askCivic

Privacy Policy

DRAFT for leadership review. Statements marked [CONFIRM] are not yet verified.

Effective date: [CONFIRM]

askCivic is an on-demand procurement help desk for public agencies: AI procurement support plus certified procurement specialists. askCivic is operated by Civic Initiatives [CONFIRM: the legal entity name and its relationship to Public Knowledge] ("we", "us"). This policy explains what information askCivic collects, how we use it, and who we share it with.

Information we collect

Account information. Sign-in is provided by Clerk. When you create an account we hold your name, email address, and organization membership, along with sign-in activity such as when you last signed in and were last active. You may sign in with a social account where offered [CONFIRM: which sign-in providers are enabled].

What you ask and submit. We store your questions and askCivic's answers in full, as your conversation history. When you upload a file in a conversation, we keep the text extracted from it and its name, type and size, not the original file. Files attached to a support ticket are stored as files.

Email to askCivic. Messages sent to the askCivic mailbox become support tickets. We keep the sender, subject, plain-text body and message identifiers, and we send acknowledgements and notices from the same mailbox.

Microsoft Teams and Google Chat. If your organization uses askCivic in Microsoft Teams or Google Chat, we receive the messages you send to askCivic there, with the identifiers those services provide. We use your email address only to match you to your organization.

Scheduling. "Book a Demo" and consultation scheduling use OnceHub. We prefill your name, email address and organization, and we keep the booking's time and subject.

Organization knowledge bases. An organization may connect Google Drive folders as its knowledge base. We store each document's details (such as title, type and size) and the text of its pages, so askCivic can answer from them.

Usage records. For each answer we record the AI model used, the tokens it consumed and its cost, together with your user and organization identifiers. We also record which actions you take and how many messages you send.

Technical information. Our application logs record user and organization identifiers, not names or email addresses. Our hosting provider records standard request information such as IP addresses [CONFIRM].

How we use information

We use this information to:

• provide askCivic, including answering your questions and routing requests to procurement specialists;
• operate support tickets and scheduling;
• keep the service secure, debug it, and meet legal obligations;
• understand usage and cost; and
• improve the service [CONFIRM: whether any customer content is used to train or improve AI models; askCivic's source contains no model-training pipeline].

We do not sell personal information.

AI providers

To generate answers, askCivic sends your conversation, details of files you attach, and the relevant knowledge-base passages to OpenRouter, which routes them to the AI model providers we use (currently models from Anthropic and OpenAI). Google Vertex AI reads the text of scanned documents in organization knowledge bases. [CONFIRM: these providers' data-retention and no-training commitments for askCivic's traffic.]

Service providers

We share information only with the service providers that run askCivic for us:

• Google Cloud: hosting, database and file storage, in the United States;
• Clerk: accounts and sign-in;
• OpenRouter and the AI model providers it routes to;
• Google Workspace: the askCivic mailbox and Google Drive knowledge bases;
• OnceHub: scheduling; and
• Microsoft Teams and Google Chat, when your organization uses them.

We may also disclose information when the law requires it.

Public records

askCivic serves public agencies. Your inputs and askCivic's outputs may be public records under the Freedom of Information Act or similar state laws. Requests for those records that we receive are routed to you for disposition.

Cookies and similar technologies

askCivic uses the cookies Clerk needs to keep you signed in. During sign-up it keeps one item in your browser's session storage, which remembers that you asked to book a demo. askCivic uses no analytics or advertising cookies. If that changes, we will update this policy before it does [CONFIRM: whether a Google advertising tag is planned; if so, this section must describe it and how to opt out].

Retention

We keep conversation history and related records for legitimate business and legal reasons, such as providing the service, debugging and compliance [CONFIRM: a retention period]. Demonstration tickets are deleted automatically after four hours. To ask us to delete your account information, contact us at the address below.

Security

askCivic is served only over HTTPS, and access to customer data is limited to the people who operate the service [CONFIRM].

Your choices

You may ask to access, correct or delete your personal information by contacting us [CONFIRM: any state privacy rights we commit to honor].

Children

askCivic is for public-agency staff and is not directed to children [CONFIRM].

Changes to this policy

We will post any change here and update the effective date. For material changes we will notify you, for example by email or in the app.

Contact

Questions about this policy: support@civicinitiatives.com. Postal address: [CONFIRM].