Privacy

Local data is not used to train models

CivicPocket is built so a person can find public assistance without creating an account or handing over an identity file.

What is collected

• Wizard answers: region, income bracket, assistance category.
• Anonymous events: wizard completed, apply clicked, assistant queried, match count.
• Assistant messages after common identifiers are stripped (SSN, phone, email, street address, card numbers).

What is never collected

• Name, Social Security number, full street address, or date of birth.
• Login credentials or account numbers.
• Anything that would let this site file an application on your behalf.

Models and training

• PRIVACY_DISABLE_MODEL_TRAINING=true is required. The API will not start if that flag is turned off.
• When Google Cloud is connected, the assistant uses Vertex AI — Google Cloud's enterprise path, not consumer AI Studio. Customer prompts and responses are not used to train Google foundation models.
• Prompt logging stays off. Chat text is not written to the utilization dashboard.
• Without cloud credentials, matching and the assistant run entirely on this machine.
• Live government lookups send only a category keyword or North Carolina geography — never a name or contact information — to Grants.gov, NC OSBM LINC, and USAspending.gov.

Analytics storage

If BigQuery is configured, only the anonymous event fields above are stored in your project. Otherwise events stay in a local JSONL file under backend/data/ and are listed in .gitignore.