What this site collects, and what it does not.
A site that asks the government to account for itself has no business being vague about its own data. This page is the whole of it.
If you only read, nothing about you is stored
Reading a page, moving the sliders, and copying a share link involve no submission and no record. The allocation in a share link is encoded in the URL itself — it is not saved here and we cannot see it unless you send it to us.
Google Analytics is loaded for aggregate traffic counts. It sets its own cookies and is governed by Google’s terms, not ours.
If you submit, this is the record
- Your allocation — the numbers you set, and the total you were over or under.
- Optional demographics — settlement, age band, state, gender, profession. Every one is a dropdown from a fixed list: nothing you can pick can identify you or anyone else.
- A message, only if you write one — a display name, a place and one sentence, all typed by you, all optional, and stored only if you tick the box saying they may be published. A person reads every message before it appears; nothing is published automatically. Write to support@meratax.fyi and it is deleted, whether or not it was published — your budget stays counted.
- A daily hash — your IP address combined with a server secret and today’s date, then hashed. It is used to stop one machine submitting a hundred budgets and skewing the median. It cannot be reversed to an IP without the secret, and it changes every day, so it cannot be used to follow you across days. Your IP address itself is not stored for this.
Name, email and phone are optional
If you choose to give a name, email address or phone number, it is stored with your submission. The purpose is to be able to contact you about this project and to avoid counting the same person twice. It is not sold, not shared, and not used for advertising.
A typed name or email proves nothing — anyone can type anything — so we do not describe those submissions as verified. Where a code or link is completed, that submission is counted separately as verified, and both numbers are published side by side.
When contact details are given, we also record the IP address and browser user-agent of that request, to investigate abuse and to tell a real response from an automated one. This is the one thing here that is genuinely identifying, so it is time-limited: it is deleted automatically after 180 days by an expiry rule set on the database itself, not by anyone remembering to run a cleanup. It is never attached to an anonymous submission.
Getting it removed
Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you can ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected, and ask for it to be erased. Write to support@meratax.fyi and say which submission you mean — the email address or phone number you used is enough to find it.
If you gave no contact details, we genuinely cannot find your row, because nothing in it points to you. That is the trade: a fully anonymous submission cannot be withdrawn individually.