- No accounts, no email, no tracking cookies. No analytics service is used. The public pages (home, Quick Count, How it works and Pricing) show one labelled banner ad, described under Advertising; it also counts one page view per page as a daily total. Desk, ballot, voting and results pages show no ad.
- Organisers: your desk's name, your ballots (title, question, options, settings) and the votes on them. Your private desk key is stored only as a one-way scramble (SHA-256 hash).
- Voters: the options you ticked and the time. A name only if the ballot allows one and you type it (only the organiser sees it). With an open link, your browser gets a random token in a cookie so you can change your vote; we store only a scramble of it, different for every ballot. With a voter code, we store only a scramble of the code.
- Cookies: a desk cookie (organisers), a voter token cookie (voters on open links) and a security cookie for forms. All are first-party and HttpOnly.
- Addresses: your IP address is used, scrambled with a secret, to limit how many desks, votes and code tries come from one address a day. These counters are deleted after 3 days. The web server keeps standard access logs.
- Deleting: organisers can delete a vote, a ballot or the whole desk at any time; it is gone from the live database at once. Desks unopened for 400 days are deleted with everything on them. Database backups are kept for 14 days, then deleted.
- Payments (when switched on): PayPal handles payment details; we keep only PayPal's subscription reference, plan and dates.
Advertising
The public pages of Approval Rating (home, Quick Count, How it works and Pricing) show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company behind this site. For now the ads are for WeldonPC's own services. Organiser desks, ballots, voting and results pages, printed ballots and tally sheets, this page, the terms and error pages show no ad. The only outside service any page loads is that banner.
To show an ad, your browser loads a script from adengine.us, asks it for one banner, loads the banner image, and reports once that the page was viewed and once that the banner was shown. Like any website, adengine.us receives your IP address, your browser type and the address of this site with those requests.
- No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
- How your IP address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your IP address in a location database kept on its own server (nothing is sent to anyone else), so that ads meant for one area are shown only there. It also uses the address to count each ad view or click only once and to leave out robots and WeldonPC's own office traffic. The address is not stored with the counts; the temporary entries made from it expire within six hours and are cleared from the server within two days.
- What is kept. Daily totals only: page views for this site, and views and clicks for each ad. The adengine.us web server also keeps a standard access log (IP address, time, address requested, referring site, browser) for security; it is deleted on a rolling schedule.
- Clicking an ad passes through adengine.us, which counts the click, and then opens the advertiser's site, which has its own privacy policy.
- Nothing about you is sold or shared.