How AMAC protects your data

Encrypted, everywhere

• Every connection to Circle, the Voter Hub and our servers uses HTTPS. Plain web addresses are redirected to it, and the Circle and Voter Hub sites tell browsers never to use an unencrypted connection.
• Our database and our file storage are encrypted at rest, and the database refuses any connection that isn’t encrypted.
• The database can’t be reached from the internet. Only our own servers can talk to it.

Who can see your circle

• You, the chief captains above you, and AMAC staff.
• Other captains can’t. They can see that a person is already in someone’s circle, and whose, so two people don’t reach out without knowing it, but they never see your notes.
• A voter’s reason for not voting, and its note, is shared with every captain working with that voter, so whoever reaches out next knows it.
• At an event, the event lead and the captain who follows up see the people met there, and any phone number someone gives for texts.
• These rules are enforced by the database itself, not only by the app, so a mistake on one screen can’t show one captain another’s circle. They are tested on every change.

Accounts and passwords

• Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes. Nobody at AMAC can read your password.
• Repeated failed sign-ins are slowed down, and after ten you get an email about it.
• If someone reuses a stolen sign-in, every session on that account is signed out.

Watching for problems

• When AMAC staff look at private voter details, read someone else’s notes, or export a list, it is written to a log that can’t be edited or deleted.
• Every change to our cloud account is recorded and kept for two years, and automated monitoring alerts us to unusual activity.

What we never do

• We never sell personal data.
• We never upload your phone’s contact list. You pick people by name, and the phone numbers in your contacts stay on your phone.
• The usage data we collect to improve Circle never includes your name or email, the people in your circle, or anything you type, and we don’t record your screen.

Public voting records and the Voter Hub

Washington’s voter file is public, and AMAC uses it. The Voter Hub shows a person’s name, city, county and gender, whether they are registered, whether their ballot was received, which past elections they voted in, and others registered at the same address. It never shows addresses, birth dates or phone numbers, even though the voter file includes addresses and birth dates. Nobody can see who anyone voted for: that isn’t in the voter file at all.

AMAC’s estimates

From the public voter file, AMAC estimates how likely each voter is to vote and, from their name, their ethnicity and religion. These are estimates, not facts, and they can be wrong. Circle shows captains the likelihood to vote and the ethnicity estimate. Religion estimates are used only by AMAC staff.

Questions or concerns

If you have a question about your data, or think something isn’t right, email dev@amacouncil.org.