Legal
Privacy Policy
Effective: June 1, 2026 · The Founded Project LLC · Minneapolis, MN
The short version
You can use the quiz without an account — anonymous quiz answers are stored by session ID. If you create an account, we store your email, a hashed password, and your quiz history so your results carry across visits. Sharing your data for civic research is a separate, optional choice you make at signup, and you can change it anytime. We never sell your data. No ads. No tracking pixels. No data brokers.
What we collect and why
| What | Why | How long | Shared with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quiz answers | Compute alignment score | Session lifetime | Nobody |
| Anonymous session ID | Link answers to results | 90 days | Nobody |
| Email address (optional) | Send your results or state launch alert | Until you unsubscribe | Nobody |
| State / ZIP code | Route you to relevant races | Session lifetime | Nobody |
| IP address (rate limiting) | Prevent abuse | 60 seconds (in-memory only) | Nobody |
| Payment info (donors) | Process donation via Stripe | Stripe handles this | Stripe only |
| Account email + hashed password (optional) | Sign-in, saved results, weighted scoring | Until you delete your account | Nobody |
| Onboarding quiz profile (accounts) | Weight your ballot quiz by the issues you said matter most | Until you delete your account | Nobody |
| Anonymized quiz results (opt-in only) | Civic research aggregates — never with your name or address | Aggregated; individual rows deletable on request | Researchers and press, aggregate form only |
What we do not do
- Sell your email or quiz data to any third party
- Share data with campaigns, PACs, or political organizations
- Run ad tracking or behavioral profiling
- Use your responses to train AI models without consent
- Store your full address or precise geolocation
- Require you to create an account to take the quiz
- Include your data in research without your explicit opt-in at signup
Cookies and local storage
GroundedVote does not use advertising cookies. We may store a session identifier in your browser's session storage to maintain quiz state during your visit. This is cleared when you close the browser tab.
Third-party services
We use the following services, each with their own privacy practices:
- Resend — transactional email delivery for results and notifications
- Stripe — payment processing for donations (we never see your card number)
- Railway — cloud hosting provider (PostgreSQL + Next.js runtime)
- Anthropic Claude / OpenAI GPT-4o — AI model inference for question generation and position extraction (no user PII is sent to these services)
- Congress.gov / US Census Bureau — public APIs for candidate and geocoding data
Your rights
You may request deletion of any data associated with your email address at any time by contacting us. Because quiz sessions are anonymous, we cannot link them to you without the session ID you provide. Minnesota residents may have additional rights under state privacy law.
Children
GroundedVote is intended for users 18 and older. We do not knowingly collect data from minors. If you believe we have inadvertently collected information from a minor, contact us immediately.
Changes
We'll update this policy as the platform grows. Material changes will be noted with a new effective date. Continued use constitutes acceptance.
Questions? Contact us · The Founded Project LLC · Minneapolis, MN