Privacy

Reading this site sets no cookies. The explorer and the comparison tool keep a little in the tab, and Cloudflare keeps an identifier for the spam check and a setting for error reports. All of it is described below, and nothing else is kept on your device. Two things load from Cloudflare, which serves the site: an analytics script on every page, and a spam check wherever a form is on screen. Everything else the pages load, fonts included, comes from this domain, and a form sends what you type to the project’s form service, which also runs on Cloudflare.

The only personal information the project holds is what you type into a form and send us. If you never use a form, we have nothing about you.

You can write to us from the contact form under About, the bulk-data request under Explore, or the small “flag something” panels beside individual records and comparisons. They all go to the same place, and which fields you see depends on which one you use.

Your name

Your email address

Your organisation

What you wrote

What you asked us for

Besides what you type, a form sends which form it is and the spam check’s result. Nothing is inferred about you from what you write.

A submission is stored in a private spreadsheet held by the project, on Google Sheets. A short notification goes to the project address so someone knows a message has arrived; it carries no personal information, only the fact that something was sent.

Submissions are not published: they do not go into the registry and they appear on no page of this site. A correction you suggest is reviewed by a person before anything changes.

We keep a submission for as long as it takes to answer it or act on it, and delete it within twelve months of receiving it or of our last reply, whichever is later.

We do not sell or share this information, and we do not use it for advertising.

Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that a submission is coming from a person rather than a script, loads whenever a form is on screen. The contact page and the bulk-data request page show their forms straight away, so visiting either loads it; on a record or the comparison page it loads only when you open one of the panels. Cloudflare receives the technical signals it needs to make the check. Turnstile also keeps an identifier in your browser’s storage for its own site, challenges.cloudflare.com, which stays after you close the tab.

The site and its data API are served by Cloudflare, which handles the request and therefore sees your IP address. The API counts requests per address to limit how fast any one caller can query it.

Cloudflare also asks your browser to report any request to the site or its data API that fails or gets an error back, and the browser keeps that instruction for up to a week. A report includes the address requested, which for a search includes what you searched for, and the page you were on.

Every page also loads a small analytics script from Cloudflare. It sets no cookie and stores nothing on your device. Cloudflare describes it as collecting timing metrics through the browser’s Performance API to report page views and visitors, and states that it does not collect visitors’ personal data and does not track individuals across sites.

The explorer remembers your last search, and the comparison tool remembers the institutions you have selected, in the tab’s own storage. Neither is a cookie. They are used to refill the search box, to take you back to that search, and to show and open your selection. Going back to either sends the request again, like any search.

What this site publishes is about government institutions and what they have said or done publicly. The registry holds no personal data about individuals and is not built from any. The people named on this site are the project team, on the team page.

Simone Paci of Stanford University, the project’s founder, is responsible for what the forms collect.

If you have sent us something and want to know what we hold, have it corrected, or have it deleted, write to info@g3observatory.org and say so. A person will answer within thirty days. If you ask us to delete your submission, we remove it from the spreadsheet.

This notice was written on 18 October 2026 and describes how the site works as of that date.