Privacy
Who's My Rep has no accounts, no ads, and no analytics or tracking scripts. Here is everything the site does with your information.
Your address
When you search by address, your browser sends it to our server inside the body of the request, never in the web address (URL). Our server passes it to the U.S. Census Bureau's public geocoder to find your districts. We don't save the address, and our code doesn't log it. The server returns your districts and a location rounded to about 10 meters.
Searching by name, state or city doesn't use your address at all.
Alaska local officials
For some Alaska addresses we look up local officials by location through Cicero (a civic data service). Only the rounded location is sent, never your address. The result is cached on our server for up to 30 days, keyed by that rounded location. Nothing in the cache identifies you.
What stays in your browser
- Your last search, kept for this tab only (session storage) so we can rerun it after a purchase. It's cleared when you close the tab.
- Your unlock code, if you bought full access (local storage).
- A random device ID, created by the site (local storage). It's sent only when you enter an unlock code, so one code can be used on up to 3 devices.
- A "dismissed" flag (a2hs_done), set when you close the add-to-home-screen tip, so it doesn't come back.
We don't set any cookies. You can clear all of this by clearing the site's data in your browser.
Payments
Full access costs $4.99, paid once, and Stripe handles the payment. Your card details go to Stripe, not to us. We keep only a scrambled (hashed) form of your unlock code, the Stripe payment reference, and the list of random device IDs that used the code. We don't keep your name or email. If a payment is refunded, its code stops working.
Other services your browser contacts
Officials' photos load directly from where they are published, such as legislature websites and public photo archives. Those sites can see your IP address, as any website can.
Campaign donor figures come from the Federal Election Commission. Our server fetches them, so your browser never contacts the FEC.
Logs and security
To slow down abuse, our server counts requests per IP address for one minute. Those counts are kept in memory only and are never saved. The site runs on Cloudflare. Cloudflare keeps its own technical logs, as hosting providers do, and we don't control them. Because your address travels in the request body rather than the URL, it isn't part of the web addresses that hosting logs usually record.
Corrections and questions
If something about you or an official is wrong, or you have a privacy question, email [email protected].