Privacy Policy

Information We Collect

Nothing is required to use the app. GovLense opens straight into the legislative record. There is no account to create, no sign-in wall, and no permission prompt before you can read anything. We do not run our own analytics, and we do not set advertising cookies.

Preferences stored on your device

The bills, members and committees you follow, the topics you choose, and the state or ZIP you set for the "find my representatives" feature are saved on your device. They are deleted when you delete the app or clear its storage. If you turn on notifications or sign in, a copy of your follow list is also sent to our servers. That is described in Sections 02 and 03, and it does not happen otherwise.

Connection data when the app talks to our API

GovLense displays live data (bills, votes, members, committees, amendments) from our own API service. Like any internet request, fetching that data sends routine technical information to our servers, including your IP address, the date and time, and which item you requested. We use this only to deliver responses and keep the service reliable and secure. It is held briefly in standard server logs, is not used to build a profile of you, and is never sold or shared for advertising.

Notifications (Optional)

If you turn on push notifications, GovLense needs to know which device to alert and what you care about. Turning them on sends us:

• An install identifier: a random identifier the app generates for your installation. It is not your Apple ID, your advertising identifier, or any hardware serial, and it changes if you delete and reinstall the app.
• A push token issued by Apple for that installation, which is what lets Apple's network deliver a notification to your device.
• Your follow list: the bills, members, committees and amendments you follow, so our servers can work out which events are worth telling you about.
• Basic technical details: app version, operating system version, your time zone (used for quiet hours and to send the digest at a sensible local hour), and your notification preferences.

We also keep a record of the notifications we sent your installation, and whether a notification was opened. We use that to measure whether the feature works (for example, whether anyone opens the weekly digest) and to make sure we never send the same alert twice.

Turning notifications off deletes this. Switching off the master notifications toggle removes your device record and follow list from our servers, unless you are signed in, in which case they remain so your weekly email still works.

Accounts and the Weekly Email Digest (Optional)

An account exists for one reason: to email you a weekly digest of what you follow, and to let your follow list survive a new phone. It is entirely optional, and the app is fully usable without one.

• Your email address is the only thing we ask for. There is no password and no name field; we email you a six-digit code to sign in. Our login library keeps a "name" field on every account; because we never ask for one, yours is stored empty.
• Sign-in codes are stored in hashed form and expire ten minutes after they're sent.
• A session record is created when you sign in. It contains your IP address and your browser or app user-agent string, which we keep so we can tell a legitimate session from a stolen one. Sessions expire after thirty days.
• A short-lived counter keyed to your IP address, used only to limit how many sign-in attempts can be made from one place, so that nobody can lock everyone else out by flooding the login. It is deleted within a day.
• Your follow list is mirrored to our servers, as described in Section 02, so the digest knows what to write about.
• Your representatives: if you've used the "find my representatives" feature, the identifiers of your two senators and your House member are stored with your account so the digest can include a section on how they voted. We store the identifiers of those public officials, not your address or coordinates. Because those three officials correspond to a congressional district, this does tell us your approximate area, which is why our app store disclosure lists coarse location. We store them only for accounts; an installation with no account has no reason to hold them.
• A record of each digest we send you, so that you never receive the same week twice.

We do not use your email address for marketing, and we do not share it with anyone except the email provider that delivers the message (Section 06). Every digest has a one-click unsubscribe link, and you can turn the digest off in the app without deleting your account.

The "Find My Representatives" Feature

GovLense can show you the senators and House member for your area. This feature is optional and only runs when you use it. You can choose either method:

• Type an address or ZIP code. We send what you type to our API to look up the matching congressional district.
• Use your device location. If you grant the permission, the app reads your coordinates and sends them to our API to find your district. You can decline this and type a ZIP instead.

To turn an address or coordinates into a district, our API forwards them to mapping and geocoding providers: the U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder and Photon (operated by komoot) for address suggestions.

