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Comment by epoch_100 | Hacker News Reader

A sysadmin of Politiwatch here (non-profit that made the site). We're not harvesting your data. In fact, we nuke it right after we serve the request. We're super privacy conscious.

Regardless, we ask for the address as well as zip because in many areas, a ZIP is not sufficient to gather detailed data, as an official may represent one part of a ZIP code and not another.

Politiwatch, the non-profit that made WhoAreMyRepresentatives.org (https://politiwatch.org), is purely public benefit. We're trying to promote government transparency and political fluency. Nothing nefarious going on here. You'll have to take my word for it, though. If you're still feeling paranoid (and rightly so), enter your neighbor's address.

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> We're not harvesting your data. In fact, we nuke it right after we serve the request. We're super privacy conscious.

That's not the whole truth. While you may be deleting the submitted form values, your site uses a third-party tracking service which collects a range of visitor data[0] which is stored by that third party. Third-party tracking is useful and mainstream, but you should have a privacy policy and disclose the tracking in that policy.

On a more positive note, your site has a solid A+ for HTTPS configuration on SSL Labs[1], so that's great to see. The only change I would make is to switch server_tokens to 'off'[2] so you aren't leaking the Nginx version number (but this is admittedly just a minor bit of security through obscurity).

[0]https://clicky.com/terms

[1]https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=whoaremyrepre...

[2]http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#serv...

You clearly did your research.

We'll put up a cookie notification soon.

Also, we configured our analytics to not store the HTTP parameters 'address' and 'zip' (where the address is encoded), so I'm not lying when I say the addresses are "nuked."

That said, we'll implement everything you have mentioned as soon as we feel its safe to be pushing out changes... the traffic right now is high and we don't want to mess anything up.

> If you're still feeling paranoid (and rightly so), enter your neighbor's address.

Thanks for that idea. A simple yet effective solution that I hadn't thought of before.

Keep in mind you may be on the border of a district. Your neighbor and you may not be in the same district. Likely won't make a difference, but it may. Maybe check multiple neighbors.

nothing like a nice honest bit of gerrymandering

Eventually, they will be so efficient at gerrymandering that they will be able to redraw districts live as people register to vote.

Would it be possible to provide this data, based on the address, via a JSON API?

I had goals to eventually to build a site that was similar but also shows political leanings and term length and when the next election for that position was going to occur. The desire is to build the core of a grassroots "run for elected seats" web service.

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