Privacy Policy
This policy explains how Political Integrity Network handles your information. It is written to be read, start with the section you care about using the contents below.
1. Introduction #
Political Integrity Network (“PIN”, “we”, “us”) helps people understand who represents them in the U.S. Congress, communicate with their representative’s office, and find community organizations that can help. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, why, how we use and protect it, and the choices you have. It applies to https://politicalintegritynetwork.org and the PIN services offered there.
PIN is built around data minimization: we collect only what a civic feature genuinely needs, we keep private civic communications private, and we do not build political profiles or sell personal information.
2. Who operates PIN #
PIN is operated under the name “Political Integrity Network.” Questions about this policy or your information can be sent to privacy@politicalintegritynetwork.org.
3. Scope #
This policy covers personal information handled by PIN. It does not cover the public government records PIN presents (for example, bills, votes, and members of Congress sourced from public records), which are public information about public officials and government activity, see “Public versus private information.” It also does not cover The Quiet Ledger, a separate product with its own policy (see “Relationship with The Quiet Ledger”).
4. Information we collect #
We collect the following categories, and only these, in normal use:
- Account and authentication information: your name, email address, profile photo, and a provider account identifier supplied by your sign-in provider (Google, and Microsoft when enabled), plus an internal account identifier we derive from it.
- Two-factor (MFA) metadata: if you enable two-factor authentication, the enrollment status and factor metadata held by our authentication provider (never a shared secret you didn’t choose to enroll).
- Your congressional district, derived from an address you enter (see “Address and location handling”). We store the resolved district, not your street address.
- Civic activity you create, messages to your representative’s office, questions, casework/service requests, referral consents, issues you follow, and your participation in polls.
- Organization information: if you administer a nonprofit or an office, the profile and membership information you provide for it.
- Notifications and support: in-app notifications we generate for you, and any support requests you send us.
- Technical and security information: session identifiers, and standard server/hosting logs (such as IP address and basic request/browser information) used to operate and secure the service, plus security and audit events for privileged actions.
We do not collect precise device location, we do not use advertising or cross-site tracking technologies, and we do not store your street address. Some capabilities are planned but not yet collecting data (for example, Microsoft sign-in until it is enabled); this policy describes them so it stays accurate as they turn on.
5. Information you provide #
Most personal information in PIN is information you choose to provide: the address you enter to find your district, the messages and questions you send, the polls you answer, the issues you follow, and any organization details you manage. You control whether and what to submit; some features simply won’t function without the relevant input (for example, we cannot route a message to your representative without a resolved district).
6. Authentication information #
You sign in with a third-party provider. We receive a verified identifier and basic profile details from that provider and mint our own session for you. We never receive or store your provider password. Your PIN session is a signed cookie scoped to PIN’s own domain; it does not sign you in to any other product.
7. Google and Microsoft authentication data #
When you sign in with Google, Google provides your Google account identifier, email address, and basic profile information (such as your name and profile photo where available). We use this only to create and operate your PIN account. Specifically:
- PIN does not receive your Google password.
- PIN does not sell Google user data.
- PIN does not use Google user data for advertising or political profiling.
- PIN does not transfer Google user data for unrelated commercial purposes.
- PIN’s access, use, storage, and sharing of Google user data is limited to the purposes described in this policy.
- The account-deletion and data-rights mechanisms in this policy apply to stored Google-derived account data.
Microsoft sign-in, when enabled, provides equivalent identity information (an account identifier, email, and basic profile) based on the scopes we request, and is used the same way. PIN and The Quiet Ledger use separate authentication; signing in to one does not sign you in to the other.
8. District and representative matching #
To show your representative and route your communications, PIN needs your congressional district. You provide an address; we send it to the U.S. Census Bureau’s public geocoder to resolve the district, then store only the resulting district (for example, “NC-04”). We match your district to members of Congress using public government records.
9. Address and location handling #
Your street address is used transiently to resolve your district and is not stored by PIN. We keep the resolved district and the state. To reduce churn and misuse, you can change your address at most once every 24 hours. We do not collect precise geolocation from your device.
10. Constituent communications #
When you contact your representative’s office through PIN, your message is private to you and the office that serves your district, it is not a public post and is not shown to other constituents. If no office has joined PIN for your district yet, we tell you plainly and never pretend a message was delivered. You can close a conversation at any time.
