Privacy

Reading the site

No account is needed to read anything, and nothing is stored about what you read. Until you log in, the site sets no cookies. There is no analytics script, no advertising script and no third-party tracker on any page — not switched off behind a banner, simply not loaded.

The site is hosted on Vercel, which keeps ordinary web-server request logs (your IP address, the page requested, the time), the same as any host. Prairie Record adds nothing of its own to that.

If you look up an address

The address or ZIP code you type on the home page is sent to the U.S. Census Bureau’s geocoder to work out which districts it falls in. It is not written to the database and not attached to any account.

Two things about that are worth knowing rather than glossing over. The lookup is a plain form that puts what you typed in the page’s own web address — which is what makes a result shareable and the back button work, and also means the address appears in your browser history and in those server logs. And the answer is cached on the server for a day, so a repeated lookup doesn’t ask Census again; what is cached is the address and the districts it resolved to, with nothing identifying whoever asked.

If you make an account

This is the whole list of what is kept:

• Your email address, and a hash of your password. Both are held by Supabase, which handles accounts and sign-in; the password is never stored in Prairie Record’s own tables.
• Which people you follow, and which bills you follow.
• The districts you saved as your delegation, if you saved one — for example IL-07, IL-SD-05, IL-HD-009. The districts, never the address they came from: an address is sent to the Census geocoder to work out which districts it is in and is not stored, here or anywhere. The database column enforces that rather than trusting the site to — an address cannot be written into it.
• Your saved searches — the text you searched for, not the results, since the results change every week.
• Whether you want the weekly digest. It is off unless you turn it on.
• Which votes and which bill updates went into which digest email you were sent, so the same roll call — or the same news that a bill moved — is never sent to you twice. Those rows hold references to public records and an account id, not your address.

Nothing else is asked for: no real name, no phone number, no home address, no payment details — the site takes no money. A saved delegation is the closest thing to a location the site keeps, and a district is a public area holding hundreds of thousands of people, not a place you live.

Your follows and saved searches are readable only by you. That is enforced by the database on every row, not by the site remembering to filter, so they are not visible to other readers or through the public data API.

Email

Prairie Record sends two kinds of mail and no others: messages you triggered yourself (confirming your address, resetting your password), and the weekly digest, if you have turned it on. There is no newsletter, no announcements list and no marketing.

The digest covers roll calls by the people you follow and on the bills you follow, and what has happened to those bills on days nobody voted. It carries no open or click tracking: links point straight atwww.prairierecord.com, and nothing records which of them you opened. Tracking links would mean keeping a record of which votes a named reader looked at, which is the opposite of the point.

Every digest has an unsubscribe link, and supports the one-click unsubscribe button built into most mail apps. The link in the footer takes you to a page with a confirm button rather than acting on load — corporate mail filters fetch every link in a message before you ever see it, and a page that unsubscribed on load would quietly unsubscribe people who never clicked anything. Unsubscribing turns the digest off and changes nothing else: your account and your follows stay as they were, and you can turn it back on from your account.

Mail is delivered by Resend, which sees the address and the message.

Who else can see any of this

Four services, each for one job: Supabase stores the database and accounts, Vercel hosts the site, Resend delivers mail, and the U.S. Census Bureau receives an address only at the moment you look one up.

That is the complete list. Nothing is sold, rented or shared: not with advertisers, data brokers, campaigns, parties or advocacy groups. A site whose value rests on being trusted by people across the whole political spectrum cannot also be quietly selling who follows whom.

Deleting your account

You can clear most of it yourself at any time: unfollow anyone or anything you follow, delete saved searches, set the digest to off. What remains is the login itself.

To delete the login itself, there is a button on your account. It asks you to type your address first, because it cannot be undone. Deleting the login removes everything listed above with it — follows, saved searches, your saved delegation, your digest setting and the record of what was sent to you all hang off it in the database and go at the same moment, not on a queue.

If that fails, or you cannot get to the account to press it, write to kenmad96@gmail.com from the address on the account and it will be done by hand.

Public records about legislators — bills, roll calls, how each member voted — are not personal data about readers and are not affected by any of this. They come from Congress.gov, senate.gov, the Illinois General Assembly and Open States, and stay on the site.

If this changes

This page is maintained alongside the code that does the storing, so it describes what the site does now rather than everything it might one day do. If what is collected changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves.