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Privacy
No tracking pixels, no advertising, no profiles, and no record of who read what.
Everything here can be read without signing up. There is no tracking and there are no ads.
Counts are kept of how many times each page is read. Those counts hold the day, the page and a rough idea of where and on what.
Nothing here can say who you are.
Reading the Site
Every page here can be read without an account and without giving anything. There is no analytics script from anyone else, no advertising, no social embeds, no third-party fonts and no cookies.
What Is Counted, and What Makes It Safe
Counts are kept of how many times each page is read, to show which parts of the site are useful. A count carries the day, the page, the country and region your network address places you in, a broad device type, browser family and operating system, which reading mode the page was in, and, where your browser sends one, the kind of site you arrived from. That is the whole of it. None of it names you, and the next section is why.
To count people rather than page loads, a visit produces a scrambled code made from your network address and browser. The recipe for that code changes every day, so the same person on two days produces two unrelated codes and there is no way to link them. Your network address itself is never written down. There is no session and no identifier that survives the day.
This is deliberate. A record of which people read which parts of a contested political document is a dataset that could be demanded in a legal case, stolen in a breach, or leaked. So the site does not create it. The question “who read this proposal” is one we cannot answer, rather than one we merely promise not to answer.
What Is Kept in Your Browser
When you choose Plain English or As written, that choice is saved in your own browser's local storage so the site remembers it as you move between pages. Which of the two a page was read in is also sent with that page's count, because whether the plain English layer is used at all is the main thing these counts are for. It is sent as part of the count and is attached to nothing that identifies you.
If you sign in, your session token is kept in local storage too, which is what keeps you signed in between visits. Signing out removes it. Clearing your browser data removes both. If your browser blocks local storage the site still works: it forgets the setting, and it cannot keep you signed in.
If You Make an Account
An account is optional and exists so you can save pages and get updates. If you make one we store your email address, the pages you have saved, and what you have asked to be told about. We do not ask for your name, and there is no profile to fill in.
What you save is never connected to the reading counts. They live in separate tables and are never joined. Saving a proposal does not put you in the statistics for that page, and the statistics cannot be worked backwards to a person.
Update emails are not switched on yet: at present the only email this site sends is your sign-in link. When they are, we will email you only what you asked for. We do not sell or share your address, and we do not use it for anything else. Every update email carries an unsubscribe link, and you can turn updates off from your account at any time.
The delete button on your account page removes your saved pages and your update settings straight away and signs you out. It does not yet remove the address itself from the sign-in system, which is a separate step we do by hand: write to contact@readthemandate.org and we will delete it. We would rather say that plainly than let a button imply more than it does.
Accounts and saved pages are held by a hosted database and sign-in provider, which processes them on our instructions and under its own terms. The reading counts described above live in the same place, in tables that are never joined to accounts.
Server Logs
The site runs on a commercial web host which, like any web host, records requests for delivery and abuse prevention. That is the host's processing under its own terms. We do not query those logs, join them to anything else, or build profiles from them.
Leaving the Site
Citations link out to the Federal Register, to publishers' copies and to court and agency records. Those sites have their own policies and we cannot speak for them.
Children
The site is written to be readable by children, and anyone may read it. An account is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly keep an email address belonging to one.