Who Serves
Who Serves privacy policy
Last updated 22 October 2026.
Who Serves tells you which governments have authority over an address and who currently holds office in them. There is no account, no sign in, and no server belonging to us. Almost everything here is about the one exception.
Your address goes to one place, and it is named
To work out which districts contain an address, the address you type is sent
to the United States Census Bureau geocoder at
geocoding.geo.census.gov. That is a public federal service and it is
the only place your address is ever sent. It is how the lookup works and there is
no version of the feature without it.
We do not control that service and we do not receive a copy of what you sent it. What the Census Bureau logs is governed by the Census Bureau, not by us.
The lookup itself keeps nothing
Searching for an address does not save it. Nothing is written as a side effect of looking something up, and there is nowhere for it to be written to, because there is no account and no database of ours anywhere.
Saving an address is your decision, and it stays with you
Who Serves lets you keep a small number of addresses so you do not have to retype them. That is a separate, deliberate act, and what it writes stays on your own device. There is no account to attach it to and no server to send it to.
So the promise is precise rather than sweeping: we never keep your address. You can, and only you. On the phone they are kept in the app's own storage until you delete them or the app. On the web they live in your browser's own storage for this site and disappear when you clear site data.
What else the app keeps on your device
A few small records, none of which holds an address or anything you looked up, except as stated next: whether your subscription is active and until when, so the app does not have to ask Apple every time it opens; the latest copies of the two public officeholder lists and the public congressional record described below, with the time each was fetched; and the rating note described further down.
The exception is for subscribers who have saved an address. For each saved address the app keeps, beside it on the same device, a note of the names on the public officeholder lists for each seat when you last looked that address up. The next time you look it up, the app compares the new result with that note and shows what reads differently. The note holds public names and the saved address you chose to keep, nothing else. It is removed when you forget the address, delete all your saved addresses, or delete the app. The comparison happens only while the app is open; nothing runs in the background and nothing is sent anywhere.
Who holds office, and how the list stays current
The officeholder records, the districts and the sources they came from ship
inside the app itself. Because officeholders change between app updates, the app
also downloads newer copies of its officeholder lists when they exist, from
carrierpress.com/whoserves/data/officeholders.json and
carrierpress.com/whoserves/data/statewide.json. In the same way it
downloads the public congressional record, the roll-call votes, committee seats
and links to official recordings that On the Record shows, from
carrierpress.com/whoserves/data/record.json. Each is checked at most
once a day. Those are plain downloads of public files. They send no address, no
identifier and nothing you have looked up, and they are the same files for
everyone.
Portraits are shown only when a government's own site publishes them, and your device fetches each picture from that site, the way any web page loads an image. Where the only portrait available is from anywhere else, such as a news site or a campaign site, the app does not load it and shows the official's initials instead. We have no way of knowing which officials you looked at, because nothing reports back to us.
On the web version
At carrierpress.com/whoserves/app/ the subscription is sold by Gumroad, which handles that payment. When you paste the license key from your Gumroad receipt, the page sends that key, and only that key, to Gumroad to check it. No address and nothing you looked up goes with it. Because a subscription can end, the page keeps the key in your browser's own storage for this site and checks it with Gumroad again about once a day; clearing site data removes it.
What there is none of
No account. No password. No analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising, no tracking and no third party SDK of any kind. No payment details: on iPhone subscriptions are bought through Apple, and we never see your card, your Apple ID or anything about you beyond whether the subscription is active on this device. On the web, Gumroad takes the payment and we receive only what Gumroad tells any seller about a sale. Your device's location is never requested, and an address is only ever one you typed.
Deleting it
To remove saved addresses, tap Delete saved addresses from this device at the bottom of the app's main screen; it needs no subscription. Deleting the app, or clearing its data, removes everything above. There is nothing held on our side to ask us to delete, and nothing for us to recover if you change your mind.
The rating prompt and Contact support
After something in the app has gone well, it may now and then ask Apple to show the App Store's own rating sheet. So that it asks rarely, it keeps one small note on your device: how many times things have gone well, the last two days they did, and the app version it last asked on. Nothing you entered is in that note, and it never leaves the device. Whatever you choose in the rating sheet is handled by Apple.
Contact support opens your own mail app with a message addressed to support@carrierpress.com. The subject line carries the app's name, its version and your phone's system version, so we know which build you mean. Nothing is sent unless you send it, and the app is not told whether you did.
Contact
Who Serves is published by Jeffrey L Carrier.