Privacy

Youth Town Hall is designed to collect as little voter information as the participation rules require. The campaign never receives submitter contact information.

Information used for verification

To participate, a submitter provides an email address, an attestation of being between 18 and 35, a city, and a ZIP code — plus, if they choose to be named on the page, a first name and last initial. A submitter may instead choose to appear as Anonymous, in which case no name is collected at all. Youth Town Hall never asks for a street address. The district check compares the city and ZIP to public Census district data on our own servers; the ZIP is used for that check and is not retained. In the rare case a town hall enables phone verification, the phone number is passed to the verification provider for a one-time code and is not stored by Youth Town Hall.

The district check confirms that the city and ZIP provided are consistent with the district. It does not verify identity, residency, or voter registration.

Information that remains

Youth Town Hall retains the verified email for notifications and self-service access, the chosen display name (or the anonymous marker, when a submitter chose not to be named), coarse locality, district, attestation records, and submitted question text. Before publication, question text is confidential political-opinion data available only to the hall's authorized curators and platform operators. Once a question is deliberately published, the question, display name, coarse locality, video, and transcript become public.

What the campaign can see

Campaign curators see question text, the chosen display name, and coarse locality. They do not see email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, or other contact information. Youth Town Hall does not sell voter information or provide campaigns with a contact list.

Service providers

Youth Town Hall uses service providers to deliver email and host video, and — only where a town hall enables phone verification — to send verification codes. Only the information needed for the specific service is sent. The district check uses no outside service at all: it runs on our own servers against public Census data. The public hall has no advertising, social-media pixels, or third-party analytics cookies. Youth Town Hall counts page views and approximate visitor numbers on its own servers. The record it keeps for that purpose holds only the first part of your network address, the page, whether the page was served, and the time, and it is deleted after 7 days. The daily totals made from it contain nothing about you. No analytics script runs in your browser, no profile of you is built, and none of this is shared with anyone. Playing a hosted video shares ordinary connection and playback information with the video provider.

Cookies

Youth Town Hall sets no cookie when you read a town hall page. It sets a cookie only when you do something that cannot work without one, and every cookie it sets is its own. None is used for advertising, analytics, or tracking, and none is shared with anyone.

  • yth_gate is set when you enter a hall's password during its password-protected preview, so you are not asked again. It expires after 24 hours.
  • yth_verify is set when you begin verification to ask a question, so the steps can continue. It expires after 24 hours.
  • yth_submitter is set when verification completes, so you can ask a question and manage your questions. It expires after 30 days.
  • yth_session and yth_registry_session are set only for campaign staff and Youth Town Hall operators when they sign in. They expire after 12 hours at most.

You can delete any of these in your browser at any time. Doing so signs you out or ends the verification, and nothing else changes.

Retention and deletion

Street addresses are never collected. ZIP codes are used for the district check and not retained; phone numbers, where a town hall enables phone verification, are never stored. Short-lived verification and rate-limit artifacts expire within 24 hours. Raw analytics events are retained for 7 days. When you enter a hall password, verify, ask a question, use a removal link, or sign in, our web server keeps a record of that request, including your network address, for 30 days, so that we can investigate a security problem. Reading a published town hall page creates no such record. These records are encrypted, kept apart from submitter information, and never joined to it. Questions that were never selected for an answer are deleted the day after election day; verification information and remaining unpublished questions are deleted 60 days after the hall enters its evergreen state, or sooner through self-service deletion. Published questions and answers remain as the evergreen public record; a submitter can make theirs anonymous at any time, and content can be removed under the published policy. Encrypted backups roll for 30 days, so purged information ages out of backups within that period.

Your choices

While the verified email is retained, a submitter may re-verify by email to make any of their questions anonymous — instantly and permanently, no reason required — to request full removal of a question whose wording could identify them, or to delete their data. Deleting your data removes your verification information immediately; your question text remains on the page, attributed to Anonymous, unless you also have it removed. Published-question notifications include a permanent link that continues to work after the email relationship is purged and offers the same choices. If that link is unavailable, the operator-owned report path remains.

Complaints about someone else's published content go to Youth Town Hall, not the campaign. The campaign is informed of an outcome but has no veto over removal.