Your civic life is yours.
Polity is built on a simple commitment: the citizen's civic information belongs to the citizen, not to Polity.
The Citizen's Vault is yours.
Your Citizen's Vault — your civic documents, your voting record, your engagement history within Polity, your civic- lineage records, your peer relationships — is encrypted with keys you control. Polity holds your civic information in trust. We do not sell or aggregate Vault contents.
The Vault is fully portable. Export everything, take it elsewhere, or return later. Your civic life moves with you.
The Vault is never aggregated without your consent. Your personal civic activity is yours alone. Polity-internal civic activity is visible only to you and the peers you've explicitly added.
Anti-engagement-optimization is permanent.
Polity is advertising-supported in V1. Advertising is how Polity sustains itself. Our advertising is strategic and aligned with our mission — not engagement-optimized, not designed to hijack your attention, not for products that contradict civic orientation. We are exploring complementary monetization (subscription tiers, institutional partnerships, foundation support); these are under consideration.
What we will not do: algorithmic outrage amplification, virality-driven feeds, dark-pattern engagement loops. The anti-engagement-optimization principle is a permanent architectural commitment regardless of revenue model.
The Bee, the Ant, and your data.
Polity's information layer is built on a structural commitment: the model retrieves and quotes; it does not author definitions or assertions. The model is the Ant. The citizen is the Bee. No Spider is allowed.
What this means for your data: Polity's system does not synthesize about you to anyone. Your civic activity is not turned into demographic insights for marketers. Your reading patterns are not converted into engagement-optimization signals. Your peer relationships are not profiled for predictive modeling.
What you can always do.
- See everything in your Vault. No hidden categories. No data we hold that you can't access.
- Export everything. Standard formats. Bring it to your records, to a successor service, or simply keep a copy.
- Delete your account. Your Vault is removed. We retain only what is required by law, time-limited.
- Adjust your privacy settings. Granular controls for peers, discoverability, and platform-shared content.
- Encrypt with your own keys. The Vault uses citizen- controlled keys. Lose your keys and we cannot recover the Vault — that is the cost of citizen-controlled encryption, and it is the right cost.
This is the citizen-facing positioning of Polity's privacy commitments. The full Privacy Policy legal document will be authored before launch with privacy-attorney review. The two artifacts are related but distinct.