What 52 knows about you

In short#

• Reading the public preview requires no account and no cookie.
• An account holds your email, display name, followed topics, and saved reports. There is no password.
• 52 emails sign-in codes you request, updates you enable, and team briefings you choose to share. There is no third-party sign-in.
• Website payments use Stripe; iPhone Plus purchases use Apple. 52 stores subscription identifiers, status and dates, never card details. Apple and Stripe manage their own payment records.
• Team owners see the email addresses they added and whether each person has signed in.
• Self-hosted Umami counts coarse page visits without analytics cookies or persistent visitor IDs.
• Ask and letter drafts use 52’s own AI services. Public-record summaries and organization reports may use external model providers.
• AI assistants you connect read public 52 records for you; they cannot see your topics, reports, or email.
• Deleting your account removes synced data. Local iPhone erase and Apple subscription cancellation are separate controls.

What an account stores#

Reading 52 needs no account. If you create one, these are the only fields we hold about you:

• Your email address and display name. Your email is how you sign in and is stored in lowercase. A display name is stored if you provide one; otherwise we use a generic name.
• Hashes of the sign-in codes we email you. Each code works once and expires after 15 minutes; the code itself is never stored in a form we can read. There is no password.
• Hashes of your active sign-in sessions, each expiring 30 days after it is issued.
• The topics you follow — the topic text, an optional jurisdiction, and when you last looked at it. Up to 20.
• The reports you save — a title and a snapshot of the legislative records that matched your topic at the moment you saved it. Up to 100.
• Your alerts, updates and projects — the bills, legislators and topics you ask 52 to watch, the answer 52 last gave you and each change it recorded, your briefing schedules and the briefing issues prepared for you, and the folios you create with any notes and drafts you write in them. Changes and new issues appear as notifications inside 52. Updates about followed records may also be emailed when you enable that delivery or a morning summary.
• Your email delivery choices and recent update-email records. These record whether you enabled a morning summary or email for a follow, and which updates were already sent to avoid duplicates. Delivery records are kept for up to 60 days. See Email you choose.
• Your plan — whether you are on the free trial or a paid plan, its status, your trial, renewal and grace-period dates, the seat count on a Team plan, and the Stripe customer and subscription identifiers that link your account to Stripe. No card details. See Payments.
• If you are on a team: the team name, the email addresses the owner added, each person’s role, when they were added and when they first signed in. See Teams.
• The date your account was created.
• If you connect an AI assistant: the name the assistant registered, hashes of its access and refresh tokens, when you connected it and when it last used 52, and the dates of your connector trial or subscription. See AI assistant connections.

That is the account record. There is no profile, no activity log of what you read, and no history of your searches attached to your account. Research submitted to AI features is handled separately below.

Email you choose#

52 sends the one-time code you request to sign in. Email updates are off until you choose them: you can enable a morning summary in your email settings, or choose “Email me” for individual records on Following. Turn off the summary in Account and choose “On my dashboard” or “Quiet” on a follow to stop its update emails.

If you choose “Email it to my team”, 52 sends a briefing of public-record updates from your dashboard to teammates who have signed in. Adding an address to a team does not send an invitation.

Cloudflare delivers these service emails and receives the recipient address and message. 52 stores your delivery choices and recent update-email delivery records to avoid duplicates; those records are kept for up to 60 days. No marketing emails are sent. Stripe handles payment receipts and invoices separately.

What 52 never collects or does#

• No marketing or invitation emails. 52 sends sign-in codes you request, update emails you enable, and team briefings you choose to share. Stripe may email payment receipts and invoices.
• No third-party sign-in. There is no Google, Apple, Microsoft, or social login, so no identity provider learns that you use 52.
• No card details. Payments are processed by Stripe or Apple. 52 never sees or stores your card number or bank details.
• No phone number, mailing address, or location tracking.
• No sale or sharing of personal information, no advertising networks, no data brokers, and no use of your account data to train machine-learning models.

52 on your iPhone#

Your place, district selections and private ballot picks stay on this iPhone and its local widget. The ZIP you enter is sent to 52 to find public records. If you choose location lookup, Apple’s geocoding service converts your location to a ZIP. 52 does not receive or save your precise coordinates.