We do not store your address or your coordinates anywhere. They are used to answer the request and are not written to any database, log or cache of ours. What we do cache, briefly, is the answer for a district, such as "the members for Virginia's 8th", which is public information and identical for everyone who lives there. We keep no history of your lookups. Your chosen state or ZIP is saved on your device so you don't have to type it again, and, if you have an account, the resulting representatives are stored as described in Section 03.

GovLense never reads your location in the background. The permission is used only at the moment you ask for a lookup.

Information We Do Not Collect

To remove any ambiguity, GovLense does not collect, store, or have access to:

• Your name, phone number, postal address, or any contact detail other than the email address you give us if you choose to create an account
• Passwords. There are none; sign-in is by emailed code
• Your contacts, calendars, photos, microphone, or camera
• Advertising identifiers (IDFA, AAID), device fingerprints, or any cross-app or cross-site tracking. We do not track you, and we do not ask for permission to, because we have nothing to do with it
• Your precise location or street address in any stored form (see Section 04)
• A reading history. We keep no database of which bills or members you have looked at, and nothing in the app builds one. We know what you follow, if you've turned on notifications or signed in. Note the limit of this promise: as Section 01 explains, an ordinary web request records the address it asked for, so our hosting provider's short-lived request logs do contain the paths your app fetched. We do not mine those logs or connect them to an account
• Payment information. The app is free, and there is no in-app purchase today
• Your political party, registration status, or opinions. We never ask, and nothing in the app infers it

We do not use third-party analytics or advertising SDKs, and we never sell, rent, or trade personal information.

Third-Party Services We Use

We keep our list of service providers short, and we share only what each one needs to do its job. None of them are permitted to use your information for their own purposes.

• Fly.io: hosts this website and our API. It processes connection data (such as IP addresses) to route requests, as described in Section 01.
• Neon: hosts our database, which holds the public congressional record plus the limited personal data described in Sections 02 and 03.
• Resend: delivers our email (sign-in codes and the weekly digest). It receives your email address and the contents of the message.
• Apple Push Notification service: delivers push notifications to iOS devices. It receives the push token and the notification itself.
• U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder and Photon / komoot: turn an address or coordinates into a congressional district for the optional feature in Section 04.
• Anthropic: turns public bill text into the plain-English headlines the app shows on bills. It receives public bill text and public voting records only. No information about you, your account, your device or your location is ever sent to it, and nothing you type reaches it.
• Apple App Store and Google Play: distribute the app and may collect standard install, crash, and device telemetry under their own terms; we do not receive identifying data from it. See the Apple and Google privacy policies.

The underlying legislative data comes from authoritative public sources (Congress.gov, the unitedstates/congress project, congress-legislators, and Voteview) which we ingest into our database. Your device does not contact those sources directly, and no information about you is sent to them.

Your Choices and How to Delete Your Data

Everything described in this policy can be switched off or removed from inside the app:

• Delete your account. Settings → Account → Delete account removes your account, your email address, your sessions, your stored representatives and your email preferences, and unlinks every device from it. We also erase the copy of your address held in our record of past digests. This happens immediately and cannot be undone.
• Turn off notifications. The master toggle in Settings removes your device record and its follow list from our servers, unless you are signed in.
• Unsubscribe from the digest using the link in any digest email, or the toggle in Settings. Your account stays.
• Revoke location permission at any time in your device's system settings. The app falls back to typing a ZIP code.
• Delete the app to remove every on-device preference. If you had notifications on, your device record ages out on the schedule in Section 08.

You can also write to us at the address in Section 13 and we will handle any request by hand, whatever your jurisdiction.

