Privacy Notice
P4P (Policy for the People) is run by Georgetown University’s Massive Data Institute. This notice covers the P4P tool at policy4people.org. It doesn't cover the Massive Data Institute (MDI) website or other Georgetown sites.
When you use P4P, we collect the following:
- Profile details you enter: your user display name, organization, and state, if you provide them. All three are optional and aren't verified. Please don't enter anything you wouldn't want stored.
- Your searches: the text of your queries, your answers to any clarifying questions, the answers P4P generated, and the search options you chose.
- Technical data: your IP address, a randomly generated session ID, and timestamps. We use these to prevent abuse and enforce usage limits.
- Feedback on your use of P4P.
How it's used
To run the service, keep it within its usage limits, let administrators review how it's performing, and help our research & engineering team perform evaluations and improvements. P4P Administrators (Georgetown MDI staff & technical support team) can see session details and full conversation logs.
The three login fields will be used in anonymized form for reports discussing the audience reach of P4P.
Who it's shared with
Your queries and conversation text are sent to Google's Gemini, Vertex AI, Cloud Run, and Cloud SQL US-based services to generate answers and embeddings. Your browser also loads fonts from Google Fonts, which means Google receives your IP address. Your information is not shared outside of Georgetown MDI or the engineering organization for advertising purposes of any kind.
What we don't do
P4P doesn't use cookies, advertising, or third-party analytics. Your browser keeps what you entered in the profile fields only for the life of the tab. It keeps only your theme and sidebar preferences after that.
Retention
The history on your screen disappears when you refresh or close the page.
Sessions and conversations are stored on our servers, and we don't currently delete them automatically. Server logs are kept for about 14 days.
Security
Data is stored in a US-based Google Cloud SQL instance with at-rest data encryption, and uses Google-managed in-flight data encryption between the Cloud Run services hosting the application and the Cloud SQL instance.