The short version
- No accounts, no ads, and no tracking cookies.
- We don’t sell or share your information with anyone for marketing.
- If you send us a message, we keep it so we can act on it and reply, and use it for nothing else.
- If something on the site breaks, we get an error report so we can fix it. It never includes what you type.
Looking up your legislators
When you enter an address to find your legislators, our server sends it to the U.S. Census Bureau’s geocoder to find your Iowa House and Senate districts. We don’t save the address in our database. Because the address is part of the page’s web address, it can appear in our hosting provider’s short-lived request logs. We remove it from error reports (below) before they’re sent.
To show your legislators on later visits, your browser keeps a cookie named ie-place with the address as the Census Bureau matched it and your two district numbers. It stays on your device for up to a year, isn’t readable by scripts, and is sent only to this site. Choosing to forget your place deletes it.
Visit counts
We use Vercel Web Analytics to count page views: which pages are visited, the site that linked to them, and general details like country, browser and device type. It uses no cookies and doesn’t identify you or follow you across other websites.
Error reports
When something on the site breaks, your browser or our server sends an error report to Sentry so we can find and fix the problem. A report includes the error, the web address of the page, your browser, operating system and device type, and the steps just before it, like the pages you opened. Sentry doesn’t keep your IP address, and we remove any address you looked up before a report leaves your browser or our server.
When an error happens in your browser, the report also includes a short replay of the page leading up to it, such as clicks, scrolling and page changes. All text on the page and everything you type is hidden in the replay, so it shows the layout, not what the page said or what you entered. We record a replay only when there’s an error. We also time a share of page visits to find slow pages, with the same details as an error report.
Other settings on your device
If you pick a light or dark theme, your browser remembers that choice in its local storage. It never leaves your device. While you have the site open, the error reporter keeps a random ID in your browser’s session storage so a replay can follow you between pages; closing the tab clears it.
Messages you send us
The Report a mistake and contact forms send us what you write, the page you were on, and, if you give them, your name and email address. We store each message in our database and email a copy to the person who reviews them. To limit spam, we also keep a scrambled one-way code made from your IP address (a hash), not the address itself.
We use your email only to reply about your message. We keep messages as long as we need them to look into a report and keep a record of corrections, and we’ll delete yours if you ask.
Services we rely on
These companies handle data on our behalf, under their own privacy policies:
- Vercel hosts the website and counts page views. Like any web host, it logs requests, including IP addresses and browser details, for a short time to run and secure the service.
- Neon hosts our database, which holds public records and the messages readers send.
- Resend delivers the email copy of messages sent through our forms.
- Sentry receives the error reports and timings described above. It doesn’t keep IP addresses.
- Amazon Web Services runs the jobs that collect public records. It doesn’t receive information about visitors.
- The U.S. Census Bureau receives addresses entered in the legislator lookup, from our server.
- OpenFreeMap serves the district map tiles, and the Iowa Legislature serves legislators’ photos. Your browser loads these directly, so those sites see your IP address, as with any web page.
Children
The site is meant for a general audience and isn’t directed at children under 13. We don’t knowingly collect information from them; if a child has sent us a message, ask us to delete it.
Your choices
You can clear the cookie and theme setting in your browser at any time. To ask what we hold about you, or to have a message you sent deleted, use the contact form.
Changes
If we change this policy, we’ll update it here and change the date at the top.