11. Lawmaker and office communications #
If you are a member of a congressional office on PIN, you can see constituent messages routed to the district your office serves, reply to them, and record staff actions. Office access is limited to that office’s own constituent communications; one office cannot read another office’s conversations. An office role governs constituent communication only, it is never a platform-administration capability.
12. Nonprofit organizations and referrals #
Nonprofit profiles contain information the organization provides. A congressional office may connect a constituent to a listed nonprofit through a referral. Nothing about you is shared with a nonprofit unless you consent. Until you consent, the organization sees only the general need (a category and a short note): never your identity. If you consent, we share a single contact you agreed to (such as your email) so the organization can help; we never share your identity id or the details of your casework.
13. Casework and service-request information #
Casework and service requests you open are private between you and your representative’s office. We store only what is needed to work the request (subject, category, your message, status, and the office’s response), and we minimize sensitive detail. We do not turn casework into a profile or share it outside the office without your consent.
14. Polls and civic participation #
Your representative’s office can publish polls. When you respond, PIN records that you participated (so you cannot be double-counted) and adds your answer to an aggregate tally. PIN does not store which option you chose against your identity: offices and lawmakers see only aggregate, district-level results, never an individual’s answer. We do not infer political ideology or persuasion from poll responses, and we do not build targeting segments from them.
15. Public versus private information #
PIN keeps a clear line between two kinds of information. Public government records: bills, votes, members of Congress, and similar: are public information about public officials and government activity, drawn from public sources. Your private information: your account, your district, your messages, casework, and poll participation, is private user data governed by this policy and is not published or sold.
16. Legislative and public-record information #
The legislative information PIN displays (bills, actions, votes, sponsorships, member records, and grades) comes from public records and from The Quiet Ledger’s analysis of them. It describes public officials and government activity, not you.
17. Automatically collected technical information #
Operating and securing PIN involves standard technical information handled by our hosting provider, including IP address, basic request and browser information, and server logs. We use this to serve pages, prevent abuse, and diagnose problems, not to profile you or to advertise.
19. How we use information #
We use personal information to: authenticate you and manage your account; match you to your district and representative; enable civic communication, nonprofit discovery, and consented referrals; run polls and show aggregate results; send in-app notifications; provide support; keep the service secure and prevent abuse; and comply with legal obligations. We do not use your private civic activity to infer political views or to target you.
20. How information is disclosed #
We disclose personal information only as follows: to the congressional office that serves your district, for communications and casework you direct to it; to a nonprofit, only the limited contact you consent to share in a referral; to service providers that operate the service on our behalf (see “Service providers”); and where required by law or to protect safety (see “Legal and safety disclosures”). We do not sell personal information, and we do not disclose your private civic communications for advertising or political targeting.
21. Service providers and processors #
We use a small set of providers strictly to operate PIN, and share with each only what that function requires:
- Supabase, authentication and database hosting (stores your account and the civic data described here).
- Vercel, application hosting and delivery (processes requests and standard logs, including IP address).
- Google (and Microsoft, when enabled), sign-in providers that verify your identity.
- U.S. Census Bureau geocoder, receives an address transiently to resolve your district; PIN does not store the address.
- Email delivery provider: when transactional email is enabled, delivers messages such as invitations and notifications (receives the recipient email and message content). Email is not enabled by default.
- ProPublica / IRS nonprofit data, used to verify an organization’s tax-exempt identity by its EIN (organization information, not your personal data).
Public legislative sources (such as Congress.gov and the FEC) are read-only public data sources, we retrieve public records from them; we do not send your personal information to them.
22. Legal and safety disclosures #
We may disclose information if required by law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request, or where we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of PIN, our users, or the public. We aim to limit any such disclosure to what is necessary.
23. Organizational account administrators #
If you join an organization (a nonprofit) or a congressional office on PIN, administrators of that organization can see the information necessary to run it: for example, team membership and the constituent communications routed to the office. Administrators are responsible for their own handling of that information.
24. Data minimization #
We design for minimization: we store your district rather than your address; we record poll participation without storing your individual choice; we share only a consented contact in referrals; and we keep sensitive casework detail to what the office needs. We prefer counts and statuses over content in our own operational views.
