Privacy Policy

Our commitment

CIV.IQ is a free, open-source civic utility. It exists to make government data easy to use, not to collect data about you. This page lists everything the site handles, and who else sees it.

What we do not collect

• No accounts. There is no registration, login or user profile.
• No address database. Your address is never saved with anything that identifies you, and it is never written to our logs.
• No selling or sharing of data for advertising or any other purpose.

Address lookups

When you enter your address to find your representatives:

• As you type, the address box sends what you have typed to Radar.io to suggest complete addresses.
• When you search, your address goes to the U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder, which returns your congressional and state legislative districts.
• Our servers log at most the city and state of a lookup, never the street address.
• To make repeat lookups fast, the district result is cached for up to 7 days under a one-way hash of the address. The cache is not linked to you, because CIV.IQ has no accounts or user IDs.

Site search

Text you type into the site search boxes is sent as part of the page address (the URL). Our hosting provider’s request logs record URLs, so a search you type there can appear in those logs. To keep a home address out of them, use the address lookup on the home page instead.

Email alerts and the weekly digest

These are the only features that store personal information. If you sign up:

• We store your email address, what you chose to follow and when you signed up. Records are kept in our database (Upstash Redis) under a one-way hash of your email.
• You must confirm by email. If you don’t confirm within 48 hours, the sign-up is deleted.
• Emails are sent through Resend. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing deletes your record.

We use your email address only to send what you signed up for.

Server logs and hosting

CIV.IQ runs on Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel keeps request logs for a limited time. They may include:

• Your IP address
• The pages and URLs requested, and when
• Your browser and device type

To prevent abuse, our rate limiter counts requests per IP address. Each count expires after one minute. We also use Vercel Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies.

Analytics (Google Analytics)

We use Google Analytics to see how the site is used in aggregate. Google Analytics sets cookies and may collect:

• The pages you visit and how long you stay
• Your approximate location (city or region)
• Your device type, browser and operating system
• How you arrived at the site

You can opt out by:

• Installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on
• Blocking cookies or analytics scripts in your browser. The site works the same without them.

For more information, see Google’s privacy policy.

Stored on your device

Your browser saves a few things locally: your light or dark theme, your recent searches, your last-viewed district, and error details if a page breaks. They stay on your device and are never sent to us. Clearing your browser’s site data removes them.

Data security

All connections to CIV.IQ use HTTPS. The only personal data we keep is subscriber email addresses. No system is perfectly secure, but there is very little here to expose.

Your rights

If you subscribed to alerts or the digest, the unsubscribe link deletes your record. You can also email us to have it deleted. For anything else, including questions about server logs, contact us.

Children’s privacy

CIV.IQ is a public civic information site, suitable for all ages. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, we post the new version here and update the date at the top.