Privacy Policy

We collect the following information through this website and the services named in section 4:

• Email address – when you create an account or subscribe to our newsletter.
• Name – our sign-up form asks for your first and last name. We use them only if you ask us to verify your voter registration, and we do not keep them. Your account is shown under your email address.
• Your address – when you give an address at sign-up, on your account page, or in a survey, we use it to determine your neighborhood or municipality and the government districts it falls in. We keep that result and throw away the address you provided.
• Voter registration status – whether you are a registered voter, if you answer that question. If you ask us to verify it, we compare your name, address, and birth date with publicly available Pennsylvania voter registration records and keep only whether your registration was confirmed. We do not keep your birth date.
• Survey answers – when you answer a survey on our site. You can answer without an account. If you are signed in, your answers are linked to your account so that you answer each survey once and can see its results.
• Supporter status – whether you currently give monthly, which we check with Stripe.
• Payment details – securely processed by Stripe. We do not store credit card numbers.
• Newsletter activity – whether our newsletters are opened and which links in them are clicked.
• Usage data – such as IP address, browser type, and pages visited, collected through Google Analytics and our server logs. When you sign in, we also note the device and browser you used.

We use your information to:

• Create and run your account, and sign you in.
• Send the newsletter if you choose to receive it, along with surveys and emails about your account.
• Place survey answers in the right neighborhood and districts, and report results as totals.
• Create aggregate data that does not identify you, such as survey results and trends, which we may share with others (see section 4).
• Show you your elected representatives on your account page.
• Manage memberships and process donations.
• Improve our website, newsletter, and reporting.
• Comply with legal obligations and prevent misuse.

Your input matters to the officials who make decisions in your community. Your personal information should not have to come with it. So:

• We do not keep your name or street address, so neither can ever be attached to your answers.
• We read the comments you write in surveys. We may quote or summarize them in our reporting, but never with your name.
• On our website, survey results are shown to signed-in readers.
• We do not publish, share, or sell individual survey responses, or publicly link survey responses to an individual.

We share personal information only with third-party processors necessary to operate our site:

• Amazon Web Services (website hosting, data storage, and content delivery and security)
• Stripe (payment processing; we also check with Stripe whether a signed-in reader gives monthly, so we can thank supporters and stop asking them to donate)
• Mailgun (email delivery, including measuring whether newsletters are opened and their links clicked)
• Google (website analytics through Google Analytics)
• Anthropic (AI tools our editors use to help draft content; these tools see our newsroom’s material, never your survey answers or account details)
• Other 3rd party services that are necessary and relevant to providing the core services of informup.org, as determined by the sole discretion of Informup.

Each third-party provider is contractually bound to protect your data.

Aggregate data. We may share or sell aggregate data that does not identify you, such as survey results and trends, with others, including elected officials and government agencies, researchers, news and civic organizations, and funders. Aggregate data combines many people’s information so that no individual can be identified, and it never includes names, email addresses, or account details. We take steps to make de-anonymizing data as difficult as possible, and we require anyone we share it with or sell it to not attempt to re-identify anyone from aggregate data.

We use a small number of cookies and similar tools:

• A sign-in cookie keeps you signed in for up to 14 days.
• A survey cookie remembers your answers to a survey you have started, so you can finish it.
• Google Analytics cookies help us understand how readers use the site.
• Your browser also stores a few settings for our site, such as light or dark mode.
• Our newsletters contain tracking that tells us whether an email was opened and which links were clicked. Unsubscribing stops it.

You may disable cookies through your browser settings, but signing in and answering surveys may not work without them.

We retain personal information only as long as necessary to provide our services or comply with applicable laws. Some information we never keep at all:

• We do not keep your street address, your name from the sign-up form, or your birth date.
• When you change your address, we replace your stored neighborhood and districts. We do not keep a history of where you have lived.
• Sign-in sessions expire after 14 days.

You may:

• Request access to or deletion of your personal data. If you delete your account, we remove your personal details; your past survey answers remain in our results without being linked to you.
• Unsubscribe at any time via a link in any email we send.
• Contact us to exercise your privacy rights.

Email: hello@informup.org (please put “Privacy request” in the subject line)

If you have questions about this policy, contact:

Informup
Email: hello@informup.org