US Civics Bot iOS App Privacy Policy

US Civics Bot is an iOS app that helps users prepare for the US Citizenship test by asking questions from the official list and compares their answer with the answers accepted by USCIS.

The following privacy policy applies:

1. We identify you using the hardware identifier of your device, and we never ask for your name, email, or any other personal information, and we do not store it, except as described in the next paragraph.
2. Some questions that USCIS uses for citizenship test ask about your state, your governor, your senators, or your representative. Before we ask such a question, we ask you to give us your address, city, or ZIP code, whatever you prefer. We will store the information you provided in our database. You can decline to provide this information, in which case we won't store any information about your address at all. The sole purpose of storing this information is to fetch the data we need to verify your answers to those questions. If you want us to forget the location information you provided, please press the "Set or delete address" button in the app settings and reply no when asked.
3. We don't sell any of the information we received from you to anyone.
4. The backend of the app is hosted on Google Cloud Run, and Google Cloud Run logs store all the interactions with the bot, including your IP address and the user agent string set by your device. We also store the verbatim messages the bot receives from you in the log. This data is not easily accessible to us, and we can only use it to debug the problem with the chat bot, and not for any other purpose.
5. We store the message history (messages that you sent to a bot, and messages that the bot sent to you) in our database. We use this data to provide you with the recent history of your interactions with the bot. We only store the last 100 messages between you and the bot, and we store them for 3 days only, after which the deletion is scheduled. Due to the way how Google Cloud Firestore processes automatic deletions, the history might stay there for a few days longer but will eventually be deleted.
6. The app supports voice mode. If the user chooses to send a voice message to the bot, the voice message will be sent to Google Cloud Speech-to-Text service for recognition. We may store your voice message, anonymized, without any reference to your device ID, for up to 30 days, in order to improve the accuracy of the speech recognition.
7. We may offer you to watch an advertisement video from Google Admob. If you allow it, we will send your advertiser ID to Google Admob to provide you with the personalized advertisement. We do not store your advertiser ID on our servers. You can choose not to view any ads and make a purchase to continue using our services.
8. To delete all your information from our servers immediately, please send a message /delete-my-information in the chat. If you made a purchase before doing it, you will need to restore it after the deletion. Not all purchases can be restored. Since we will automatically delete your information after receiving this request, we will not be able to restore your information after it is deleted.

Please direct any questions about this chat bot, as well as the data deletion requests, to us-civics-bot@fenster.name.