Center Field Politics is designed to collect as little personal information as possible. There are no user accounts, and we do not sell or rent any data.
What we store
The Site keeps your filter and location choices — including an optional “home” state — in your browser’s local storage so the experience persists between visits. This information stays on your device and is not sent to us as a profile. Clearing your browser storage removes it.
Requests you send us
When you request a data refresh for a region or submit a correction, we process the details you provide (such as the official or field in question and any contact information you choose to include) solely to act on that request. Please do not include sensitive personal information you do not want us to receive.
Server logs and abuse prevention
Like most websites, our servers and hosting/content-delivery providers may record standard technical information (such as IP address, timestamp, and request path) for security, rate limiting, and abuse prevention. We do not use this to build advertising profiles, and we do not log the raw contents of requests beyond what is needed to operate the Site.
Cookies and analytics
The Site does not set advertising cookies and does not use third-party advertising or cross-site tracking. To understand how the Site is used and which features and regions are in demand, we collect our own privacy-respecting, aggregate usage analytics.
These analytics are anonymous. We generate two random identifiers that are stored only in your browser (a long-lived “visitor” id in local storage and a short-lived “session” id that resets after about 30 minutes of inactivity). They let us count returning versus new visitors and measure session length without ever knowing who you are. We do not store your IP address, your precise location, or any advertising or cross-site identifier alongside this analytics data, and we do not link it to the requests you send us.
The events we record are limited to product interactions, such as which pages you view, how long a session lasts, which state you select (including requests to load a state we do not yet cover), whether you filter or open candidate cards by party, the issues you set preferences on, searches (including the text of searches that return no results, so we can fill content gaps), comparisons, corrections, your device type (mobile/desktop), and the referring website’s domain. We honor your browser’s “Do Not Track” setting: when it is enabled, no analytics events are collected. Clearing your browser storage resets the identifiers.
Public data about officials
Information about officials and candidates is public political information drawn from the sources described in our methodology. It is not private personal data collected from you.