Privacy Policy
Our website address is: http://blaskattacks.com
This is a blog and central hub for the various social media accounts for BlaskAttack. It also hosts free public tools, including Civic Duty, a tool for looking up your elected representatives and contacting them.
Civic Duty works very differently from the blog — it collects nothing at all — so it has its own section, first. Everything after that covers the blog itself.
Civic Duty (representative-contact tool)
Civic Duty is a static web page. There is no server behind it, no database, no user account, no login, and no comment system. It is not part of the WordPress blog. The sections further down this page about comments, cookies, media uploads, registration and data retention do not apply to it.
What we collect: nothing
There are no analytics on Civic Duty. No tracking pixels, no advertising tags, no session cookies, no logs of who used it or what they looked up. We cannot tell you how many people have used the tool or who they are, because we do not know and have no way to find out.
What you type stays in your browser
Nothing you enter on Civic Duty is sent to blaskattacks.com. Two things are kept in your own browser’s local storage, on your device only, so you don’t have to enter them again:
- “Who you are” (step 2): your name, your town, your state, the congressional and state legislative districts a lookup found, and whether you ticked “Also find my state legislators.” If you looked up by street address, that address is saved too, in the form the Census Bureau matched it. If you used a ZIP code, the ZIP is saved. If you used your current location, your coordinates are not saved. Forget me on this device in step 2 deletes all of it.
- Docket comment drafts: the comment you are writing, along with the options you picked for it and the name, town and state on it, so a closed tab doesn’t lose your work. Delete saved draft deletes it.
Outside the docket comment tool, your own words in step 3 and the options you tick there are not saved; closing the tab discards them. We cannot read anything stored in your browser, and we never see any message you write — not before you send it, and not after. On a shared computer, use the delete buttons when you’re done.
Third parties that do receive something
There are two, and both are tied to a specific action you take:
1. The U.S. Census Bureau. When you look up your representatives, the address, ZIP code or coordinates you provide are sent to the Census Bureau’s public geocoding service, which returns the districts you live in. This is what makes the lookup work. The request goes from your browser directly to the Census Bureau — it does not pass through us, and we neither receive nor store it. What they do with it is governed by their privacy policy: https://www.census.gov/about/policies/privacy.html
2. Your own email program. If you use “Open in email app,” the draft message is handed to whatever mail client your device uses. Where it goes from there is between you and your email provider. We are not a party to it and receive no copy.
Fonts and all other files are served from this site rather than from a third-party font or content network, so no outside company is contacted simply by loading the page.
Links to official government contact forms
Members of Congress do not publish direct email addresses; they use web forms on their own official House and Senate websites. When you follow one of those links, you leave Civic Duty entirely. Anything you enter on those sites is governed by that office’s privacy practices, not ours.
Location access
If you choose “Use my current location,” your browser will ask your permission first. If you grant it, your coordinates are sent to the Census Bureau geocoder for the district lookup described above, and nowhere else. If you decline, nothing is sent, and the address and ZIP lookups still work normally.
Your rights regarding Civic Duty data
We hold nothing to export, correct or delete, because nothing is collected in the first place. What your browser keeps on your device you can delete yourself, with Forget me on this device and Delete saved draft, or by clearing this site’s data in your browser settings. If you have sent a message to a congressional office and want it removed, that request has to go to that office — we never had a copy of it.
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Who we share your data with
If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.
Otherwise I am not sharing data with anyone really, unless your comment somehow breaks international law. In that case, you have really done something.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
These rights apply to the blog. We hold no Civic Duty data about you at all — see its section above.
Where your data is sent
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Affiliation and funding
Civic Duty and this blog are funded personally by the author. The author works with Haven Access, an organization active in kratom policy; no salary or compensation is received from them, though Haven Access has supplied materials for advocacy work in the past. Haven Access has no editorial control over anything published here and maintains its own separate website.
Beyond that disclosed relationship, this site is not associated with, funded by, sponsored by, or acting on behalf of any advocacy group, trade association, industry body, PAC, campaign or company. If that changes, it will be disclosed here.
Last updated: September 2026