What we know about you.

The short version

We are Works Better Corporation, a Delaware public benefit corporation. We trade as WorksBetter. We publish what governments spend, with a source behind every figure.

In one line. No account, no sign-in, no cookies. One form asks for an email address if you want the weekly report. A rating, a comment or a suggestion reaches us without your name or any identifier. What you say about a project is collected so the people who govern that place can see it. Everything else you type, Follow Your Dollar included, stays in your browser.

• We set no cookies, of any kind, for any purpose.
• We do not sell your data. We do not share it for advertising. We do not profile you.
• We count page views and a short list of actions, in totals only.
• We never record what you type. Not a ZIP code, not a search.
• Give us an email address and we keep it. That is the only record we hold of a person.
• Ask us to delete it and we will.

The rest of this page is the same thing at greater length.

What we measure

This section is built from our own code rather than typed by hand. The list of things we count lives in one file, our site reads it, and this page reads the same file. So the list below cannot fall behind what the site actually does. A check fails our build if it ever does.

This site counts how often its pages are read, and a short list of things a reader does on them. It counts them in totals. It does not build a record of you.

This site counts page views using first-party, cookieless analytics: aggregate counts of pages viewed, referrer, country and device class. No cookies, no fingerprinting, no identifiers, no cross-site tracking, and never any content you type.

We also measure how quickly pages load for real visitors: the timing of this page rendering in your browser, and with each timing the browser, device class, device operating system, network speed and country. No cookies, no identifiers, nothing that follows you from one page to the next, and never any content you type.

The 14 things we count besides a page view

This is the whole list. It is written once in our code, and this page is built from it. So the list you are reading cannot fall behind the list the site uses.

• When a citation is followed out to its publisher.
• When the Honesty Framework is opened and from which page.
• When a data table is opened.
• How the question player on one prototype page is used.
• Which link is followed, and from which menu or part of the page.
• How far down a page a reader gets, by section.
• How far the guided tour is followed.
• Whether a ZIP code typed on this site matched one county, crossed a county line, or was not in the file — never the code itself.
• That updates were asked for, and from where.
• Which broad region you are reading from.

The four rules that bind all of it

1. Every event has a name from a fixed list, and anything not on that list is dropped.
2. Nothing you type is ever recorded — not a ZIP code, not a search, not the words of a comment; where we count one of those, we count only that it happened.
3. Location stays coarse: a county, a region or a state — never a postal code, never coordinates, never an address. A county is named only where your postal code sits wholly inside one and enough people live there for the answer to be about a place rather than a person.
4. If your browser sends the Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal, or the older Do Not Track (DNT) signal, we honor it. Nothing about your visit is counted: no page view, no page-speed timing, no interaction. We do not ask our edge where you are, so no region and no county is ever known. The two counting scripts are not loaded at all. We sell nothing and share nothing with anybody, under any setting.

Location is worked out where your request first reaches us: a county where your postal code sits wholly inside one and enough people live there, otherwise a group of counties, more often a whole state, and outside the country nothing but that. The closer location your network reports is read there and thrown away in the same breath — it never reaches this page, it is never written down, and nothing about it is kept between one page and the next.

How coarse "coarse" is

Today that means 64 counties in one state. Where a county cannot be named, that state is counted in 6 parts. Every other state is counted whole, and everywhere outside the country is one bucket. A county is named only where more than 2,500 people live in it.

Of the 14 things above, 0 can carry a location at all. An event may carry one only if it says so in the same line of code that names it. So the list that carries a location and the list allowed to carry one are one list.

The address bar is stripped of everything after the path before any count is sent. A value you typed cannot reach us by that route either.

Nothing you send us — a rating, a comment, a form — trains or prompts an AI model. Not ours, and not a vendor's.

Your email address, if you give us one

One form on this site asks for an email address. It is the weekly report sign-up on the Colorado dashboard. Nothing else on the site asks you for anything about yourself.

If you use it, we keep two things: your address, and what you chose to follow. We keep nothing else about you. We do not keep your name. We do not keep your IP address, and our own service is built so that it never sees one.

Signing up for the weekly report means telling us your county, so we know which one to write about. Following a project or a bill means we record which one, so we can tell you when it changes. Both live in our own reader store, not on this site, and this site never reads them back.

Your address is kept in the clear, not hidden even from us, so we can find your record and remove it when you ask. A confirmation link goes out first. Nothing else is sent to you until you click that link, and we do not measure whether you open the mail or click a link in it.

We use the address to send you the report you asked for, and for nothing else. We do not sell it, rent it, or pass it to anyone for their own use. One click unsubscribes, from any message we send, and your record is deleted thirty days after you unsubscribe.

A message you send through the contact form, or a suggestion for what we cover next, stays on our own dashboard. The people who run this site read it there. It is never forwarded anywhere else.

What you say about a project, and what it is for

Rating a project is different from the two above, and it is the reason this site exists. A government that cannot hear from the people it serves governs blind.

