Privacy Policy

What we collect

When you create a Luminous account, we collect:

• Account info: the email address and username you sign up with, and your password (stored securely, hashed, by our authentication provider — we never see it in plain text).
• Activity: votes, comment reactions, comments and replies you post, bills you follow, and reports/blocks you file.
• Technical info: your IP address (used transiently for bot/abuse protection and approximate location — we don't store a persistent log of it tied to your account), and standard browser/device information.

How we use it

We use this information to: operate your account and authenticate you; show your votes/comments/follows back to you; compute public aggregates (like a politician's approval rating) from everyone's activity; send account-related emails (confirmation, password reset); and protect the service from spam, bots, and abuse (including via Cloudflare Turnstile).

We do not sell your personal information.

What's public

Your username, display name, and any comments you post are visible to other users and, for public politician pages, to anyone visiting the site. Your email address and individual votes on specific politicians are never shown to other users — only aggregate totals.

Third parties

We use Supabase for authentication and data storage, Vercel for hosting, and Cloudflare Turnstile for bot protection. Public politician, legislation, vote and campaign-finance data displayed on Luminous comes from Congress.gov, the U.S. Senate (senate.gov), the Federal Election Commission (FEC), and the public-domain congress-legislators project.

When you look up your representatives, a ZIP code is matched against a table on our own server and remembered only in your browser. If you enter a street address instead, it is sent to the U.S. Census Bureau's geocoder to find your congressional district; we don't store it, and only the resulting state and district are remembered, in your browser.

Cookies

We use a cookie to keep you signed in between visits. We don't use third-party advertising or tracking cookies.

Your choices

You can update your username, email, or password at any time in Account Settings. You can delete your account (and all associated votes, comments, and follows) at any time from Account Settings — this is permanent and can't be undone. You can also email us to request access to or deletion of your data.

Children's privacy

Luminous is not directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time; we'll update the date at the top when we do.

Contact

Questions, or want to request your data or its deletion? Email theluminousapp@gmail.com.