Privacy Policy

Votaran (“Votaran,” “we,” “us”) runs a platform that connects residents with their local and state officials and candidates. This policy explains what information we collect when you use votaran.com, how we use it, and who can see it. Votaran is currently in a private beta, and we'll update this policy as the product grows.

1. Information we collect

When you create an account

• Your name, email address, password (stored only in scrambled, hashed form), and optionally a phone number.
• Whether you're joining as a resident or as an official or candidate, and the beta code you used.
• If you sign in with Google, the name, email address, and profile photo Google shares with us.

Resident profiles

• Your legal name and date of birth, to keep Votaran a platform for real people.
• Your address (street, city, state, ZIP), so we can show the officials, districts, and elections that apply to you.
• Optionally: your party affiliation, issues you care about, a profile photo, and a short bio.

Officials and candidates

• The office you hold or are seeking, your jurisdiction, party, official contact details, website, social links, bio, and photos.
• Verification documents, such as a government ID and proof of office or candidacy. These are encrypted, stored privately, seen only by the Votaran team members who review them, and deleted once your verification has been reviewed.

How you use Votaran

• Officials you follow, posts you like or dislike, and how you vote in polls.
• Messages you send to officials and their replies.
• Posts, comments, endorsements, and reposts made by officials.
• Which posts you view, so officials can see how many people their posts reach.
• Reports and blocks you submit, and civic activity such as badges and streaks.

The waitlist

If you join the waitlist, we store your email address, your name and city or office if you give them, and a one-way scrambled version of your internet address, used only to limit repeated signups. We never store the address itself.

Payments

Paid plans for officials are processed by Stripe. Stripe handles your card details. We only store the reference numbers Stripe gives us for your customer account and subscription. Votaran is free for residents.

Technical information

We use cookies only to keep you signed in. We don't use advertising cookies or third-party analytics trackers. The companies that host Votaran keep standard server logs, such as internet address, browser type, and the time of a request, to run and secure the service.

Public officials who haven't joined

So residents can follow the officials who represent them, Votaran creates basic “unclaimed” profiles for sitting officials from public records: name, office, party, district, the year they took office, official contact details, and official portraits. Each one is clearly labeled as unclaimed and lists its sources. An official can claim their profile by signing up and verifying their identity, or ask us to correct or remove it by emailing mpeakes@votaran.com.

2. How we use it

• To run Votaran: your account, your feed, messaging, polls, and the rest of the product.
• To show you your representatives and elections. Your address is sent to Google's Civic Information service to look up which districts you live in. Officials' details come from public records.
• To verify that officials and candidates are who they say they are.
• To give officials a picture of their community in totals (see section 3).
• To keep Votaran safe: reviewing reports, preventing abuse, and enforcing our Terms.
• To email you sign-in codes, password resets, and important notices about your account.
• To understand what's working and improve the product.
• To comply with the law.

3. Who can see what

Public to Votaran users

• Officials' and candidates' profiles, posts, comments, endorsements, and reposts.
• Each official's follower count and poll totals.

Shared with an official

• Messages you send them, along with your name.
• Totals about their followers and the people who view their posts: party, age range, and city. These appear only when at least 10 people are counted. Groups smaller than 5 are combined into “Other,” so no individual can be singled out.
• Poll results as totals. Officials never see how any individual voted.

Private to you

Who you follow, what you like or dislike, how you vote in polls, your address, your date of birth, and your party affiliation are not shown to other users.

The Votaran team

A small number of team members can access account data when needed to run the service, review verification documents, respond to reports, or answer your requests.

Messages to officials may be public records

Many officials are subject to public records laws, such as Florida's Chapter 119. A message you send to an official about public business may be a public record that they must keep and, if requested, disclose. Please keep that in mind before including sensitive personal details in a message.

4. Sharing

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only:

• With the service providers that run Votaran, who may use it only to provide their services to us: Supabase (database, sign-in, and file storage), Vercel (website hosting, plus anonymous visit counts and page speed measurements that use no cookies and don't identify you), Resend (email delivery), Stripe (payments), and Google (Google sign-in and district lookup).
• When required by law, or to protect the safety of our users or the public.
• If Votaran is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, in which case this policy continues to apply to your information.
• With your permission.

We may share or publish aggregated, de-identified insights, such as which issues matter most in a district, that cannot be used to identify you. When officials connect their campaign software to Votaran (a feature coming later), only aggregated, anonymized data is sent. Your identity and messages are never sent.

5. How long we keep it

We keep your information while your account is open, with one exception: verification documents are deleted as soon as they have been reviewed, whether your verification is approved or not. We keep only the outcome and its date. If you ask us to delete your account, we'll delete your personal information within 30 days, except where we must keep something to meet a legal obligation, resolve a dispute, or enforce our Terms. Copies in backups are removed as those backups expire.

6. Your choices

• Update your profile and address at any time from your account.
• Unfollow officials, or block accounts, whenever you like.
• Delete your account from your profile page, using Delete account at the bottom. If you have both a resident and an official profile, you can delete either one or both.
• Get a copy of your data by emailing mpeakes@votaran.com. We'll respond within 30 days.
• Depending on where you live, you may have additional privacy rights. Contact us to use them.

7. Children

You must be at least 13 to use Votaran, and under 18 you need a parent or guardian's permission. We don't knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has signed up, contact us and we'll delete the account.

8. Security

We protect your information with encrypted connections, encryption of stored data, hashed passwords, and database rules that limit each account to the data it's allowed to see. Verification documents are kept in private storage, opened only through links that expire within minutes, and deleted after review. No system is perfectly secure, though. If we learn of a breach that affects you, we'll tell you as the law requires.

9. Changes

We'll update this policy as Votaran changes. If we make a significant change, we'll let you know by email or in the app before it takes effect.

10. Contact

Questions or requests: mpeakes@votaran.com.