Privacy Policy

You enter your address. This is the only way we can figure out which congressional district and state legislative districts you live in.

We send it to the US Census Bureau. Their free geocoding API determines your districts. This is the same data the government uses.

We match districts to legislators. Using public data from the congress-legislators project and Open States, we find your federal and state representatives.

Without an account: your address is used to find your officials and is not stored with your profile. If you send a message to a congressional office through this site, your name, street address, email, and message are kept in our delivery records so the office can confirm you are a constituent and so we can retry or review the delivery. The street address, email, and phone are removed from those records 30 days after the delivery is settled. With an account: your address is stored securely in your profile so you can access your dashboard and matched officials. You can update or delete it anytime.

When we generate your personalized email or phone script, official bios, or bill summaries, the AI receives:

• Your name: so it can personalize the message
• Your city and state: so it can say "as your constituent from Reno, Nevada"
• The issue you care about: what you wrote in your own words
• Your official's info: name, party, position, so it can tailor the message

The AI does NOT see your full street address or any other personal information beyond what's needed to write the message.

Before a message goes to a congressional office through this site, an automated screen reads the message text to check for threats, impersonation, and spam. The screen runs on the same AI provider under the same terms. Messages it cannot clear are read by a My Democracy administrator before they are sent or declined. We keep a short excerpt and the decision for each screened message.

When you use My Democracy to contact your elected officials, we record some information about the send. What we keep depends on whether you have an account.

For every send (with or without an account), we record:

• Your name, city, state, and legislative district
• The name, party, and chamber of the legislator(s) you contacted
• The issue area you selected
• The date and time, and the delivery method and status
• Your email address, when you give us one. A congressional office requires it to accept a message, and an organization’s campaign asks for it so it can tell you when the bill moves.

We use this to show aggregate issue trends and to keep basic records of activity on the platform.

Only if you have an account, we additionally store:

• The full text of each message — so you can read your own message history in your dashboard
• That your email is linked to your account, so your message history is yours to read

If you send a message without an account, we do not store the text of what you wrote with the trend information. The one exception is a message you send to a congressional office through this site, which is kept in our delivery records as described above.

We never sell your messages or personal information, and we never give them to advertisers. When you send a message to an official through this site, we deliver your name, address, email, and message to that office, because that is what you asked us to do. Nothing goes to any office you did not choose. If you took part through an organization’s campaign, that organization can see that you took part: your name, your city and state, which official you wrote to, and whether it arrived. It never sees what you wrote. Your message goes to the office, not to the campaign.

When you create an account, we store the following to power your personalized dashboard:

• Your name and email address
• Your street address, city, state, and ZIP code
• Your matched representatives: federal, state, and local officials
• Dashboard data: cached voting records, campaign finance, lobbying activity, committee assignments, and bill tracking preferences

You can update or delete your account data at any time from your profile settings.

Depending on which features you use, we may also store:

• Campaign participation: if you create or join an advocacy campaign, we store the campaign details and the name, city, and state you supply, along with how many messages were sent.
• Storytelling campaigns: if you share a personal story with a storytelling campaign, we save it to that campaign's private dashboard when you press Submit (see the "Storytelling Campaigns" section below). You can withdraw a saved story later from your dashboard, or with the withdraw link you receive when you submit.
• Message-quality ratings: if you give a draft a thumbs up or down, we record that rating with the issue, tone, and official's party — but not the message text or your identity. It is stored against a one-way hash so we can improve drafting quality.
• Notification preferences: if you opt in to the weekly digest or follow-up reminders, we store your email and those preferences so we can send them. You can unsubscribe at any time.
• AI usage logs: see "To prevent abuse and control costs" below — a timestamped record of AI-generation events, tied to your account or a hashed IP, purged after 30 days.

Some organizations run storytelling campaigns that invite you to share a personal story. The purpose is to share your story with that organization. When you press Submit, we save it to that campaign's private dashboard so the organization can read it and, if you allowed it, use it. Nothing is saved before you press Submit. What we save depends on the choices you make:

• Your story text, as you chose to have it attributed. If you choose anonymous, an AI pass removes names, employers, specific places, and other identifying details. You see and can edit that version before it is saved. If the pass cannot run, nothing is saved. Anonymous stories carry no name, contact, or location. If you are signed in, the story is linked to your account so you can edit or withdraw it; the organization never sees that link.
• Your name (full, first-name-only, or none) exactly as you chose; your city, state, and the names of your elected officials only if you check the box to share them; and a contact email only if you type one and allow follow-up. Your street address is used once to confirm you are a constituent and is never shared or stored.
• The uses you allowed (for example sharing with legislators, publishing, press, or reports) and the date you consented. The organization sees this list and records each use of your story against it. You can see that log on your dashboard. If the organization wants a use you did not allow, it must ask you by email, and it may not proceed unless you say yes. We record all of this; we cannot enforce how the organization uses a story after it downloads it.
• For guests, a one-way hashed IP address for abuse tracing, and an edited or withdrawn timestamp if you change the story later.

