Privacy policy
This policy explains exactly what OpenRent.Win stores when you sign the petition, what is published, and how to get it removed. A petition only works if it can be shown to the people it is addressed to, so some of what you provide is published on purpose. This policy is specific about which parts those are.
We will never sell your information. Not your name, not your email address, not anything else. We do not sell, rent, trade, or licence it, to anyone, for any price, ever. There is no advertising on this site, no analytics tracking, and no third-party trackers of any kind.
What we store
When you sign, we store exactly these things and nothing else:
- Your name — required, and published on the petition page, unless you untick the box when signing.
- Your email address — required, and used only to verify that you are a real person signing once. It confirms your signature and prevents the same address signing twice. It is never published and never sold. We will not add you to a mailing list, and we will not email you about anything other than this signature.
- Your borough — published beside your signature, so the petition can show support across the five boroughs.
- Your ZIP code — never published. Used only to count how much support exists in each City Council district, and reported to decision-makers as district totals, never as a list of people.
- Your comment — optional, and published beside your signature if you write one.
- The date you signed and the date you confirmed.
We do not ask for a postal address, a phone number, a date of birth, income, or any identity document, and this site has no accounts or passwords.
Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs, which record the IP address and browser user-agent of requests. These are used for security and troubleshooting and are not linked to your signature.
Confirming your signature
After you sign, we email you a link. Your signature does not count until you click it. This is the only thing your email address is for: proving that a real person, reachable at a real address, signed once.
If you never click the link, your signature is never counted and never published, and we delete the pending record after 3 days.
Confirmation emails are delivered through Postmark, which processes the email address and message on our behalf in order to send them.
What is published
The petition page shows a public list of confirmed signatures. For each one, that list shows the borough, the comment, and the date, along with either your name or the word “Anonymous”, depending on the box you ticked when signing.
Your email address and ZIP code are never displayed publicly. Neither appears anywhere on the site, and neither is included in the public signature list.
Choosing not to show your name hides your name from the public list. It does not hide the signature itself — it still counts, and the borough, comment, and date still appear.
Anything published here can be read, copied, quoted, or archived by anyone, including search engines. Please treat a comment as a permanently public statement.
Reported comments
Any visitor can report a published comment as inappropriate. A reported comment is hidden from the page immediately and sent to us to review, so nothing offensive stays up while it waits for a human.
Reporting hides the comment text only. The signature still counts, and the signer's name, borough, and date remain on the list. We keep a copy of the reported text and the time it was reported so the decision can be reviewed and reversed. We do not record who submitted a report.
If your comment was hidden and you believe that was wrong, email [email protected] and we will look at it. You can also remove your signature entirely at any time.
Why we hold it, and who else sees it
We use what you provide for these purposes and no others:
- To confirm your signature is genuine and counted once.
- To display the signature and the running total.
- To demonstrate support to the New York City Council, which this petition addresses. When the petition is delivered, we may pass on the signature list — names as displayed, boroughs, comments, and totals, together with counts of signatures per Council district. Email addresses and ZIP codes are not included.
People who administer this site can see the full record, including email addresses, through a password-protected admin area. We disclose data outside the uses above only where we are legally required to.
Service providers
We do not run our own hardware. The site runs on Heroku, signatures are stored in a CockroachDB Cloud database, and confirmation emails are sent through Postmark. These providers process data on our behalf, under their own terms, and their servers may be located outside your country, including in the United States. Connections between your browser, the site, and the database are encrypted in transit.
Cookies
This site sets no advertising or analytics cookies, and there are no third-party trackers on it. The only cookies used are the ones needed to make the site work: a security token that protects the sign form against forged submissions, a short-lived cookie that carries confirmation messages, and a session cookie for administrators who are logged in.
Removing your signature
You can withdraw at any time, and you do not need to explain why. Use the remove my signature page, or the link at the bottom of any email we send you. We email you a confirmation link, and once you confirm, the record is deleted outright — name, email address, borough, ZIP code, comment, and all. Nothing is kept, and the signature stops counting toward the total.
How long we keep it
Confirmed signatures are kept while the petition is open and for as long as the campaign is live, since the record is the point of the petition. When the campaign ends, we either delete the signature records or keep only the totals, which identify nobody. Unconfirmed signatures are deleted after 3 days.
Your other rights
You can also ask us to:
- Tell you what we hold about you.
- Correct your name, borough, ZIP code, or comment.
- Hide your name from the public list, or show it.
Email [email protected] from the address you signed with, or tell us which address you used. Depending on where you live you may also have rights under laws such as the UK/EU GDPR or the CCPA, including the right to complain to your data protection regulator. We do not charge for any of this.
Removing a signature takes it off the public list and out of the total. We cannot retrieve copies of a page that other people have already saved, quoted, or archived, and we cannot withdraw a signature from a petition that has already been delivered.
Children
This site is not aimed at children, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has signed, contact us and we will remove the record.
Changes
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page. If a change materially affects signatures already collected, we will say so on the petition page.
Contact
Questions about this policy or about data we hold: [email protected].