Follows stay on the phone until you sign in. Signing in syncs the records and keywords you follow with your account. Your session is stored in the iPhone Keychain. Ballot picks and unshared notes composed in the app are not uploaded. Choosing Review and share opens Apple’s sharing options; you choose the destination and send the note yourself.

If you enable phone alerts, 52 stores Apple’s device token linked to your account, the notification environment, your time zone, quiet hours and alert preferences. Apple Push Notification service delivers alerts. Recent delivery records prevent duplicates. Signing out removes this phone’s account association; you can also turn off notifications in iPhone Settings.

Deleting local data on the iPhone does not delete your 52 account. Delete your 52 account in Account and privacy to remove its synced data and phone registrations. Deleting the account does not cancel an Apple subscription; manage or cancel it in Apple’s subscription settings.

Payments#

Website payments are processed by Stripe. When you choose a website plan, you enter your payment details on Stripe’s checkout page, not on 52, and you manage your card, invoices and cancellation on Stripe’s billing page, opened from Manage billing on your account page.

52 stores no card details — only the Stripe customer and subscription identifiers, your plan, its status, its trial, renewal and grace-period dates, and seat counts. Stripe processes payment data under its own privacy policy. Stripe may email receipts and invoices on 52’s behalf. Service emails from 52 are described above.

Apple processes purchases of 52 Plus in the iPhone app under its own privacy policy. 52 verifies Apple’s signed purchase records and stores the product, transaction identifiers, purchase and expiry dates, and refund or revocation status. A purchase linked to a 52 account also stores that account association. We do not store Apple payment details or raw signed receipts.

Restore purchases works without a separate 52 account. Apple subscriptions are managed and cancelled through Apple subscription settings. Deleting a 52 account removes its purchase association and synced entitlement record, while Apple retains and manages its own payment records and subscription.

Teams#

A Team plan owner adds people by email address. Team owners see the email addresses they added and whether each person has signed in, along with each person’s display name once they have. 52 sends no invitation; a person joins by signing in with the address the owner added.

Folios shared with a team can be read and edited by everyone on it, and entries on them show who wrote them. Other research stays private unless you choose to share it. If you choose to email a week’s briefing to your team, public-record updates from your dashboard go only to teammates who have signed in. This does not give them access to your private notes, drafts or account. When an owner removes a member, or a member leaves, their access to the team’s folios ends at once and their private work stays theirs.

How your research is used#

Your followed topics and saved reports exist to render your own briefing when you return. They are scoped to your account: every read and write is filtered by your session, and the service has no endpoint that accepts another person’s account identifier. Everyone on your team can read and edit folios you share with it. A team briefing you explicitly email shares the public-record updates in that message, not access to your account.

Staff access to the database is limited to operating the service — fixing a fault, restoring data, or responding to a legal obligation. We do not read saved reports for product analytics.

Questions and websites submitted to AI features#

Ask and letter drafting process your question or draft with relevant public records on 52’s AI servers. These interactive requests use our own inference services, without an external AI provider fallback. Avoid entering private information that is unnecessary for your question.

Public-record summaries and organization reports may use external AI providers. An organization report sends the website address you provide and relevant public pages, and may read public pages on that site. A scheduled briefing summary receives only the public records listed in the briefing, never your notes, drafts or email address. Its summary is kept only if every sentence cites one of those records and it adds no figures of its own.

External model providers may process and retain the public-record and website request data they receive under their own terms. Generated answers can be wrong; check the linked source records before relying on them.

AI assistant connections#

You can connect 52 to an AI assistant, such as Claude, so the assistant can search and read 52 for you. You start the connection from the assistant, sign in to 52 with the usual emailed code, and approve it on a 52 page that names the assistant and lists what it can read.

• What the assistant can read: the same public records 52 publishes — bills and their text, sponsors, votes, committees, enacted-law citations, legislators, campaign-finance and lobbying records, ballot measures, local government meetings, executive appointees, topic overviews, and organization pages. It can also ask 52 to build an organization page from a public website.
• What it cannot do: see your email address, followed topics, or saved reports; change or delete anything in your account; send email; or make payments.
• What 52 keeps: the assistant’s registered name and its callback address, hashes of its access tokens (valid for an hour) and refresh tokens (valid for 60 days unless revoked), when the connection was made and last used, and your connector trial dates. The first approval starts a 14-day trial once per account; reconnecting does not restart it.
• What the assistant’s provider sees: the questions you ask your assistant and the 52 results it retrieves are handled by that provider under its own terms. 52 does not receive your conversation, only the requests the assistant makes to 52.

