Privacy Policy

1. AI systems and generated content

You are interacting with an artificial intelligence system. When you ask a question, Article411 uses automated retrieval and large language models (LLMs) to search municipal ordinance text and generate answers. Those answers are AI-generated, even when they include citations to source code sections.

• Answers are produced automatically from retrieved ordinance excerpts. They are not legal advice and should not be relied on as a substitute for advice from a licensed attorney.
• AI output can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect. Confidence labels (supported, inferred, needs confirmation) indicate how strongly a claim is grounded in the sources shown, not legal certainty.
• We do not use AI to make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you (such as credit, employment, or housing eligibility). The service is informational only.
• Individual questions are processed by automated systems without routine human review. Support requests sent to us by email may be reviewed by a person.
• Your question, selected jurisdiction, and a short summary of recent conversation turns may be sent to third-party AI providers to generate a response. See “Service providers” below.

2. Information we collect

Account information

When you create an account, we collect:

• Email address
• Password (stored in hashed form by our authentication provider; we do not store plain-text passwords)
• Display name

Questions and chat history

When you use the service while signed in, we store:

• Questions you submit
• AI-generated answers, citations, confidence labels, and related response metadata
• Chat titles derived from your first question in each conversation
• Your selected jurisdiction (for example, Omaha, Nebraska)
• Timestamps associated with chats and messages

The landing-page demo is illustrative only and does not store your activity unless you create an account and submit questions.

Technical and device information

Our hosting and infrastructure providers may automatically collect standard technical data when you visit the site or call our API, such as IP address, browser type, device identifiers, and request logs. We use this information to operate, secure, and troubleshoot the service.

What we do not collect

• We do not run advertising or behavioral analytics trackers in the app today.
• We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13.
• We do not sell your personal information.

3. How we use information

We use the information described above to:

• Create and manage your account and authenticate you
• Process your questions and return AI-generated, source-grounded answers
• Save and display your chat history across sessions
• Maintain, secure, and improve the service
• Respond to support requests and enforce our terms
• Comply with law and protect our rights and users

4. Legal bases for processing (EEA, UK, and Switzerland)

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, we process personal data on these bases:

• Contract: to provide the service you request, including account access and chat history.
• Legitimate interests: to secure, maintain, and improve Article411, prevent abuse, and understand how the service is used at an aggregate level.
• Consent: where required, such as for optional communications. You may withdraw consent at any time without affecting the lawfulness of processing before withdrawal.
• Legal obligation: where we must retain or disclose information to comply with applicable law.

5. Service providers

We use third-party service providers to operate Article411. They process personal information on our instructions and only as needed to provide their services, including:

• Authentication and database providers — account sign-in and storage of chat history.
• AI providers — processing your questions and generating answers. Your question, jurisdiction, and limited conversation context may be transmitted to them for this purpose.
• Hosting and infrastructure providers — running the website, API, and related technical operations.

6. Cookies and similar technologies

We use essential cookies (and similar browser storage) to keep you signed in and maintain your session. These cookies are necessary for the service to function and are not used for cross-site advertising.

You can control cookies through your browser settings. Disabling essential cookies may prevent you from staying signed in.

7. How long we keep information

• Account and chat data are kept until you delete your account or individual chats, or until we no longer need the data to provide the service.
• When you delete your account from your profile settings, your account record and associated chat history are permanently removed from our database.
• Infrastructure logs (for example, server or CDN logs) may be retained for a limited period by our hosting providers for security and operations, then deleted or aggregated according to their policies.
• AI provider retention is governed by each provider's terms and settings. We do not control how long third-party AI vendors retain API inputs after processing.

8. Your choices and rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you
• Correct inaccurate account information (display name) in your profile
• Delete your account and associated chat history from your profile settings
• Export or receive a copy of your data, where applicable
• Object to or restrict certain processing, where applicable
• Withdraw consent where processing is based on consent
• Lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority

To exercise these rights, use in-app account controls or email us at aiden@barger.me. We may need to verify your identity before responding.

9. California privacy rights

If you are a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), as amended by the CPRA, provides additional rights. In the preceding 12 months we have collected the categories of personal information described in Section 2 for the business purposes in Section 3.

• We do not sell personal information.
• We do not share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising.
• We use automated processing to generate informational answers, but not for decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about consumers.

California residents may request access, correction, or deletion by contacting aiden@barger.me. We will not discriminate against you for exercising privacy rights.

10. International data transfers

Article411 is operated from the United States. If you access the service from outside the U.S., your information may be transferred to, stored in, and processed in the United States and other countries where our service providers operate. Those countries may have data-protection laws that differ from those in your jurisdiction.

Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards (such as standard contractual clauses) for international transfers of personal data.

11. Security

We use technical and organizational measures designed to protect personal information, including encrypted connections (HTTPS), access controls, and row-level security so users can access only their own chats. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

12. Children's privacy

Article411 is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact us and we will take steps to delete it.

13. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will post the updated policy on this page and revise the effective date above. Continued use of the service after an update means you accept the revised policy.

14. Ordinance data source

Source ordinance text shown in Article411 comes from LOCUS-v1 (Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States), a public research dataset on Hugging Face. LOCUS is described in Freeing the Law with LOCUS: A Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States (Peskoff et al., 2026; arXiv:2606.19334), licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

Article411 does not receive personal information from LOCUS. We ingest and index public municipal code excerpts from the dataset to power search and citations in AI-generated answers. Display text may differ from source.

15. Contact us

Questions about this Privacy Policy or our data practices? Email aiden@barger.me.