Privacy
CivicFM keeps as little about you as it can. This page covers this site and every show's site, their podcast feeds, and CivicFM's videos.
Updated
Visiting the site
There are no cookies, no ads, and no tracking scripts from anyone else. We count visits ourselves: as a page opens, it tells our server which page it is and which site sent you there (the site's name, not the page), and an episode's page says when Play is pressed and how far it played. To count each person once a day, we combine your IP address and browser with a secret that changes every day and keep only the scrambled result, which we delete two days later, with that day's secret. Your IP address itself is never stored: our server's logs record each page asked for, search words included, but not who asked.
If you switch the site to its light theme, your browser remembers that choice. It's never sent to us.
Listening
Episodes, in podcast apps and on this site, download through OP3, an open service that counts podcast downloads under its own privacy policy. The app you listen in, such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify, has its own.
If you follow a search by email, or ask us to tell you when your town gets a show, we keep your address and what you asked for, and use them only to send those emails. They go out through our email provider, Resend. We never sell or share your address, and never send anything else. A request you don't confirm is deleted after a week. Every email links to your own page, where you can stop any of it, or unsubscribe, which deletes your address and everything you asked for.
Asking for a show in your town without an email keeps only the place and the time, not who asked.
People in the meetings
The shows report on public meetings from their public recordings. Members of the public are never named, and their names and addresses are cut from the clips. To have a clip taken down, use "Remove this clip" on its page, or write to us.
AI assistants and the API
The API, and the MCP server that AI assistants read it through, answer anyone, with no account. For an assistant, we count each call by the tool it used and the assistant it came from.
YouTube
CivicFM posts its own videos to its own YouTube channel through YouTube's API Services. It never asks for access to your Google account, and receives nothing about you from it. Watching on YouTube is covered by Google's privacy policy.
Where it's kept
The site and its database run on Fly.io, in the United States, and its files are stored with Tigris. The AI services that make the shows only ever see public recordings and documents, never anything about you.
Contact
Questions, or a request to see or delete anything about you: hello@civic.fm. If this page changes, its date will too.