Privacy Policy

TaxLoop collects only the information necessary to deliver our civic budget-preference service. When you create an account and use the platform, we may collect the following:

• Account information: Your name, email address, and a securely hashed password.
• Address and location: Your street address and zip code, used to determine your legislative districts and associate your preferences with the correct elected officials.
• Budget preferences: The budget allocation percentages, top priorities, and optional comments you submit for each government level (city, county, state, federal).
• Message history: Records of any messages you send to legislators through TaxLoop, including message content, recipient, and timestamp.
• Usage metadata: Timestamps of account creation, preference submissions, and login activity. We do not use analytics trackers or advertising cookies.

Your data is used exclusively to power the TaxLoop civic platform:

• Aggregate preference reports: Individual preferences are combined at the zip code and district level to generate anonymous community budget-preference reports. These aggregated reports are delivered to your elected officials before budget deliberations.
• Alignment reports: We compare legislator voting records against community preferences to generate alignment scores and accountability reports for your review.
• Legislator messaging: When you choose to contact a legislator through TaxLoop, we use your preference data to pre-generate a personalized message that you can review and edit before sending.
• Service communications: We may email you about preference submission windows, new reports, and important platform updates.

TaxLoop is built on a principle of privacy-preserving civic participation. Here is how aggregation works:

• Individual budget preferences are aggregated at the zip code level. Reports delivered to legislators contain only statistical summaries (mean, median, and distribution of allocations) across all participants in a given district.
• No individual preferences, names, email addresses, or personal identifiers are ever included in reports delivered to legislators or any third party.
• Aggregated data requires a minimum number of participants per zip code before any report is generated, to further protect individual privacy.
• Your optional comments are never shared with legislators directly. They may be used in aggregate to identify common themes, but only in anonymized, paraphrased form.

TaxLoop respects your data rights in accordance with CCPA, GDPR, and similar privacy frameworks. Regardless of where you reside, we extend the following rights to all users:

• Right to access: You may request a complete summary of the personal data we hold about you at any time.
• Right to download: You may request a portable, machine-readable export of all your data, including account information, preference history, and message records.
• Right to delete: You may request deletion of your account and all associated personal data. Upon request, your data will be permanently deleted within 30 days.
• Right to opt out: You may opt out of non-essential communications (such as preference window reminders and report notifications) at any time via your account settings or by contacting us directly.
• Right to know: You may ask us at any time what personal data we have collected, how it is used, and with whom (if anyone) it has been shared.

To exercise any of these rights, email us at privacy@taxloop.org. We will respond within 14 business days.

• Active accounts: Your personal data is retained for as long as your account remains active and you continue to use the TaxLoop service.
• Account deletion: Upon receiving a deletion request, all personally identifiable data (name, email, address, individual preferences, and message history) will be permanently deleted within 30 days.
• Aggregated data: Anonymized, aggregated data that has already been included in community-level reports may be retained indefinitely, as it cannot be linked back to any individual user.
• Legal obligations: We may retain certain records beyond the 30-day deletion period if required by law or to resolve disputes.

We take the security of your data seriously and employ industry-standard measures to protect it:

• Encryption in transit: All data transmitted between your browser and our servers is encrypted using TLS (Transport Layer Security).
• Password protection: Passwords are salted and hashed using modern cryptographic algorithms. We never store plaintext passwords.
• Access controls: Access to user data is restricted to authorized TaxLoop personnel on a need-to-know basis. All access is logged and audited.
• Infrastructure: Our application is hosted on reputable cloud infrastructure providers that maintain SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance.

If you discover a security vulnerability, please report it to privacy@taxloop.org.

TaxLoop uses a limited set of third-party services to operate the platform:

• Cloud hosting: Our application and database are hosted on cloud infrastructure providers (e.g., AWS, Vercel). These providers process data on our behalf under strict data processing agreements.
• Email delivery: We use a third-party email service to send transactional and notification emails (e.g., account verification, preference reminders). Only your email address and message content are shared with this provider for delivery purposes.

If you have questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or your personal data, please contact us:

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, technology, legal requirements, or other factors. When we make material changes:

• We will notify you via email at the address associated with your TaxLoop account.
• The updated policy will be posted on this page with a revised effective date.
• Your continued use of TaxLoop after the effective date of a revised policy constitutes your acceptance of the updated terms.