We collect the rating you give a project, and the comment you leave with it, for one purpose. The people who govern that place can then see how residents read their spending.

They never see you, because we never had you. We do not collect your name, your address, your IP address or any identifier. There is nothing about you to pass on, and no way to link two of your ratings together.

What we would send is a total, and comments with every name, email address, phone number and address already removed. Feedback about one place is only ever shown for that place. We do not sell it. We do not send it to anyone the feedback is not about. We do not put it on a public page, as a total, as an average or as a quotation.

We may publish summaries of what residents tell us about a place. If we ever do, it will be our own writing about what we heard. It will never be your rating, never your comment, and never a count, average or distribution of anybody's.

Today we have not shown this to anyone. Nothing has left our own store.

Please do not put anything in a comment that identifies you.

What is kept on your own device

One thing, on one kind of page. When you finish or close the guided tour on a dashboard, your browser remembers that, so the tour does not open at you again.

It is a single value in your browser's own storage. It never leaves your device and we never see it. Clearing your browsing data clears it. It is not a cookie, and nothing on this site is.

Who else sees any of this

The site is served by Vercel, which also provides the page counting described above. A form you submit is passed to our own store. These are companies we pay to run the site. They may not use anything from it for their own purposes. What you say about a project is a separate question, answered in full above.

Nothing on any page of this site loads from an advertising network, a social network, or an analytics company outside the two named here. Our security policy blocks it at the browser, so a third-party script cannot be added to a page by accident.

Three other companies keep the lights on without ever seeing a reader: Cloudflare answers the question “where is worksbetter.org?” but does not carry the site's traffic; Squarespace is where the domain name is registered; and GitHub holds the site's code. None of them is used to build a picture of you.

We will hand over records only if a court or a law requires it, or where reasonably necessary to protect the service, our rights, or someone's safety. If that ever happens we will say so here, unless we are forbidden to. And if the company is ever sold, merged, financed or reorganized, information could move with it — under the same limits described here, and with any notice the law requires.

Your rights, and how to use them

Some of these rights are yours under a law where you live. Some are not, depending on where that is. We do not think it is worth your time to work out which. We will honor all of them for anyone who asks.

• Know what we hold about you.
• Get a copy of it, in a form you can take elsewhere.
• Correct it if it is wrong.
• Delete it. For an email address, that means the record is removed. A rating or a comment cannot be deleted on request, because nothing links it to you and we cannot find yours. We would rather say that plainly than offer a right nobody can use.
• Opt out of a sale, of targeted advertising, and of profiling.
• Appeal if we refuse, and we will tell you how.

The opt-out is the shortest one. We do none of those three things, so there is nothing to switch off. If your browser sends a privacy signal such as Global Privacy Control, it has nothing here to act on.

To use any of them, write to privacy@worksbetter.org or use the contact page. Tell us the address you signed up with, so we can find the right record. We answer within 45 days and will say so if we need longer.

Children

This site is for adults who pay taxes. It is not aimed at children and we do not advertise it to them. We do not knowingly collect anything from a child under 13. If you believe a child has given us an address, tell us and we will delete it.

How long we keep things

Page counts and the actions listed above

Kept as totals by our analytics provider. They are not tied to a person and cannot be traced back to one, so there is nothing in them to delete on request.

An email address you gave us

Kept until you unsubscribe, or you ask us to delete it sooner. Removed thirty days after that.

A message you send us

Kept for as long as it takes to answer you, and while we may need it as a record.

A rating or a comment you leave on a project

Kept for as long as the project is one we publish. Nothing in it is tied to a person and nothing in it can be traced back to one, so there is nothing in it to delete on request.

If something goes wrong

We use administrative, technical and organizational safeguards appropriate to the small amount of information we handle and the size of our operation, and we seek appropriate commitments from the providers that handle anything for us. No method of transmission or storage is ever completely secure, and we cannot promise absolute security.

If a record of yours is exposed, we will tell you, and we will tell the authorities that a law requires us to tell. We will say what happened, what was in it, and what to do. We would rather be early and unsure than late and certain.

If you have found a security problem on this site, please tell us through the contact page. We will not take legal action against anyone who reports a problem in good faith and gives us a fair chance to fix it.

How to reach us

Write to hello@worksbetter.org, or use the contact page. Both are read by a person.

For a privacy request specifically, write to privacy@worksbetter.org. The contact page works too, and reaches the same people. The mailbox is hosted by Google.

To write to us on paper, or to serve a notice, use the address of our registered office. It is the address on our Certificate of Incorporation, and it reaches our registered agent:

Works Better Corporation
c/o Corporation Service Company
251 Little Falls Drive
Wilmington, DE 19808

When this page changes

Any change to what we measure ships with the change to this page, in the same release. That is a rule we hold ourselves to and a check enforces it. The date at the top of this page is the date of the version you are reading.

We also keep a public corrections log. When we get something wrong, it goes there.