Privacy

This petition is about surveillance. So we'd better not be doing it to you. Here's exactly what happens to your information, in plain words.

What we ask for, and why

• Your name. A petition needs names.
• Your street address, city and ZIP code. To check you live or work in City of Bakersfield, and to figure out your ward. Council cares about both.
• Your email. To make sure each signature is a real person, once. You click a link, and your signature counts.
• Whether you live here, or work or go to school here. Council weighs these differently, so we count them separately.
• A comment, if you want to leave one. Totally optional.

That's it. No phone number. No birthday. No "how did you hear about us."

Who sees what

The Bakersfield City Council gets: your name, ZIP code, ward, whether you live or work here, your comment, and the date you signed.

Once we hand the petition to council, it's a public record. Anyone can ask the city for a copy. Don't put anything in your comment you wouldn't want strangers to read.

Nobody else gets your street address or email. We don't sell, trade or share them. Ever.

The only exceptions are services that handle them to do one job for us, and nothing else:

• The US Census Bureau Geocoder gets your street address, city and ZIP code, to find your ward. More on that below.
• SMTP2GO delivers our emails. It handles your email address and the emails we send you, including your confirmation link. We've turned off its open and click tracking, so it doesn't record whether you read them or what you click.

We don't show anyone's name on the website.

Finding your ward

To figure out your ward, we send your street address, city and ZIP code to the US Census Bureau Geocoder. We don't send your name or email with it. That's a federal agency, and we can't control what they log. We think that's a fair trade for putting you in the right ward, but you should know.

We don't keep the map coordinates. We only save the ward number.

How long we keep things

• Street addresses: deleted within 60 days of turning the petition in to council. After that we only keep your ZIP code.
• Signatures you never confirmed: deleted after 14 days.
• Confirmation links: work once, and run out after 72 hours.
• Emails: deleted when the campaign is over. The one exception is below.
• Web server logs: Like most websites, our server keeps standard access logs. They record your IP address, the pages you loaded and your browser, and they're deleted automatically on a rolling schedule. We use them to deal with spam and attacks: addresses that are clearly abusing the petition get blocked for a while, automatically. We don't give IP addresses to Bakersfield City Council.

When we delete something, we really delete it. It gets wiped from the database, not just hidden.

Backups count too. Our backups are encrypted, and old ones get deleted on a schedule. Once your address is purged from the live database, it's gone from new backups, and the old ones age out.

The "keep me updated" box

It's unchecked unless you check it. Signing doesn't sign you up for anything else.

If you do check it, after you confirm your email we add you to our mailing list, run on our own server (listmonk). We send it your email, your first name, your ward and your language. Never your street address. Every email we send has an unsubscribe link, and it works.

What we don't do

• No tracking scripts, analytics, ads or "like" buttons.
• No fonts or code loaded from other companies' servers. Everything comes from us.
• No cookies on the petition pages.
• No reCAPTCHA. Our spam check runs a quick math puzzle in your browser instead. It doesn't know or send anything about you.

Your rights

You can ask to see what we have on you, fix it, or delete it. If you delete it, your signature comes off the petition, unless we've already turned it in to council. We can't take back a public record.

Questions, or want your signature removed? Email jason@makersfield.co.