Privacy

Public records and your account

OpenPublica is a project run by Isaac Torres to help people explore public local-government records. You can browse without an account. Public videos, documents, transcripts and summaries are separate from your private account information.

Clerk manages registration, sign-in and verification, including your email address and profile information you provide or authorize a sign-in provider to share. Our account database stores identifiers, saved cities, account status and operational timestamps so your choices work across devices. Your saved-city list is not published.

If you choose Google sign-in, Clerk processes the Google profile information you authorize for sign-in and account management. OpenPublica uses the resulting identity to verify your account. We do not copy email addresses, names or profile photos into the saved-city database.

Search and Inquiry Desk

Semantic searches send search text through OpenRouter to OpenAI. Inquiry Desk sends your question, recent conversation and relevant public-record and city context to model providers through OpenRouter. Results may be cached, and portions of Inquiry Desk requests are recorded in operational logs.

Cookies and browser storage

Clerk uses cookies to manage sign-in. Your browser also remembers display preferences and recent Inquiry Desk conversations. These conversations are not separated by account and remain after logout or account deletion. Use the conversation’s Clear control or your browser’s site-data controls to remove them.

Usage information and service providers

We use web analytics to understand public-page usage. Our page-view integration excludes Account, My cities, sign-in and signup pages, and removes query strings and fragments from reported page URLs. Public API logs include IP addresses, browser information and request details for operation and usage measurement. Aggregate statistics may remain longer than individual logs.

Hosting, database and analytics providers process data to operate and measure the service. The sign-in and AI providers described above process data for those features. Loading externally hosted media also sends requests to its providers.

Removing data

You can remove saved cities or request deletion from Account. An accepted deletion removes your saved cities, blocks account access and starts deletion of your Clerk identity. If provider cleanup fails, we keep the identifiers needed to retry it. After completion, we retain a limited pseudonymous deletion record without saved cities or original Clerk identifiers, with no scheduled expiry, to prevent accidental reactivation.

Account deletion does not erase public government records, browser-local conversations or existing operational logs. Database backups may retain earlier account data for up to one year under the current backup policy. Operational logs and provider records can remain after deletion; retention differs by service.

Contact

For privacy questions or requests, email torresisaac26@gmail.com.