25. Political privacy #
This is a commitment we hold as a matter of design. PIN does not infer, derive, score, or sell any of the following from your private civic activity:
- party affiliation
- political ideology
- voting preference
- candidate preference
- a persuasion or targeting profile
We do not use your messages, casework, follows, or poll answers to determine your political leanings, and we do not build audiences for political or commercial targeting. Aggregate, non-identifying counts may be used to operate and improve the service, but never to profile you politically.
26. Poll privacy #
To be explicit about visibility: an office or lawmaker sees only aggregate poll results for the district. PIN records that you voted (to prevent duplicate votes) but does not store your specific answer against your identity, so no one: including the office, the lawmaker, or PIN operators, can look up how a particular person answered a poll. We do not claim more anonymity than this: because participation is recorded to prevent double-voting, PIN can tell that you participated in a given poll, even though it does not retain your specific choice.
27. Communications privacy #
Who can see what: a constituent conversation is visible to that constituent and to the members of the office serving their district. Casework is visible to the constituent and that office. A referral’s consented contact is visible to the specific nonprofit the constituent agreed to; the nonprofit never sees the constituent’s identity id or casework detail. PIN operators do not browse private message content as a matter of course; any exceptional access follows our internal authorization and audit controls and applicable law.
28. Data retention #
We keep personal information for as long as your account is active and as needed to provide the service, then retain it only as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described here, to meet legal, security, or audit obligations, or to resolve disputes. Security and audit logs of privileged actions are kept for a limited period appropriate to their security purpose. When you ask us to delete your account, we delete or de-identify your personal information within a reasonable period, except where we must retain limited records for legal, security, or audit reasons. (Specific retention durations are being finalized; see the operator contact for current details.)
29. Security #
We use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards appropriate to the information we handle, including encrypted transport, authenticated and access-controlled data stores, optional two-factor authentication for your account, and additional verification for privileged operations. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security; we work to protect your information and to respond appropriately if an incident occurs.
30. User rights and choices #
You can request access to, correction of, deletion of, or a copy (export) of your personal information, and you can withdraw consent you previously gave (for example, a referral consent). To exercise these, sign in and use the relevant in-product controls where available, or contact privacy@politicalintegritynetwork.org. We will verify your request and respond within a reasonable period. You will not be discriminated against for exercising these rights.
31. Account deletion #
You can request deletion of your PIN account at privacy@politicalintegritynetwork.org. On deletion we remove or de-identify your account and associated private information, subject to limited retention for legal, security, or audit purposes. Some content you contributed to shared contexts (for example, a message already delivered to an office) may persist with that office as needed for its recordkeeping.
32. Communications preferences #
PIN’s primary notifications are in-app. If we enable email notifications, we will honor your preferences and provide a way to opt out of non-essential messages; essential account and security messages may still be sent.
33. Relationship with The Quiet Ledger #
The Quiet Ledger (“TQL”) is a separate product with its own account system and privacy policy. PIN consumes legislative intelligence from TQL (such as bill grades) to present public legislative information. A TQL subscription or entitlement does not grant any PIN organizational authority, and a PIN role does not grant TQL privileges. If we offer account linking in the future, it will be explicit and will not merge permissions between the products.
34. Children #
PIN is a civic-information service intended for adults and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 without legally sufficient consent. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us personal information, contact privacy@politicalintegritynetwork.org and we will delete it. Given PIN’s civic communications and organizational roles, we may set a higher minimum age for account creation; the current requirement is stated in our Terms of Service.
35. U.S. state privacy rights #
Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or obtain a portable copy of your personal information, to opt out of certain processing, and to appeal a decision about a request. PIN does not sell personal information and does not use it for cross-context behavioral advertising. To exercise any right or to appeal, contact privacy@politicalintegritynetwork.org; we will respond as required by applicable law.
36. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control #
Because PIN does not track you across other sites or serve behavioral advertising, it does not use cross-site tracking that a “Do Not Track” or Global Privacy Control signal would limit. We honor the intent of these signals by not engaging in that tracking in the first place.
37. International users #
PIN is operated in the United States and is intended for use in the United States. If you access PIN from elsewhere, you understand that your information is processed in the United States under this policy.
38. Changes to this policy #
We may update this policy to reflect changes in the service or the law. When we make material changes, we will update the “Last updated” date and, where appropriate, provide additional notice. Your continued use after an update means you accept the revised policy.
39. Contact information #
Questions, requests, or concerns about privacy: privacy@politicalintegritynetwork.org. See also our Terms of Service.