How your data is handled.

Required at signup: email address (to sign in and recover your account) and ZIP code (to match you with your district).

Optional, when you provide them: display name, photo, bio, phone (only if you opt into SMS), legal name and address (only if you donate to a candidate and FEC law requires it — and only for the donation, not stored separately).

Activity, automatically: the civic actions you take through the app, your friend connections, your org memberships. This is the core of what the app does — without it, we can't show you a streak or a heatmap.

Technical, automatically: IP address, browser type, timestamps of your sign-ins. Held for 90 days for security purposes, then purged.

We do not collect: precise location, contacts, microphone, camera, browsing history, third-party identifiers, ad-tech cookies, or anything we don't actively use to make the product work for you.

Three uses, and only these three:

• Run the product: showing you actions in your district, matching you with candidates, tracking your streak and history, sending you notifications you turned on.
• Comply with the law: FEC reporting requirements for donations, anti-fraud checks via Stripe, lawful response to subpoenas or court orders we cannot legally refuse.
• Improve the product anonymously: aggregate usage statistics (e.g. "how many people complete the onboarding wizard") with all individual identifiers stripped.

We do not use your data to train AI models. We do not enrich your profile with data from data brokers. We do not feed your activity to targeted-ad networks.

With candidates you donate to: if you contribute over $50, federal law requires us to pass your legal name, address, and employer to their committee's treasurer for FEC reporting. For donations under $50, you can opt to be anonymized.

With elected officials you contact: only aggregate counts ("47 constituents from 78704 called about HB-2208") unless you specifically opt to attach your name to a contact. Your default is aggregate.

With organizations you join: the org coordinator sees your name and the optional "why I joined" note (if you wrote one). They never see your email — all communications route through us.

With friends you connect to: your name, photo (if uploaded), streak count. They never see your specific actions, donations, or which candidates you back.

With nobody else. No advertisers, no campaign vendors, no data brokers, no political consultancies. We have no business reason to share, and we have a contractual obligation under our own terms not to.

To run the service we use a small number of vendors. Each has its own privacy policy and a contractual obligation to handle our users' data only as we direct.

• Stripe — payment processing for donations. They see your card details; we never do.
• AWS — hosting infrastructure. They host the database; they have no access to its contents.
• Postmark — transactional email (verification, password reset, notifications you opted into).
• Twilio — SMS (only if you opt into SMS notifications).
• OpenSecrets & FEC.gov — public data sources we read from; we don't send them anything about you.

None of these vendors are permitted to use our user data for their own marketing, training, or analytics.

Regardless of where you live, you have the right to:

• Access your data — download a full JSON or CSV archive from Data & deletion.
• Correct inaccurate data — edit your profile any time in Profile settings.
• Delete your data — permanent deletion with a 30-day grace period, also at Data & deletion.
• Object to specific processing — granular toggles in Privacy settings.
• Port your data — the JSON export is structured for portability to other tools.

If you're in California, the EU, the UK, or another jurisdiction with specific privacy rights (CCPA, GDPR, etc.), those rights apply to you here too. Email privacy@iamdemocracy.app with any rights request — we respond within 30 days.

While your account is active: all your data, indefinitely.

After you delete: 30-day grace period for restore, then permanent deletion of profile, activity, friend connections, org memberships, notification preferences.

Legally retained beyond that: FEC donation records (3+ years per 52 USC §30104), Stripe transaction records (held by Stripe per their retention policies), aggregate non-identifying counts (your individual contribution is removed but the count remains).

Security/technical logs: 90 days, then purged.

Encryption at rest and in transit. Passwords hashed with bcrypt. Two-factor authentication available and recommended. SOC-2 Type II audit completed annually (latest report: April 2026, on request to enterprise partners). Penetration testing by an independent firm twice a year.

No system is unbreakable. If we ever experience a breach affecting your data, we will notify you within 72 hours and tell you exactly what was exposed.

Minor changes (typo fixes, clarifications, vendor swaps): we update this page and note it in the changelog.

Substantive changes (new collection, new sharing, new processing): we email every active user 30 days before the change takes effect. You can delete your account before the change if you don't accept it. Continued use of the app after the effective date means acceptance.

Privacy questions: privacy@iamdemocracy.app

General questions: hello@iamdemocracy.app

Data-protection officer: Maya Nguyen, maya@iamdemocracy.app

Postal: I Am Democracy, PO Box 4422, Austin, TX 78704, USA