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 for lookup only and then discarded. 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.

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

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
• Your email, so the message is linked to your account

If you send a message without an account, we do not store the text of what you wrote. We keep only the trend information listed above.

We never share, sell, or provide your messages or personal information to any third party, including legislators, political organizations, or advertisers.

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 (see the "Storytelling Campaigns" section below). You can opt out at submission, and remove a saved story anytime from your dashboard.
• 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 organizers run storytelling campaigns that invite you to share a personal story. Because the whole point is to share your story with that campaign, when you submit one we save it to that campaign's private dashboard so the organizer can read, track, and follow up on the stories they receive. What we save depends on the choices you make:

• Your story text, as you chose to have it attributed. If you choose anonymous, we run an automatic pass to remove your name and we save no name, contact, or location with it.
• Your name (full, first-name-only, or none) exactly as you chose; your city and state only if you opt to share your location; and a contact email only if you provide one for follow-up. Your street address is never shared or stored.
• The uses you granted and the date you shared it.

Who can see it: only the organizer of that specific campaign and you. Saved stories are not public and are not shared with any other campaign or third party. The organizer can download their campaign's stories as a spreadsheet for their own records.

You're in control: you can decline to save your story when you submit it (you can still email it yourself), and you can remove a saved story at any time from your dashboard, which takes it out of the organizer's dashboard and export. You may also email us to delete all of your data (see "Data Retention & Deletion").

• 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