Privacy Policy

Rotunda has no accounts, no logins and no analytics software of any kind. Your name, ZIP code, interests and saved stories are stored on your phone and are never uploaded to us.

1. What stays on your device

When you set up Rotunda, the app asks for a few things to personalize what you see. All of it is written to your device’s local storage and stays there:

• Your first name, if you choose to give one. It is used to greet you on the Today screen and nothing else. Leaving it blank is fully supported.
• Your ZIP code, used to determine which legislature, district and officials are yours.
• The topics you said you care about, used to order what appears first.
• Your saved stories and your notification preference.

We do not have a copy of any of this. There is no account to attach it to. If you delete the app, it is gone — from your phone and from existence, because nowhere else held it.

2. What is sent to our servers

Two things leave your device, and only while you are actively using the feature that needs them:

• Your ZIP code, when the app looks up which officials represent you. It is sent to our lookup service, which queries official and third-party government-data sources on your behalf.
• What you type into search, when you ask Rotunda to explain a topic or find a bill. The text of your question is processed to generate a plain-language answer.

Neither is stored against you, because there is no identifier to store them against — no account, no user ID, no device fingerprint, no advertising identifier.

The one thing we do keep

We cache the answers to ZIP lookups: which officials serve a given ZIP code, and which city and county a ZIP belongs to. This is so the next person who enters that ZIP gets an instant result instead of waiting on a chain of external APIs. That cache contains ZIP codes, place names and public officials. It contains no people, no devices and no record of who asked.

3. What we do not do

• No analytics. The app ships with no analytics, crash-reporting, attribution or product-telemetry software. This is not a lighter-touch configuration of tracking — there is none in the build.
• No advertising. No ad networks, no ad identifiers, no ad-related data sharing.
• No selling or sharing your data. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are used under California law.
• No tracking you across other apps or websites.
• No location access. The app never requests your device location. A ZIP code you typed is not the same as being tracked.

4. Service providers

Rotunda relies on outside services to host the app’s content and to fetch government data. They process requests on our behalf:

• Supabase — hosts our database of stories and runs the functions that fetch government data.
• Anthropic — generates the plain-language explanations from official text. Search queries are processed here and are not used to train models.
• Government and civic-data sources — including Congress.gov, GovInfo, OpenStates, Cicero and 5 Calls, which supply bill records and officeholder information.

When your ZIP or a search query reaches one of these services, it arrives as an isolated request without any information about who you are.

5. Children

Rotunda is a general-audience civics app and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 — in practice, we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, since the app has no accounts.

6. Your choices and rights

Because your information lives on your device, you control it directly:

• Change your name, ZIP or interests at any time from the Profile screen in the app.
• Delete everything by deleting the app. No request to us is required, and no residual copy exists.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete or port personal information a company holds about you — for example under the GDPR or the CCPA. You are welcome to exercise them by writing to info@rotundaapp.com. In most cases our honest answer will be that we hold nothing to return, because we never received it.

7. Security

Traffic between the app and our services is encrypted in transit. No system is perfectly secure, but the strongest protection here is structural rather than technical: a database that never held your personal information cannot leak it.

8. Changes to this policy

If Rotunda ever begins collecting something it does not collect today, this page will be updated before that change ships, and the date at the top will change with it. We will not quietly broaden what we gather.

9. Contact

Questions about this policy, or about privacy generally, go to info@rotundaapp.com. Help with the app itself goes to the same address — see the support page.