Privacy Policy

The short version

We do not collect any information from you, other than the anonymized story you choose to publish if you opt in to share. We don’t run analytics, ad tracking, or cross-site identifiers. We don’t sell data. We don’t need an email or password to use the tool.

Who runs this site

This site is a free civic-action tool operated by SilverGrid Technologies LLC (“we”, “us”). The source code is publicly available on GitHub. You can email us at info@silvergridtech.com for anything privacy-related.

What stays on your device

The form fields you fill in (name, occupation, immigration status, nationality, address, city) live only in your browser while you use the tool. We do not save them on our servers. If you close the tab without finishing, they’re gone.

What we publish (only if you choose to)

On the final step we ask if you want to share your story publicly. If you say yes:

• An AI editor removes names, school names, employer names, exact dates, and city-level location detail
• You see and approve the anonymized version
• We store the anonymized text, the state you live in, your immigration status category (e.g. “F-1”, “US citizen”), and the publish timestamp

Nothing else from your form ever gets stored on our side. If you don’t share, nothing is stored on our side.

Third parties that briefly see your data while you use the tool

To actually look up your representatives and draft your email, your browser talks directly to a few APIs:

• Google Places Autocomplete — gets the address you type so it can suggest matches. Google’s privacy policy.
• US Census Geocoder — receives the address you confirm in order to return your congressional district. It’s a US Government service.
• Google Vertex AI (Gemini) — receives the chat messages you send and the user-context summary so it can ask interview questions and draft your email. Vertex AI data governance. Per Google’s terms, prompts to generative-AI models on Vertex AI are not used to train Google’s models.
• Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise — runs in the background to confirm you’re a human (not a bot).
• Firebase Anonymous Authentication — gives your browser a random anonymous ID so we can rate-limit abuse. The ID is not tied to your name or email.
• Firebase Analytics (Google Analytics 4) — we record aggregate page-view counts and basic device/locale info so we can see how many people are using the tool and which pages help most. We do not send any of your form content, address, chat messages, or story text to analytics. Firebase Analytics sets standard Google Analytics cookies (_ga, _ga_*); they expire in 13 months and are first-party (uscis-pause.org).

Your draft email, when you click “Open in Gmail” or “Open Mail”, is handed to your mail app via a standard URL. We never send it for you. You send it yourself.

Cookies and tracking

We do not use advertising cookies and we do not participate in any cross-site tracking network. The cookies the site does use are:

• Firebase Anonymous Auth — a random anonymous ID stored in your browser’s local storage so we can rate-limit abuse across requests.
• Firebase Analytics — standard Google Analytics 4 cookies (_ga, _ga_*) for aggregate, anonymized usage measurement. No personal info or form content is sent to analytics.

You can clear both at any time from your browser’s site-data tools. If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal or you use an extension that blocks Google Analytics, the site works normally without analytics.

Story moderation and removal

We use AI to screen submitted stories for spam, abuse, and accidental personal-information leaks before they go live. You can report a published story you find objectionable, and we may re-moderate or remove it. If you want a story you submitted removed, email us at info@silvergridtech.com with as much detail as you remember (state, status, date) so we can find and delete it.

Children

This tool isn’t directed at children under 13. Please don’t use it if you’re under 13.

Security

Submissions move over HTTPS. Published stories live in Google Firestore with rules that deny any client write — only our server can publish. The tool runs on Firebase App Hosting (Google Cloud Run); no one outside the deployment can reach the source data.

Changes

If this policy materially changes, we’ll update the “Last updated” date at the top. There’s no account system, so we can’t notify you directly — check this page if you want to stay current.

Contact

Questions or concerns: info@silvergridtech.com.

A product of SilverGrid Technologies LLC. See also our Terms of Service.