Privacy

No account is required and no cookie is set. Page views are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, a cookieless script from the same company that serves the site. It records the page, the referring site, the country, and the browser and device type. Cloudflare states that it does not use cookies or local storage, does not fingerprint visitors and does not follow anyone across other sites.

The site’s content security policy lets scripts load only from this site and from Cloudflare’s analytics beacon, so a page here cannot quietly load any other tracker.

The map remembers your own preferences — light or dark theme, reduced motion, filter and tool settings, records you flagged, and drawings or notes you added — in your browser’s local storage. That data stays on your device and is never transmitted. Clearing your browser storage erases it.

When you sign up, the following is stored in a Cloudflare Workers KV namespace controlled by Dark Money Map:

• Your email address, lowercased.
• Which lists you chose — newsletter, API waitlist, or both.
• The page path you signed up from, so it is clear which part of the site brought you in.
• A two-letter country code supplied by Cloudflare’s network.
• The timestamps of your first signup and the most recent change.

Your IP address is not stored. There is no third-party email marketing platform behind this — no Mailchimp, Substack or equivalent — so the list is not shared with one.

The address is used to send the newsletter described at signup: new public records, new reporting and new map features. Every email carries an unsubscribe path, and unsubscribing deletes the record rather than flagging it.

Saving a map view is optional and needs a sign-in. There are no passwords. You enter an email address, a single-use link is mailed to it from sign-in@darkmoneymap.org, and that link expires after 15 minutes.

A signed-in account holds your email address, the map views you save, and any notes or drawn connections attached to them. Saved views are namespaced per account, so no reader can read or write another reader’s list. Your annotations travel only inside your own saved view and are never part of a shared link.

Signing in sets one cookie, dmm_session, marked HttpOnly, Secure and SameSite=Lax, lasting 30 days. Its value is an opaque random identifier that means nothing outside our own store; it holds no personal data. Signing out clears it immediately.

To limit sign-in-link abuse, a counter is kept against a SHA-256 hash of the address rather than the address itself, and it expires after an hour.

Asking for an account to be deleted removes the address, the sessions and the saved views.

When you create a share image, its picture, caption and map destination are stored on Cloudflare so the link can display a social preview. Anyone with the link can view it. New images expire after 90 days. Upload limits use a hash of the connection’s IP address in an hourly counter, which expires automatically.

The site is served by Cloudflare Pages, and signups and accounts are stored in Cloudflare Workers KV. As the hosting and network provider, Cloudflare processes requests on the project’s behalf and keeps its own operational and security logs, under its terms rather than ours. It also runs the cookieless Web Analytics described above. Cloudflare is the only third party that handles reader data, and it is an infrastructure provider, not a recipient of a data transfer.

The domain’s DNS is operated by Cloudflare, and sign-in mail is sent through Cloudflare’s Email Service. No outside email marketing platform is involved at any point.

Signup and account records are kept until you ask for them to be removed or the list is retired. Sign-in tokens expire in 15 minutes and sessions in 30 days, both automatically.

Use the contact form, naming the address in question, to:

• get a copy of what is stored about you,
• correct it,
• have it deleted, or
• unsubscribe from any list.

Requests are handled by hand, normally within a few days. California residents have rights under the CCPA and readers in the EU and UK under the GDPR; the project does not sell personal information, so there is no sale to opt out of.

The map shows people and organizations named in California public filings — donors, committees, lobbying firms, candidates and legislators. That information is not collected from readers. It is published by the California Secretary of State and the Legislature as required by state disclosure law, and it appears here as filed.

The project does not add private information to those records, does not attempt to identify anyone not named in a filing, and does not build profiles of readers.

If a record about you looks wrong, send the record link, the underlying public filing and a description of the discrepancy. Where the error is in the original filing, the correction has to be made with the filing agency; the map will note the discrepancy in the meantime.

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who handles it, the date at the top of the page changes and the change is described in the newsletter. Questions go through the contact form.