Privacy Policy
Our Commitment to Your Privacy
At Emerald City Beacon, privacy isn’t just a practice—it’s a principle. Our work is guided by the belief that respecting your privacy is a crucial part of serving the community. We collect only what’s essential, anonymize data at every step, and use it solely to advance our mission: empowering the people of King County through innovative social services. We understand that privacy matters, and we are dedicated to keeping your data secure and your trust intact.
What We Collect
We believe in data minimization, collecting only what's necessary to provide and improve our services:
- Cookies: We use first-party cookies to support essential site functionality, like remembering your language settings or keeping your session active. We do not use third-party trackers or analytics tools.
- Settings: Any settings or preferences you set are stored locally on your device. We do not create or store a profile of you on our servers.
- Queries: User queries are anonymized immediately to remove any personally identifiable information (PII) before they are logged or processed by external providers.
- Logging: We log queries, stripped of PII, to improve our service quality and to train our in-house Beacon Bot. This helps us reduce reliance on external AI providers as we work toward a fully in-house solution.
How We Use Your Data
Your data supports our mission to enhance social services for the community:
- We use anonymized data to improve our chat experience and continuously develop a smarter, more responsive Beacon Bot that can eventually operate without sending any information to third parties. Our goal is a service that remains entirely within the community’s hands. If you’d like to know more about how we approach AI responsibly, see our AI Ethics policy.
Sharing Data
We limit data sharing to the bare essentials:
- Sanitized Queries: Only anonymized queries are sent to trusted third-party providers for processing. This is a temporary step, and we are working diligently to bring this capability fully in-house.
We Never Sell Your Data
As a nonprofit, we are committed to serving people, not profiting from data. We never sell your information, and our mission remains focused on community support and empowerment.
Cookies
Our use of cookies is designed to prioritize your experience while respecting your privacy:
- Internal Cookies: We only use internal cookies to manage your session, store local settings, and ensure essential functionality.
- No External Tracking: All analytics are performed in-house. We do not use third-party tracking cookies or analytics services.
Security Practices
We take a proactive approach to data protection:
- Anonymization is the first step in handling any data, ensuring that your information is depersonalized before any processing or logging.
- We implement strong security measures to safeguard our systems and data, continually striving to protect against unauthorized access.
Your Rights and Choices
We’re committed to transparency and empowering you to take control:
- Requesting or Deleting Your Data: Because all data is fully anonymized from the start, we cannot retrieve or delete specific records. We believe this approach is the best way to protect your privacy.
Changes to This Policy
Our commitment to privacy is constant, even as we evolve:
- If our practices change, we will update this document to reflect those changes. We pledge to stay true to our core values of privacy, transparency, and security.
Contact Us
We’re here to help and answer your questions. For any concerns about our privacy practices, please reach out at: privacy@emeraldcity.ai