Poll City Social — Privacy Policy

What This App Does

Poll City Social is a unified civic engagement app. Residents can find representatives, vote in community polls, message within Poll City, and connect with candidates. Authorized campaign workers can also access campaign-scoped field operations, and verified advertiser users can access their organization's advertising workspace. Those private workspaces require an authenticated account and the matching role and permissions.

Information We Collect

• Account information (if you create an account): name, email address, and password hash. You may also sign in with Google or Apple — we receive only your name and email from those providers.
• Location and address information: a postal code or address you enter is sent to Poll City to resolve your electoral area. If you grant foreground location permission, the app may use your current device location while a canvassing map is open or convert it into an address or postal code for a civic lookup. Poll City does not request background location access.
• Poll votes: which options you selected. Votes are aggregated — individual votes are never disclosed to candidates or the public.
• Questions: questions you submit to officials are stored and may be displayed publicly with your display name.
• Follow relationships: which officials and candidates you follow.
• Group memberships: which civic interest groups you join.
• Issue interests: topics you engage with, used to personalise your feed.
• Device and notification delivery data: crash diagnostics can include device type and OS version. If you enable notifications, Poll City also sends your device platform, app version, time zone, an app-generated identifier stored on your device, and the Expo push token so the service can register, deliver, refresh, or revoke notifications for that app installation.
• Messages and other content: private in-app messages, questions, profile content, images you choose to upload, and other text you submit.
• Campaign workspace data: for authorized campaign users, assigned voter/contact records shown to you and the outcomes, notes, sign requests, volunteer leads, and other field actions you record. Offline field actions can remain encrypted by the operating system in app storage until they sync or you resolve a conflict.
• Advertiser workspace data: for verified advertiser users, organization registration details, authorized-user records, campaigns, audiences, creatives, and spend information associated with that advertiser account.

How We Use Your Information

• To show you your local elected officials and community polls
• To personalise your civic feed based on your location and interests
• To notify you about new polls, responses from officials you follow, and local election updates
• To aggregate poll results for public display (never individual-level disclosure)
• To improve the platform through usage analytics
• To provide permission-scoped campaign and advertiser workflows to authorized users
• To diagnose crashes and performance problems when production crash reporting is enabled

We do not sell your data. We do not use your data for advertising. We do not share your individual voting behaviour with any candidate or campaign.

What Candidates and Officials See

Candidates and elected officials can see: aggregate poll results (e.g. “62% support”), total follower counts, and questions submitted to them publicly. They cannot see who voted for which option, who follows them by name, or your personal profile unless you make it public.

Third-Party Services

• Vercel — hosting and CDN
• Railway / PostgreSQL — database hosting in Canada
• Google Sign-In — optional authentication (name + email only)
• Apple Sign-In — optional authentication (name + email only)
• Represent API (OpenNorth) — Canadian electoral boundary data (public API, no personal data sent)
• Expo / EAS and Apple — signed app delivery, updates, and device push-notification transport
• Sentry — production crash and performance diagnostics. Poll City configures the mobile SDK not to send default personal information and removes custom breadcrumb payloads; diagnostic events can still include app/device context and technical exception details.

Data Retention

Your account data is retained as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, your personal information (name, email, follow relationships, group memberships) is deleted within 30 days. Aggregated, anonymised poll data may be retained indefinitely as it contains no personal information.

Your Rights (PIPEDA)

Under Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), you have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you
• Request correction of inaccurate information
• Withdraw consent and request deletion of your account and data
• Know how your information is being used

To exercise these rights, contact us at the address below.

Age Requirement

Poll City Social is intended for users 18 years of age and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has created an account, please contact us and we will delete it promptly.

Security

All data is transmitted over HTTPS. Passwords are hashed and never stored in plain text. Access tokens use short-lived JWT tokens. We follow OWASP security guidelines and conduct regular security reviews.

Changes to This Policy

We will notify registered users by email of any material changes to this policy. The "last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision.

Contact

Poll City Inc.
Privacy inquiries: pangaon@gmail.com