Privacy Policy

Catalyst Civic is a public-facing civic accountability publication. This policy describes how we handle information collected through this site.

What We Collect

If you submit your email address through a subscription form on this site, we store one subscriber record. That record contains all of the following, and nothing else:

• Your email address — so we can send you what you asked for.
• The date and time you submitted it.
• Which page you subscribed from — the page's address and its title, so we can tell which parts of the site are actually useful.
• Your consent, and the version of this policy that was in force when you gave it.
• Your IP address and browser user-agent string, as they were at the moment you submitted. These are kept as evidence that the consent was real and to let us identify automated signup abuse.

We do not sell, share, or transfer any part of that record to third parties. We do not operate tracking pixels, behavioral advertising, or third-party analytics that profile individual users.

How We Use It

Your email address is used only to send you the Democracy Toolkit and the Catalyst Civic briefings — reports, FOIA updates, and agenda notes. The remaining fields are used to operate and defend the subscription itself; they are not used to build a profile of you and are never used for advertising.

Buy Me a Coffee support transactions are processed by Buy Me a Coffee and subject to that processor's own privacy terms. Catalyst Civic does not store payment card information.

Site Analytics

We count how the site is used: how many pages are viewed, which pages and documents, what is searched for in the Nexus, and whether the visit came from a phone or a computer. We do this so we know which records people actually need.

None of it is attached to you. Specifically:

• No cookies, no local storage, no tracking pixels, and no third-party analytics service. The measurement is our own code on our own server.
• Your IP address is not stored. There is no field for it. Our web server logs have also been configured not to record it.
• Your browser's user-agent string is not stored either. We keep only whether the screen was phone-sized.
• To count returning readers within a single day without identifying anyone, we compute a one-way fingerprint from your IP address and browser, mixed with a secret that changes every midnight. The result cannot be reversed, cannot be linked to you, and cannot be linked to the same reader on any other day. The IP address itself is discarded the instant that value is computed.

Nexus search terms are recorded so we can see what the public is looking for. They are stored with no visitor information of any kind — the result is a list of what was searched, not a record of who searched it.

We do it this way deliberately. This publication reports on people who hold power locally, and some readers may be sources. Records we do not keep cannot be leaked, subpoenaed, or turned against a reader.

The Store

Orders placed in the store are paid through Stripe Checkout. When you check out you leave this site for Stripe's own payment page, and Stripe collects your name, email address, shipping address and payment details there. Your card number never reaches Catalyst Civic. Stripe handles that information under its own privacy policy.

From Stripe we see what any merchant sees for an order: your name, email, shipping address, what you bought, and whether the payment went through. We use it only to pack and ship your order and to answer questions about it. It is not added to the subscriber list and not used for marketing. It goes to two services, each for one job. Your email address goes to our email-delivery service, Postmark, for a single plain message, with no tracking, telling you your order has shipped and giving you its tracking number. The other is our shipping-label service, EasyPost: when your order is packed, your name and shipping address are sent to EasyPost to buy the USPS postage label, as the address on any package must be. Order records stay in our Stripe account; this site's own server keeps only a receipt that a payment event arrived — its Stripe reference number and status — and, for the Library Fund total on the home page, how many shirts the order contained, plus the label's tracking number once it ships. No name, address or email.

While you shop, your cart is held in your browser tab's session storage so it survives a page reload. It never leaves your device until you choose to check out, and it is cleared when you close the tab or complete an order.

External Links

This site links to external government sources, public records databases, and social platforms. Once you leave catalystcivic.org, the privacy practices of those external sites apply. We are not responsible for their data-handling policies.

Data Retention

The subscriber record described above is retained in full until you request removal, at which point the entire record is deleted — including the IP address and user-agent string. To unsubscribe or request deletion, use the contact page and say what you want removed.

When this policy changes, the version recorded against your consent stays as it was. It reflects the terms you actually agreed to, not the terms in force today.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from minors.

Contact

Privacy questions and data removal requests can be sent through the contact page.