Privacy Policy
Effective: 15 August 2007
Privacy Policy Table Of Contents
- Our Commitment To Privacy
- The Information We Collect
- How We Use Information
- Our Commitment To Children's Privacy
- How To Contact Us
Our Commitment To Privacy
Your privacy is important to us. To better protect your privacy we provide this notice explaining our online information practices and the way your information is collected and used.
In making voting lists available to the general public, a primary goal was to protect privacy by gathering only the minimum data required for public verification of elections. We don't want to provide any information that could be exploited by marketers, political candidates, stalkers, or the like.
The Information We Collect
Information collected for purposes of the Who Voted website falls into two general categories:
Voter Data: This is the data provided by state and county governments—Elections Departments or similar offices. It contains information to identify voters and also includes reports of voters' participation in public elections. Although we generally receive many personally-identifiable details about voters from the government offices, only the following information is saved about voters and made available through this website:
- name,
- zip code(s),
- political party affiliation,
- state or county voter registration number,
- county in which voter is registered to vote,
- a short description of whether a voter voted in specific elections,
- the manner in which a voter's ballot was received (e.g. "voted absentee," "voted at polls," "voted provisionally," etc.).
Search Queries: All users of the website have the opportunity to search the aforementioned database for specific voters; this process requires the user to send to our web server some or all of the following information:
- name,
- zip code,
- registration number,
- county in which voter is registered to vote.
We do not consider the information in these search queries to be personally-identifyable, since any search can be strictly hypothetical; that is, simply issuing searching for a voter doesn't mean that there actually exists a voter to match the query. Furthermore, we do not assume that a website user's search query reflects the user's own identity. For example, if you might search the Who Voted website for voters named "Elvis Presley" in Memphis, but this does not imply that there is such a person, nor does it imply that you are Elvis Presley.
How We Use Information
We make the Voter Data enumerated in the preceding section available to the general public through the Who Voted website, the home page of which is at <http://whovoted.net/>. Data that we receive about voters that is not enumerated above is not used for this website.
We do not make Voter Data available over the Internet when the data is specific to a state or county that has laws against doing so. This includes, but is not limited to, Arizona, California, and Pennsylvania.
Information that we receive in Search Queries (defined in the preceding section) is used to process the query and return appropriate results to the website user who issued the query. We do not share specific search queries with outside parties. We do not currently, but may in the future, aggregate non-identifying information about Search Queries to learn about how the Who Voted website is being used.
We use return email addresses to answer the email we receive. Such addresses are not used for any other purpose and are not shared with outside parties.
Finally, we never use or share the personally identifiable information provided to us online in ways unrelated to the ones described above without also providing you an opportunity to opt-out or otherwise prohibit such unrelated uses.
Cookies
Cookies are small pieces of information transferred by the web site from the hard disk of the user's computer and are connected to a piece of information about you or your preferences. Cookies are sometimes used on the Who Voted website to record the voter registration number and county/state information from a user's most recent Search Query. We do not use cookies to collect any other personal information about you.
The website instructs your computer to delete the cookies once you leave the Who Voted website, although this is dependent on your own web browser. To the best of our knowledge, users may browse the website without allowing cookies, unless they are uploading new Voter Data to the website (which is reserved for website administrators anyway).
Outside Parties
Because the Who Voted website makes Voter Data available to the public over the Internet, it is possible that other people, companies, or organizations will create their own copies of some or all of the Voter Data. Keep in mind that these data are public information by law, and that our display does not include all of the data about each voter that are available.. Nevertheless, we have no control over how any copies of Voter Data are used by other entities.
This website also contains links to other sites not affiliated with Who Voted. Please be aware that Who Voted is not responsible for the privacy practices of other sites. We encourage users to be aware when they leave our website and to read the privacy statements of other websites, which may collect personally identifiable information. This privacy policy applies solely to information collected by the Who Voted website.
Our Commitment To Children's Privacy
Protecting the privacy of the very young is especially important. For that reason, we never collect or maintain information at our website from those we actually know are under 13, and no part of our website is structured to attract anyone under 13.
How To Contact Us
Should you have other questions or concerns about these privacy policies, please contact us:
Who Voted Project
c/o Todd Davies
Symbolic Systems Program
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305-2150 USA
E-mail: davies (a) csli dot stanford dot edu
Note: Please substitute the proper @ symbol for the (a) when sending email. (We use (a) here to discourage spam.)
Project team: Todd Davies, Jeffrey Gerard, Reid Chandler, and Gordon Lyon