Privacy Policy

IonActon (ionacton.com) is an independent community site about Acton town finances. This policy covers two things: the public website, and the IonActon research assistant, a private tool that reads one Gmail account to help prepare budget analysis. Questions go to [email protected].

The website

The news pages have no accounts, advertising, or analytics, and they set no cookies of their own. The site is served through Cloudflare, which processes visitors' IP addresses and request details to deliver pages and block abusive traffic. Cloudflare handles that data under its own privacy policy. If you email us, we use your message and address only to reply.

Ratings

The ratings pages are a straw poll for people who live in Acton or Boxborough. A checkbox is not a residency check. If you send a score, the site stores the scores, which person you rated, whether you said Acton or Boxborough, an optional comment of up to 280 characters, and a hash of your IP address. The hash exists so the same person cannot rate the same official twice in one week. The IP address itself is not kept. Comments are not printed one by one. The comment text is sent to Anthropic's API so a short summary can be written on the board. Anthropic does not train its models on API data. There is no sign-in.

The research assistant and Google user data

The research assistant is used only by the person who runs IonActon, with that person's own Google account. It is not offered to the public, and no one else can sign in to it. With the account owner's permission, it requests these Gmail permissions:

• Read and modify (gmail.modify): to read messages that the owner has labeled for the assistant (public committee mailing lists sent to [email protected]), and to mark those messages as read once processed. It does not delete messages or read mail outside that label.
• Send (gmail.send): to email draft reports and reminders to the owner's own two addresses. The software blocks every other recipient.

How that data is used

Message text and attachments are used only to find budget figures, deadlines and meeting information, and to draft notes for the owner's review. Text is sent to Anthropic's API so its Claude models can do this analysis. Anthropic does not train its models on API data. Results are kept in a private Supabase database and in the owner's private file storage. Nothing is published or sent to anyone else automatically. Every draft is reviewed by a person first.

We do not sell Google user data. We do not use it for advertising, and we do not use it to train AI models. We share it only with the service providers named above, and only to run the assistant.

IonActon's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Retention and deletion

Extracted notes are kept while they are useful for the town's budget work. The account owner can revoke the assistant's access at any time from Google Account permissions. Anyone whose message was processed can ask for that data to be deleted by writing to [email protected].

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with a new effective date.