Data Security & Retention

The strongest privacy guarantee is to hold as little as possible, for as short a time as possible. Our website and API are served over HTTPS, and your preferences live in your device's protected app storage. We run an automatic daily pass that deletes data once it has stopped being useful. Not eventually, but on a schedule:

• Notification records, including whether a notification was opened: 30 days.
• Sign-in codes: ten minutes, and they are erased the moment they're used.
• Sessions, including the IP address and user-agent they carry: until they expire, at most 30 days.
• Sign-in rate-limit counters, which contain an IP address: 24 hours.
• Your email address in our record of sent digests: erased after 30 days; the record that a digest was sent at all is kept for 180 days so you never receive a duplicate.
• Sign-ups that were never confirmed: 7 days.
• Device records whose push token has gone dead: 30 days.
• Device records with no activity at all: 180 days. Devices linked to an account are kept, because your weekly email depends on them.
• Addresses, coordinates and lookup history: never stored, so there is nothing to expire.

Deleting your account (Section 07) does not wait for any of these schedules.

Children's Privacy (COPPA)

GovLense is a general-audience civic information app and is not directed to children under the age of 13. Consistent with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, contact us using the details in Section 13 and we will delete it promptly.

California Privacy Rights (CCPA / CPRA)

If you are a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act and California Privacy Rights Act give you certain rights regarding your personal information. Because we collect so little, the practical impact is limited, but for completeness:

• Categories collected in the past 12 months: identifiers (an install identifier, a push token, and, only with an account, an account identifier and email address); internet or network activity (IP address, user-agent, request logs, and whether a notification was opened); and coarse geolocation, only in the form described in Sections 03 and 04.
• Categories sold or shared: none. We have never sold or "shared" (as the CCPA defines it for cross-context advertising) personal information, and we never will. We do not process personal information for targeted advertising.
• Sensitive personal information: if, and only if, you choose the "use my location" option, we receive your precise geolocation for the single lookup described in Section 04. We retain none of it, we never use it to infer any characteristic about you, and we use it only for the purpose you asked for, so we do not use or disclose sensitive personal information in any way that triggers the right to limit. We do not collect or infer political affiliation, and we collect no other category of sensitive information.
• Sources: directly from you and from your device.
• Business purpose: to deliver, secure and maintain the app and the features you switch on. We do not build profiles.
• Retention: as set out in Section 08.

You retain the right to know, delete, correct, limit the use of sensitive information, and opt out of sale or sharing. Section 07 lets you exercise the deletion right yourself, immediately; or contact us and we will act on any request. We will not discriminate against you for exercising a right.

European Privacy Rights (GDPR / UK GDPR)

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, the General Data Protection Regulation gives you rights over personal data that controllers process about you. Our lawful bases are:

• Legitimate interest: the technical connection data in Section 01, and the session, rate-limiting and delivery records that keep the service working and secure.
• Performance of a contract: your email address and follow list, where you have asked us to send you notifications or a weekly digest.
• Consent: your device location, which your operating system asks you for and which you can revoke at any time.

You may exercise your rights (access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, or objection) through Section 07 or by contacting us, and you have the right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority. Our providers are listed in Section 06; some are located in the United States, and transfers rely on their standard contractual clauses.

Changes to This Policy

If we make material changes to this policy, for example if we introduce a feature that processes something new, we will update the effective date at the top of this page and clearly highlight the change. We will not change this policy retroactively to authorize new collection on data we previously promised not to collect.

September 21, 2026: this policy was rewritten to describe optional accounts, the weekly email digest and push notifications. The previous version stated that GovLense had no accounts, which was true when it was written and is no longer.

September 25, 2026: this website now serves its own fonts, so loading it no longer sends a request to Google, and Google Fonts is no longer listed as a provider. Fly.io is now listed as hosting the website as well as the API, which it already did.

Contact

GovLense is operated by GovLense LLC, a Virginia limited liability company, which is the data controller for the information described in this policy. Questions, concerns, or requests about this policy or your privacy can be sent to:

privacy@govlense.app

We read every message. If your question is about a specific bill, vote, or member rather than privacy, the in-app feedback link is the better place to send it.