Privacy Policy Summary as of March 18, 2019

Our mission at Public Democracy is to combine what’s right and what works, and a big part of how we accomplish this is by using technology to empower people like yourself. We want to share the value with you that your data creates, but we also care about keeping your privacy safe. All pages hosted by www.publicdemocracy.io are subject to our privacy policy.

Privacy details matter, but most of us don’t have time to read the many pages and technical details of privacy policies.  So to sum up our privacy policy, we want to know what our visitors value and use on the website.  We track that and actually do use it to try to improve our website’s performance and understand how we can best meet the needs of those taking the time to visit us.  But we won’t sell that data or your cookies from our website to others. And if you choose to share personal information with us, we will keep it confidential unless you expressly tell us you want us to share something.

We are also working to bring our broader data sets, which include personally identifiable information, from our work over the past decade in the advocacy, service, political, and entertainment space to market in an effort to improve advertising offerings and affect how the internet understands each of us. Much of the data out there defines us merely by how we were born, how much money we make, or what we have bought. And most of the metrics used to evaluate whether data predictors are helpful are based on attention measures (i.e., how many pages—and ad impressions—can someone get you to view). These underlying assumptions in the data have a profound impact on how the data is used, what messages are communicated, and the experience each of us has in the online and mobile space. Because of that, we have built our database very differently.

We believe each of us is best understood by the values that motivate us and that the most valuable measures are what individuals will do with others to positively affect the world around them. We’ve learned that data based on those assumptions and measures performs very differently from most of what is on the market and paints a very different picture of who we are as Americans. Our hope is that by providing better insights into who we are and what we truly care about, we can shift how data is used by our leaders, governments, corporations, news agencies, and non-profits. Our mission is to align what is right with what works, and that means giving those with power and influence a self-interested reason to do what the people want and need. At its core, that is what Democracy has always sought to do. We believe our data can help to create such incentives in the online, virtual, and mobile space.

We may change some of the details of how we pursue these goals to stay in line with new laws or practices, but we don’t expect the principles above to change. But you can look at the date on this page and the full privacy policy (below) to see when last we last updated them. And we welcome your thoughts and input as we seek to faithfully chart this course forward.

Now, if you’re still interested in the legal jargon and want to read our whole policy, click here. And let us know if you have any questions or suggestions by clicking here. We respect your privacy and value the work you allow us to do, so thank you for your partnership!