Draft for legal review. Last updated November 12, 2026.

Privacy policy

The short version: your dollar amounts stay in your account. What’s public is your percentages and anything you choose to write. We never sell or share any individual’s data. We may license summary statistics that can’t identify anyone. We don’t run ads.

BuckBallot is run by [legal name of owner or company] (“we”), [city], Connecticut. Questions: buckballot@gmail.com.

What’s public

When you post a split, anyone can see:

• the percentages you chose for the federal budget and any state budgets, and the level you played
• your note, if you write one (up to 280 characters)
• your home state, which you declare yourself and we don’t verify
• the date you posted
• your display name. This is a handle you choose; it doesn’t have to be your real name. Every post, reply and take carries it, so nothing on BuckBallot is posted without one.
• your replies to other people’s posts, with your display name
• how many people co-signed or respected your post, and how many replied
• your “takes”: if you add a note to a vote on a bill, rule or tax question, that vote and note are public with your display name and home state

Your email, phone number and tax numbers are never public.

What stays private to your account

• Your receipt. If you save the tax numbers you typed on the Receipt page (income, taxes paid, town, filing status), they’re stored in your account and only you can see them on the site. Database rules block every other user, signed in or not.
• Your email address, used to sign you in.
• Your phone number, if phone verification is turned on. It’s used only to make sure each person has one account.
• How you voted on bills, rules and tax questions, unless you add a note. Only totals are public, updated about once an hour rather than live, and the yes/no split is withheld until a question has at least 10 votes. You can remove your note at any time.
• Who you co-signed or respected, and what you reported. The counts are public; the list of who did it is not. The person you report never sees that it was you, and neither does the site owner.

Honest caveat: the people who run BuckBallot, and our database provider, technically have access to the database to keep it running. We don’t look at receipts, and we will only access account data to fix a technical problem, respond to a report, or when the law requires it.

The research pool (optional)

If you check “Add my numbers to the research pool,” we store a separate, rounded copy of your receipt in the pool. That copy has no display name, no email address and no account ID on it. It holds:

• your state, the town you typed (if any) and your filing status
• an income range, not your exact income
• three tax amounts, each rounded to the nearest $100: federal income tax, state income tax, and Social Security plus Medicare added together
• your overall tax rate, rounded to a tenth of a percent
• the date the copy was last updated

The receipt used to ask for an estimate of “tax savings from credits and deductions.” It no longer does. A pool row saved before that change may still hold that rounded estimate; it’s set to zero the next time its owner saves their receipt, and deleted with the row.

How the copy is linked to you, and why. So that you can change or delete your copy, a separate private table records which pool row belongs to which account. That link is used for three things only: to update your row when you save your receipt again, to delete it when you uncheck the box, and to delete it when you delete your account. No one using the site, signed in or not, can read the pool or the link. The people who run the database could technically match the two, as described in the caveat above; we don’t.

Uncheck the box and save your receipt, and your row and its link are deleted. We use the pool only for summary statistics, like average tax rates by town, and never publish a single person’s row. We never show or export a town-level figure for fewer than 20 people.

Selling and sharing

We never sell or share any individual’s data. We may license summary statistics that can’t identify anyone.

• “Summary statistics” means totals and averages across many people, such as the average split or vote counts on a question. Town-level figures from the research pool are never produced for fewer than 20 people, and vote splits are withheld until a question has at least 10 votes.
• What you post is public by your own choice (see “What’s public” above). Anyone can read it on the site.
• The companies that run the site for us (listed below) handle data only to provide their service to us. [Lawyer: confirm “never share” is accurate given these service providers and public posts, or adjust the wording.]

Things your browser stores

Your browser keeps a few small items on your own device: your light or dark setting, your progress through the site, which levels you’ve cleared, and a sign-in token so you stay signed in. There are no advertising or tracking cookies.

Companies that help run the site

• Supabase stores the database and handles sign-in emails.
• Cloudflare hosts the website. Like any web host, it briefly processes visitors’ IP addresses to deliver pages and stop attacks.
• [SMS provider, e.g. Twilio] sends phone verification codes, if phone verification is on.

Budget numbers come from public government sources and are downloaded by us; your visit isn’t shared with those agencies.

Your choices

• Delete your post any time from the Vote page.
• Download your data from Account, including your receipt and votes.
• Delete your account from Account. This permanently removes your profile, posts, co-signs, votes on bills, rules and tax questions, reports you made, saved receipt and research-pool row. Database backups held by our provider may keep a copy for up to [backup retention period] before it’s overwritten.

Age

BuckBallot is for people 18 and older. [Lawyer: confirm the age requirement.] Before we email a sign-in link, you have to check a box saying you’re 18 or older. We don’t check ages, and we don’t store that checkbox. [Lawyer: confirm this approach is enough.] If you think a child has made an account, email buckballot@gmail.com and we’ll delete it.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that affects what’s public or what we keep, we’ll say so on the site before the change takes effect.