The AI sees your story. The interview, the draft, any edits you request, the anonymization pass, and the organization's summaries are generated by our AI provider (Anthropic) from the text you wrote. Anthropic does not train on this data. The organization can generate an AI summary of its campaign's stories with short verbatim quotes; quotes never carry names, are marked when they come from an anonymous story, and appear in printable reports only from storytellers who allowed use in reports. A withdrawn story drops out of those summaries the next time they refresh, and we refresh them when a story changes.

Who can see it: the organization running that specific campaign and you. Saved stories are not public and are not shared with any other campaign. The organization can download its campaign's stories as a spreadsheet, which carries only the details you allowed. A short, name-free topic title and a running count of stories are kept for the campaign page even after a story is withdrawn.

You are in control: you can withdraw a story at any time from your dashboard, or with the withdraw link shown when you submit if you do not have an account. Withdrawing removes it from the organization's dashboard, its export, and its summaries. Anything the organization already used before then may not be recallable. Stories are kept until you withdraw them or delete your account. You may also email us to delete all of your data (see "Data Retention & Deletion"). You must be 18 or older, or a parent or guardian sharing your family's experience, to submit a story.

• To deliver your message: your name, city, state, and message are included in correspondence sent to your elected officials, as you direct.
• To show your message history: if you create an account, you can view every message you've sent.
• To track issue trends: we use anonymized, aggregated data (such as how many messages were sent about "Health" or "Education") to show what issues constituents care about. This data is never tied to your identity.
• To improve the platform: we may review anonymized message patterns to improve AI message generation.
• To prevent abuse and control costs: we log AI-generation events (which feature was used and when) to enforce daily limits and protect against automated abuse. For signed-in users this is tied to your account; for visitors without an account we record only a one-way hashed version of your IP address. We never store raw IP addresses for this purpose. These logs are automatically purged after 30 days.

We do NOT use your data for advertising, marketing, or profiling.

We have added user accounts, personalized dashboards, and expanded civic data features. This policy reflects those additions and will continue to be updated as the platform evolves.

We will never sell your data. Ever.

My Democracy uses AI (powered by Anthropic's Claude) to draft personalized messages. The AI uses the legislator's name, party, state, chamber, and committee assignments (from the public congress-legislators GitHub repository), plus the issue area and details you provide.

For official bios, the AI uses publicly available data (name, party, state, committees, legislative history) to generate biographical narratives. For bill summaries, the AI summarizes publicly available bill text. No personal user data is used for bios or summaries.

You always review and can edit messages before sending.

Learn more about how AI tailors your message →

Account data (profile, address, matched representatives, dashboard preferences) is retained as long as your account is active.

Message history (the full text of your messages) is retained only for account holders, so you can view it in your dashboard. For sends without an account, no message text is stored — only the aggregate trend information described above.

Cached representative data (voting records, campaign finance, lobbying, committees) is refreshed periodically from public sources and is not personal data.

You may request deletion of all your personal data at any time by emailing Jared@mydemocracy.app. We will delete your account and all associated personal information within 30 days of your request.

Your data is stored using Supabase, a trusted cloud database provider with encryption at rest and in transit. We take a defense-in-depth approach:

• Row-level security: database access policies ensure each account can only read and write its own data.
• Encrypted connections: the site is served over HTTPS with HSTS, and browser-hardening headers (clickjacking, MIME-sniffing, and referrer protections) are applied to every response.
• Abuse protection: CAPTCHA bot-detection, rate limiting, and per-account (or per-IP) daily usage limits guard our AI features against automated misuse.
• Data minimization: we never store raw IP addresses for usage tracking, only one-way hashes, and the AI is never given your full street address.
• Least privilege: access to your data is restricted to essential platform operations only.

Questions about this policy? Concerns about your privacy?

Email us at Jared@mydemocracy.app