Effective Date: August 31, 2026 ยท Last Updated: September 13, 2026
Smarter Policing is committed to collecting only the information needed to operate this website, review projects, and support constructive public participation. We do not sell personal information.
Information We May Collect On The Live Platform
Depending on which features you use, we collect account names, email addresses, sign-in credentials, optional profile photos and employee-display choices; contact messages; and support or action reports. Project requests include the requester's name and email, and may include a phone number, organization, agency or community details, proposed goals, written responses, and selected photo names and file details. Photo files selected on the request form are not uploaded with that request. We also collect limited browser, device, session, and service-log information needed to operate and secure the website.
Officer-poll requests collect the requester's name, work email, job title or role, agency and location, officer-count range, timing, and written responses about agency concerns. Project and poll requests go to authorized site administrators for review; they are not automatically published. Requesting a poll is not answering one: this form does not collect officers' poll answers. For any separately arranged poll, check its own privacy information before answering; do not assume answers are anonymous or shared only as summaries.
Project Support And Public Display
Public support and action reports do not require an account or email verification. We trim whitespace and lowercase the submitted email to prevent duplicate reports within the same project, issue or site, and action. Normalized emails are stored privately for duplicate prevention and authorized administrator review; raw emails are not publicly displayed. Each email can support a project once. Counts reflect submitted participation records, not verified unique people.
A supporter may select one or more issues or sites within a project. The public project roll may display a self-reported name, city or ZIP information if chosen, and the issues or sites supported. Government employees who choose the employee option will be displayed publicly as A Current Employee. This is a public-display choice, not a promise of complete anonymity; submitted information may still identify the person to Smarter Policing or the platform provider. Never use government equipment to participate.
How We Use Information
We may use information to review project requests, respond to messages, administer approved project access, display an optional public support label, limit duplicate action reports, protect the platform against fraud or abuse, and comply with legal obligations. Participation email addresses are not displayed publicly and are not used for other purposes unless the submission page clearly explains those purposes.
Groups And Uploaded Content
Visible posts and comments in published project groups can be read without signing in, including discussions retained on archived projects. They show an account display name or, where enabled through the separate account employee setting, A Current Employee. Account email addresses are not shown in group feeds. Supporter-name choices do not automatically hide your group identity, posts, comments, or photos; your words and images may identify you even when a protected label is used.
Profile photos and project/group photos use public file storage and can be viewed by anyone with their link. Hiding a post does not by itself make its photo link private. Photos attached to private site reports use separate restricted storage for the submitting account and authorized project moderators/administrators. Upload only material appropriate for its audience.
Information You Should Not Submit
Do not submit confidential law-enforcement information, investigation details, personnel records, protected victim or witness information, passwords, medical information, Social Security numbers, financial account details, or images and documents that are not safe to share.
When Information May Be Shared
We use Cloudflare for website delivery, domain and security services, Supabase for authentication, database, API, and file-storage services, and Resend for account and notification emails. GitHub and Google Drive support the backup process described below. Those providers process information as needed to operate the platform. We may also disclose information when required by law or when reasonably necessary to protect people, rights, safety, or the integrity of the platform. We do not sell personal information or give it to advertisers for their own marketing.
Security And Retention
We will use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards appropriate to the live platform. No online system can guarantee absolute security. We will keep personal information only as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described here, to resolve disputes, prevent fraud, meet legal obligations, or maintain accurate project records.
Backups
We keep encrypted backups of website data for recovery purposes. Deleted or corrected information may remain in older backups until those backups are removed under our retention process.
Manually triggered GitHub Actions workflows process database records and uploaded files, encrypt the backup packages before uploading them to private Google Drive storage, and verify the uploaded copies. After a new backup is verified, the workflow keeps the latest 10 successful backup sets in the backup folder and moves older successful sets to Drive Trash, where they may remain until Trash is cleared. This is not a fixed number of days.
Your Choices
Use the public-display choices provided on the relevant form. Current government employees can withhold their name on support and action reports by choosing A Current Employee; these reports do not require an account. Changing a support record's public visibility does not remove its count. You may also ask questions about the personal information connected to your participation, request correction of inaccurate information, or request deletion where legally and operationally appropriate. We may need to verify your request before acting on it.
Children
This platform is not intended for children under 13. Do not submit personal information for a child through this website.
Changes To This Policy
We may update this policy as the platform develops or our practices change. The last-updated date at the top shows when it was last revised. If a change materially affects how we use personal information, we will provide an appropriate notice before applying it where required.
Contact Us
For privacy questions or requests, use the Contact Us page and select the privacy-related topic.