not set cookies, does not fingerprint, and aggregates traffic at the page level. Per-user paths are not retained. The PLAUSIBLE_DOMAIN env var, if set, enables this; absent that, no analytics fire.
Data residency
The site is hosted on Vercel. Server-side requests run in the closest Vercel edge region to your browser. Source records and indexed metadata are public; user-specific state lives only in your browser plus the optional correction-submission server queue.
Requests, deletion, contact
Email privacy@bythepeopleforthepeople.com with any request to delete a correction submission you sent, or to ask what we know about you. Default position: we know your ZIP if you set it (visible to you in your own browser), an optional email if you gave one on a correction submission, and your email plus your cadence (daily or weekly) and a ZIP/causes snapshot if you subscribed to the digest. Unsubscribe from any digest email to erase the subscription record entirely.
Last updated 2026-06-02. Material changes will be logged in the corrections log.