What we hold, and how to make us stop

This website

billtracking.org collects nothing from you

There is no analytics anywhere on this site. No Google Analytics, no Cloudflare, no pixel, no tag manager, no advertising and no tracking SDKs — on any page, of any kind. We do not record what you read, what you search for or where you arrived from, we do not sell or share anything about you, and we build no profile of you.

Some pages do keep things for you, deliberately — the feed pages (/us and /eu) most of all. Whatever a page keeps — the posts it has already shown you, so that it opens quickly the next time, your display preferences, your docket keywords, and your sign-in session if you choose to vote — stays in your browser, on your device, and none of it is transmitted to us. We are not told which pages you opened, what you read, or where you arrived from. From this website, the only things that ever leave your device are a vote you deliberately cast and — if you sign in — the bills you choose to follow, exactly as described below.

One honest caveat, because the alternative would be a false claim: the site is hosted on GitHub Pages, and any web host necessarily handles your IP address at the network layer in order to send you a page. GitHub does not surface those logs to us and we have never seen them — but we will not tell you no IP address is processed anywhere, because that would not be true.

The app — accounts and votes

An account exists so your vote counts once

You can mark a bill with a thumbs up or down. Because a reader's position on a bill is a political opinion — a specially protected category of personal data under EU law — we are deliberately narrow about this.

• Voting requires signing in with Google or Apple; reading never does. The account is what makes one vote per person per bill possible. Without it, the counts would be meaningless.
• All we act on from the sign-in is an account identifier and an email address. If you use Sign in with Apple and choose Hide My Email, we only ever see Apple's relay address.
• A vote record is: which bill, thumbs up or down, when, and — only if you choose to set it — a country and, for the US, a state. That location is optional, you choose it yourself, and nobody verifies it. Leaving it unset is a normal and fully-supported way to use the app.
• Who voted which way is never published, shown to anyone, or attached to a profile. There are no public profiles and no vote histories. What is published is counts: how many voted each way overall, and how many from each country or state.
• You can change or withdraw your vote at any time, and deleting your account deletes every vote with it.

What we ask you to understand about published counts

Counts are exact — we never round, estimate or randomise them, because the whole point of this project is that its numbers can be checked. Every place we show also shows how many people voted there, so a small number is visibly small rather than dressed up as a percentage.

Where it is stored, and on what legal basis

Votes are held in a database in Frankfurt, Germany, chosen so that this data does not leave the EU. The legal basis is your explicit consent (GDPR Article 9(2)(a)), given by choosing to vote after being told what a vote records. Withdrawing that consent and deleting your account are the same action — there is no state in which you have withdrawn consent and we still hold your votes.

Our database provider is Supabase, acting as a processor on our instructions. If you sign in with Apple, we also store a token from Apple used for one purpose only: to properly disconnect BillTracking from your Apple ID when you delete your account, as Apple requires.

Email, and everything else

The rest of it

• Email. contact@billtracking.org and accuracy@billtracking.org are aliases on a single mailbox and receive mail. If you write to us, we hold your message and your address for as long as needed to deal with it. Please don't send us anything sensitive — it's an ordinary mailbox.
• Legislators. The feeds republish the official legislative record, which names Members of Congress and MEPs and records how they voted and what they sponsored. That is public record information, republished on the basis of legitimate interest in making the legislative process followable.
• We sell nothing and share nothing. No advertisers, no sponsors, no data brokers, no "partners". There is no revenue.
• Children. The app is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.
• AI. Plain-English bill summaries are AI-written and carry an explicit [AI-Generated] label. Dates, vote tallies, bill numbers and procedural facts are copied from the official record and are never AI-written.

Your rights

If you are in the EU or UK you have the right to access, correct, erase, restrict or object to our processing of your personal data, and to receive it in a portable form. You also have the right to object to processing based on legitimate interests, at any time. For votes, the fastest route to all of this is the app itself, which lets you see and withdraw your votes and delete your account outright.

Otherwise, write to contact@billtracking.org. We will respond within one month. If we refuse a request we will tell you why, and you can complain to your national data protection authority or go to court.

Who we are

BillTracking is an independent project run by one person, not a company. The data controller is Thomas Vanhoutte, who can be reached at contact@billtracking.org; a postal address is available on request.

Changes

If we change how any of this works we will update this page and change the date below. We will not quietly start collecting something this page says we do not collect.

26 August 2026. The bullet above about signing in used to open "We ask for no profile. No name, no photo". That was not accurate and it has been removed, along with the list of things it went on to say we do not ask for. Nothing about what the product does changed and nothing new is collected — what changed is that this page no longer says something untrue, and says less. Later the same day, three more descriptions were corrected to match the product exactly: the update check's request also carries the previous run's crash message when there was one — it always did, and the page now says so; the deletion section describes the backups as they are — they hold the votes, the consent records and the follow lists, on a 90-day rotation that never keeps fewer than two snapshots, and a word about encryption that the pipeline does not support is gone; and the list of what a feed page keeps on your device now includes your docket keywords. As before, nothing about what the product does changed — the page stopped saying three things inexactly.

23 August 2026. Voting, with Google sign-in, went live on this website, and the what-exists-today note now says so. The note's Apple sentence was also corrected: the button is live and answers when pressed, not "visibly switched off". The deletion section states the backup reality: we keep no working copy, and deleted data ages out of encrypted disaster-recovery backups within 90 days. The app's update check is also disclosed — it has worked this way since over-the-air updates were wired in; what changed is that we wrote it down. And we dropped a mention of notification settings, which the app does not ship yet.

22 August 2026. The "Who we are" section now names the data controller, Thomas Vanhoutte. Nothing about what is collected or how it is handled changed.

20 August 2026. If you sign in, the bills you follow are now kept with your account so they follow you across devices, and the website can show you new actions on them. Signed out, nothing changed: follows stay on your device and are not transmitted to us.

19 August 2026. Signing in, voting and deleting an account are built into this website as well as the app, and switch on when sign-in is enabled — this page now covers them. Nothing new is collected, and nothing that was kept on your device moved off it.

Last updated 26 August 2026.