Governance
Data and privacy
What CENTS collects, why, how long we keep it, and how to have it deleted.
The short version
The site collects personal information only when you send one of its forms. Submissions are stored in a database provider that hosts our data for us. We do not sell or share them. We run no advertising, analytics or tracking scripts, and we send no email: the site does not send confirmations or newsletters from these forms. Our web host keeps standard server logs.
CENTS is not a registered nonprofit or a lobbying organization, and it handles no money.
What each form collects
Join (register your interest)
- a nickname (a first name or nickname; please do not use a full name) and your email address;
- your state, and optionally your school district;
- how you want to take part: District Delegate, State lead, researcher, teacher or parent sponsor, or other;
- an optional short note of up to 500 characters;
- a yes-or-no confirmation that you are 13 or older. We store this answer as true or false only, and never a birth date or an age. The form cannot be sent without it;
- a yes-or-no agreement to the storage of this information as described on this page; and
- only if you say you are under 16and have a parent or teacher sponsor: your sponsor’s email address, stored in its own field, and a yes-or-no answer that your sponsor has agreed to the code of conduct. The submission is then marked “needs sponsor confirmation.” We do not store a sponsor’s name.
We do not collect full names, birth dates, ages, photos, home addresses or phone numbers. A person at CENTS contacts an under-16applicant only through the sponsor’s email address, never directly. Nothing is sent automatically: the site sends no email.
Contact
- your name and email address;
- a topic from a short list (press, correction, data question and others); and
- your message, up to 2,000 characters.
Corrections
- the state or page the report is about;
- what is wrong, and the source that shows the correct information; and
- optionally, your email address, if you want us to be able to reach you.
Newsletter
- your email address and the page you signed up from.
Please do not put anyone’s personal information, or any student’s name or records, in a note, message or correction.
Spam protection
Each form has a hidden decoy field and a minimum time to submit, and the number of submissions from one network is limited. For the limit we store a one-way, salted hash of the network address together with the time. The salt includes the date, so the hash changes every day and cannot be used to follow anyone across days. We never store the address itself. These records are deleted after 2 days.
Why
To confirm that a district has a delegate, to confirm with a sponsor that a young person under 16 may take part, to answer messages, to check and apply corrections, and to contact you about your role. We use it for nothing else.
How long we keep it
- Join submissions: deleted 30days after they are sent unless we have followed up and marked the submission confirmed. A submission that needs sponsor confirmation is deleted, with the sponsor’s email address, if the sponsor has not confirmed within 30 days. Confirmed submissions are deleted after 12 months without activity, or sooner on request.
- Contact messages and corrections: deleted 12 months after they are sent, or sooner on request. Corrections that lead to a change are recorded in the public change log without any personal details.
- Newsletter addresses: kept until you ask us to remove yours.
- Spam-protection records: 2 days.
The deletions above are run by hand with a script that the maintainers run, so a record can stay a little past its date until the next run.
Deletion
You can ask us to delete anything you sent at any time. Email [email protected] from the address you used, with the date you sent it. A parent or teacher sponsor can make the same request for a young person. See youth safety. For questions about the data this site publishes, write to [email protected].
The forms send no email. Messages and submissions are read by people who work with CENTS, and we may write back to the address you gave. Role addresses such as [email protected] forward to a private inbox.