You can disconnect an assistant at any time from your account page or from the assistant’s own settings; either ends its tokens immediately. Deleting your account removes every connection with it. Connecting an assistant sends no email and does not turn on email updates.

Analytics and cookies#

We use Umami on our own servers to count visits to coarse page categories. We collect browser, device and approximate location statistics, but no names, emails, search terms, full URLs, form values, recordings or persistent visitor IDs. The counter uses no cookies or local storage and respects Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. IP addresses are used transiently for daily visitor counts and location, and are not stored by Umami.

When you sign in, the site sets this cookie in your browser:

• 52_session — the cookie that keeps you signed in. It is HTTP-only, secure, SameSite Lax, and expires after 30 days. Signing out deletes it.

There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, which is why 52 shows no cookie banner. Our hosting provider records standard request logs, including IP addresses, for a limited period as part of serving and protecting the site.

Public records published on 52#

Most of what 52 shows is not about its readers. Bills, sponsors, votes, committee membership, lobbying positions, and campaign contributions come from federal, state, and District of Columbia disclosure systems that publish them as public records. If your name appears in a contribution record or a sponsor list, it is there because a government body published it, and 52 reproduces it with a link to that source.

52 does not add inferences about the people in those records. A contribution does not establish a policy motive, and the site says so where the records are shown.

If a record on 52 misstates what the official source says — a mismatched name, a wrong amount, a record attached to the wrong person — write to corrections@52.report with the link, and we will correct or remove it. Where the official source itself is wrong, the correction has to be made with that agency; we will point you to the right one.

Keeping and deleting your data#

Account data is kept until you delete it. Sessions expire on their own after 30 days. You can remove a followed topic or a saved report at any time, and deleting either erases it from the database.

Deleting your account from your account page asks you to type your email to confirm and immediately removes the account row and, with it, every session, followed topic, saved report, standing question, briefing, folio, note, draft and notification. It cannot be undone, and we cannot restore an account after deletion. A minimal record of the deleted account’s random identifier and deletion date remains to prevent an older backup from restoring it; it contains no email or research content.

Copies may survive briefly in encrypted operational backups, which roll over within 30 days, and in request logs held for a short retention window by our hosting provider. Apple and Stripe keep their own records of payments you made, as the law requires, under its privacy policy.

Security#

Traffic is served over TLS. There are no passwords to leak: you sign in with a six-digit code that is stored only as a hash, works once, expires after 15 minutes, and locks after five wrong guesses. Sessions are opaque random tokens stored only as hashes, so a leaked database row cannot be replayed as a sign-in. Code requests are rate limited per email and per address, and the response is identical whether or not an account exists.

No system is perfect. If you find a vulnerability, report it to security@52.report before disclosing it publicly, and we will work the fix.

Your choices and your rights#

You can see everything your account holds from inside the product and delete the account outright. For anything you cannot do in the interface — a copy of your data in machine-readable form, a correction, or a question about how a record reached the site — write to privacy@52.report.

California residents. Under the CCPA you have the right to know what personal information is collected and how it is used, to have it corrected or deleted, and not to be treated differently for exercising those rights. 52 does not sell or share personal information, and it runs no financial incentive program. Note that the CCPA excludes lawfully available government records, which is what the legislative and campaign finance data on 52 is; the rights above apply to your account.

We answer requests within 45 days and may ask you to confirm control of the account email first.

Children#

52 is a research tool for adults and is not directed to children. Do not create an account if you are under 13. If we learn that an account belongs to a child under 13, we delete it.

Changes to this policy#

When this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. If a change materially expands what we collect or what we do with it, we will say so on the site before it takes effect. This version is dated October 28, 2026.

Who to contact#

For privacy questions, corrections, data requests, or security reports, write to privacy@52.report. See also the terms of use.