Privacy

What we know about you.

Freepol stores people's political opinions. That deserves a straight answer about where they go, not four pages of legal hedging. Here is the straight answer.

The short version

Nobody can see how you voted. Not other members, not anyone browsing the site. Only the totals are shared.
Nothing is sold, ever. No advertising, no data brokers, no analytics companies.
You are not tracked. There are no tracking cookies and no third-party scripts watching you.
Vish can see everything. He runs the database, so he can read any of it. Said plainly rather than buried.
Ask and it is deleted. All of it, for good.

What is collected

Only what the site actually needs to work. Nothing is gathered speculatively in case it is useful later.

Your email: So you can sign in, and so we can send you a confirmation link. Nothing else is sent to it. There is no newsletter and there will not be one without you asking for it.
Your name: Only if you sign in with Google, which passes along the name on your Google account. It is used to greet you and for nothing else. If you sign up with an email and password instead, we never learn your name.
Your charter votes: Which of the thirteen principles you marked essential, useful, or wrong. This is the point of the site.
Notes on your votes: The optional explanation you can attach to any vote.
Subjects you care about: The topics you tick, plus anything you type in the box. Used to decide what gets built first.
Principles you suggest: Anything you write in the suggestion box.
What you post in the discussion: Threads you start, replies you write, and the display name they appear under. These are public. Anybody with the link can read them without signing in. Treat a post the way you would treat anything else you publish under your own name.
Votes on posts, and threads you save: The score on a post is public. Which way you voted is not, and neither is your list of saved threads. Both are visible only to you.
A sign-in session: A token stored in your own browser so you stay signed in between visits. It lives on your device rather than on a server, and clearing your browser data removes it.

There is no age field, no location, no phone number, no gender, no employer. None of it is needed, so none of it is asked for.

Who can see it

Freepol holds two different kinds of thing, and they are treated differently. What you post in the discussion is public. Everything else you enter is private. The rest of this section is that sentence in detail.

Anybody at all: the discussion, and only the discussion

Approved threads and approved replies can be read by anyone with the link, with no account. That is deliberate: an argument nobody outside can read is not much of an argument. What a visitor sees is the text of the post, the display name on it, and its score.

A visitor with no account cannot reply, vote, save, or propose anything, and cannot reach any other table in the database. Their access runs through three named functions that return the posts and nothing else, so what a stranger can see is a short list rather than a judgement call.

Posts held for review, posts that were not accepted, and anything removed are not in that list. Nobody but their author and the moderators can see them.

The discussion is still marked so that search engines do not index it. Public to a person who follows a link is not the same as showing up when somebody searches your name, and the second of those is not on by default.

Other members: the discussion, and nothing else

Beyond the discussion, members can see the thirteen principles, the roadmap, and the totals for each principle, such as how many people marked one essential. They cannot see who voted which way, cannot read your notes, cannot see your subjects, and cannot see your suggestions or your email address.

This is not a promise resting on good manners. The database enforces it with rules that sit underneath the website, so it holds even if the website itself were rewritten or broken.

The founders: all of it

Vish and Abhijeet administer the database and can therefore read everything in it, including individual votes, notes and suggestions. Anyone who tells you otherwise about a service they run is misleading you. They read notes and suggestions because that is how the charter gets better. They have no interest in who voted which way, and that will not be published, shared, or used to treat anybody differently.

They can also remove a thread or a reply. When that happens it is visible: a marker is left where the post was, saying a moderator removed it and giving the reason, and a line is written to a log with the moderator's name against it that every moderator can read. Vish can additionally erase a thread outright, leaving nothing but a line in that log. That exists for spam and for material that must not remain online, not for arguments anybody disagrees with.

A platform arguing that people should hear each other out, on which posts can vanish with no trace and no reason, would be a platform not following its own argument. Hence the marker.

Companies involved

Freepol is run by two students, not a company with its own servers. Four services make it work, and each one is listed here because each one touches something of yours.

Supabase: Holds the database and manages sign-ins. Your email, votes, notes, subjects and suggestions live here.
Netlify: Serves the website. Like any web server it keeps routine request logs, which include visitors' network addresses.
Google: Only if you choose to sign in with Google. Google then tells Freepol your name and email address. Freepol receives nothing else from your Google account and can do nothing else with it. Using an email and password instead keeps Google out of it entirely.
Resend: Sends the confirmation and password emails. It handles your email address in order to deliver them.

There is no analytics service, no advertising network, and no third-party tracker of any kind on this site. If that ever changes, it will be written here first, and it will not be something that follows you around the internet.

What will never happen

Your data will never be sold. Freepol is non-profit, and there is no version of this where your opinions become a product.
Your votes will never be published against your name. Not in totals that could identify you, not in screenshots, not in anything.
You will never be profiled for advertising. Nobody is buying the fact that you care about housing policy.
You will never be emailed things you did not ask for. Sign-in and account emails only.
Your data will never be handed over quietly. If a law ever compelled disclosure, you would be told, unless telling you were itself unlawful.

Your data is yours

Change it

Any vote, note or subject can be changed or cleared from the member area at any time, as often as you like.

Get a copy

Ask, and you will be sent everything stored against your account.

Delete it

Ask, and your account and everything attached to it is deleted. Not hidden, not deactivated. Removed, with nothing kept back. There is no retention period, because there is no reason to keep it.

For any of these, email thechosenkwisatzhaderach@gmail.com. It is answered by a person, because there is only one.

Honest caveats

Freepol is in early development and run by two students, not a company with a security department. Everything above is true, and the protections described are real and enforced by the database. But this is a small project, and treating it as though it had the resilience of a large organisation would be a mistake.

Practical advice, meant seriously: use a password you do not use anywhere else, or sign in with Google so there is no password here at all. And do not write anything into a note or a suggestion that would genuinely endanger you if it were exposed. That is good advice for any young platform, this one included.

If this policy changes in a way that affects you, the change will be noted here and members will be told. It will not be altered quietly.