Privacy policy

Cohesion is a volunteer portal run by Project Liberal. This policy explains what Cohesion collects when you use it, why, who else is involved, and the choices you have. Questions and requests go to oren@projectliberal.org.

Cohesion and Cohesion Politics are separate sites run on separate systems. Signing up to one does not create an account on the other, and neither site can see the other’s volunteers or their work.

When you sign in. You sign in with Google or Discord. From them we take your name and your verified email address. We use the name as your starting display name, which you can change. We do not store your email address. We keep only a one-way, keyed fingerprint of it, which lets us recognise you when you sign in again but cannot be turned back into the address. We do not use your profile picture.

When you set up your profile. A display name, unique to you. Your team, or the name of a new team you are starting.

When you volunteer. The work you do on the site: projects and teams you join, tasks, checklists, comments, notes and links on project canvases, the work you submit for review (titles, summaries, hours, links and attached files), reviewers’ notes on it, and the certifications you earn.

In a Discord activity. If you join a Cohesion activity inside a Discord voice channel, we store your Discord user ID, your Discord display name, and a fingerprint of the email Discord has verified for you, so that work you do there can be added to your Cohesion account.

On a Reddit project board. Boards in subreddits keep their projects on Reddit. When a subreddit moderator confirms a task you finished there, we receive the task’s name and description, the project’s title, the hours, when it was done and confirmed, and an anonymous ID for you and for the moderator. We never receive your Reddit username or Reddit ID. If you choose to link your account (by typing a code from the board on our site), we connect that anonymous ID to your Cohesion account and record the work as completed tasks; you can unlink at any time on the board or at /link-reddit. Work from someone who has not linked is kept, under the anonymous ID only, so that it can be added if they link later.

We do not ask for your home address, phone number, date of birth, or any payment details. We do not run analytics or advertising trackers.

• To sign you in and keep your account secure.
• To run the site: organising projects and teams, assigning tasks, and reviewing submitted work.
• To issue certifications and keep a record of what you have contributed.
• To keep the site safe. Site admins keep a list of keywords, and text saved on the site is checked against it. A match is not blocked; it is recorded, with a short excerpt and its author, for a site admin to review, and a notice is posted to a private staff channel on Discord.
• To report on the program as a whole. Reports for funders and partners are totals only; no individual volunteer appears in them.

We do not sell your information, and we do not use it for advertising.

• Other members who are signed in can see your display name, your team, the projects you are part of, the tasks and comments you add to them, and your place on the leaderboards.
• Coordinators and team leads can see and review the work your team submits, including attached files.
• Site admins can see accounts, including previous display names, and everything above, so that they can manage the site and respond to problems.
• The public sees only what you or a project chooses to make public: a certification page, if you turn on its public link (it shows the name you chose for certificates, the certification and the date), and projects marked public on the map, which show the project and its place but no people.

We use these providers to run the site. Each receives only what it needs for its part.

• Google and Discord, to sign you in. Their own privacy policies apply to your accounts with them.
• Supabase, which hosts our database and the files you attach. Attached files are private and are shown to reviewers through links that expire after 30 minutes.
• Hostinger, which hosts the website.
• Discord, for Cohesion activities in voice channels and for staff notices about flagged text.
• Reddit, which runs Cohesion project boards in subreddits and stores the work done on them. Reddit’s own privacy policy applies to your Reddit account.
• GitHub and Google Drive, which hold our private backups (see below).
• OpenStreetMap (Nominatim) and Photon, which turn place names typed into projects and chapters into map positions. Only the place name is sent.
• Esri, which supplies the map images. Your browser loads them directly from Esri, so Esri sees your IP address, as any website you load content from does.

We may also disclose information when the law requires it, or to protect the safety of our volunteers or the public.

We use one cookie to keep you signed in. It is encrypted, and it expires after 30 days or when you sign out. Signing in also sets short-lived cookies that protect the sign-in itself. Your browser may store a display preference. We use no advertising or tracking cookies.

We keep your account and your work for as long as the account exists, so that your record and certifications stay intact. We take a private backup every night so that the site can be restored after a failure. Backups hold the fingerprint of your email, never the address, and leave out your certificate name and attached files. Backups are kept for recovery and are not automatically deleted, so information removed from the site can remain in older backups.

• You can change your display name and your certificate name on your profile at any time.
• You can turn the public link to any certification on or off.
• You can ask us for a copy of your information, to correct it, or to delete your account, by writing to oren@projectliberal.org. Account deletion is handled by hand, and we will confirm when it is done.

Cohesion is for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone younger. If you believe someone under 18 has an account, write to oren@projectliberal.org and we will remove it.

Every table in our database refuses access by default, and only the site’s own server holds the key that can read it. Email addresses are never stored, and the files you attach are private. No system is perfectly secure, and if a breach affects your information we will tell you.

When this policy changes, we will update it here and change the date at the top. If a change is significant, we will tell members on the site.

Project Liberal, oren@projectliberal.org.