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Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-07-08

Informed Citizen is an Android app that displays U.S. Congressional bill information. This policy describes what the app does and does not do with your data. Plain version: the app does not collect personal information, has no accounts, no advertising, and no third-party tracking, and no analytics or crash reporting unless you opt in.

What the app stores on your device

Everything the app saves stays on your device, using Android Jetpack DataStore (and a local cache database). None of it is sent to us — we run no server and have no account to attach it to. The app persists:

• Your theme preference (system, light, or dark, plus the color palette).
• Your crash-reporting choice (off unless you turn it on — see below).
• Your saved representatives — the state and district you pick, or that you confirm after a ZIP-code lookup — so the app can show your senators and representative without asking again.
• A local cache of the bill, session-calendar, and member data the app has downloaded, so it works quickly and offline.
• If you turn on Bring Your Own Key (Settings → Data sources), your Congress.gov API key. It is encrypted at rest with a key held in the Android Keystore that app code can never read and that never leaves your device; the key is used only to authenticate your requests to Congress.gov (see below).

This on-device data may be included in the standard Android Auto Backup that your device manages with your Google account. The Congress.gov API key is a special case: because its encryption key lives only in your device's Keystore and is never backed up, a backed-up copy of the key cannot be decrypted on any other device.

What the app sends over the network

• Bill data feed. By default the app downloads public JSON files from nukeforum.github.io/bill-summarizer/data/, hosted on GitHub Pages. This is a plain HTTPS request for public files; no personal information is sent. GitHub may log standard request metadata (IP address, user agent) per their own privacy statement.
• Direct Congress.gov fetching (only if you opt in). If you add your own Congress.gov API key under Settings → Data sources, the app fetches bill and member data directly from the official Congress.gov API (api.congress.gov, operated by the Library of Congress) over HTTPS, authenticated with your key. Your key is sent only to Congress.gov to authorize your own requests — never to us or any third party. This path is off unless you enter a key; with no key, the app uses only the public data feed above.
• Congress.gov links. When you open a bill on Congress.gov from inside the app, the link is handed off to your device's browser (via Chrome Custom Tabs). From that point on, the request is made by your browser, not the app.

The "Share to LLM" feature

The app can build a prompt containing the bill's public metadata and text excerpt, and send it to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any app you choose via Android's share menu. This action only happens when you tap a share button. The content of the prompt comes from public Congressional records plus the prompt template; it does not include any information about you. Once the prompt is handed to another app or website, that app or website handles the data under its own privacy policy, not this one.

Optional crash reporting

The app includes Firebase Crashlytics, off by default. You can turn it on in Settings → Crash reporting. When enabled, if the app crashes or hits a non-fatal error (e.g., a network failure fetching the bill list), an anonymous report is sent to Google Firebase containing the stack trace, device model, OS version, app version, locale, and a Crashlytics-generated installation identifier. Reports include no information about you, no account identifier (the app has no accounts), and no content from the bills you've viewed. You can turn the toggle back off at any time, which also requests deletion of any unsent reports. Crashlytics is governed by Google's Firebase data processing terms.

What the app does not do

• No user accounts, sign-in, or authentication.
• No advertising or ad-network integration.
• No collection of location, contacts, photos, microphone, camera, or any other sensitive permission. The app's only declared permission is INTERNET.
• No selling or sharing of personal information; we do not have any to sell or share.

Children's privacy

The app is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect any information from anyone, including children.

Source code

Informed Citizen is open source. You can verify the claims above by reading the source at github.com/nukeforum/bill-summarizer.

Changes to this policy

If the app's behavior changes in a way that affects this policy, the updated version will be published at this URL with a new "Last updated" date.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be filed as an issue at github.com/nukeforum/bill-summarizer/issues.