Privacy
What we collect, and what happens to your documents.
The short version: this site runs no analytics and no advertising trackers, the only information we hold about you is what you chose to send us, and the documents you send are used to do your job and for nothing else. The long version is below, in the order a records officer reads it.
This website
What the site collects.
Almost nothing. That is a decision about how the site is built, not an omission from the policy.
No analytics, no advertising, no tracking.
This site runs no analytics package, no advertising or conversion trackers, no session recording, no heat mapping, and no social media pixels. Nothing in the page reports your visit to a third party. There is no visitor profile, because nothing here is built to assemble one.
The page is served from one place.
Typefaces, styles, and images load from our own domain rather than from a font host, a content network, or an advertising network. Reading a page here does not tell anyone else that you read it.
Cookies.
The site sets no advertising cookies and no analytics cookies. Anything it does set is strictly necessary — the kind of thing that stops a form from being submitted twice, or that a security control needs to function. Nothing follows you to another site. There is no cookie banner on this site because there is nothing to ask you to consent to.
Server logs.
Our hosting provider records ordinary web-server logs: the requesting IP address, the time, the page requested, and the browser’s user-agent string. Logs exist so a fault or an attack can be investigated. We do not use them to identify visitors, do not combine them with anything else, and do not build reports from them. They are held for a short operational window and then discarded.
What you send us.
The quote form and our inboxes are the only routes by which this site takes information from you, and what arrives is what you typed: your name, the agency or organization you work for, an email address, a phone number if you choose to give one, the languages and the deadline, whatever you write in the message, and the document if you attach one. There is no account, no password, and no login.
The form composes a message and delivers it to our inbox through an email delivery provider. We use what you send to answer you, to price the work, to do the work, to invoice for it, and to keep the record of the job described below. We do not add you to a marketing list and we do not send a newsletter.
Client documents
What happens to the documents you send.
This is the part a records officer is actually here to read, so it is set out in full rather than folded into a sentence about business purposes.
Most of what an agency sends us is not about the agency. It is a notice to a household, a benefits form, a hearing packet, a school letter — records about members of the public that reached us only because someone needed to read them in another language. They are handled on that basis.
Used for your job. Not for anything else.
- Never used to train anything. Your documents are not used to train, fine-tune, test, or evaluate any machine-learning system, ours or anyone else’s, and they are not contributed to a shared or public translation corpus.
- Never sold, never shared for advertising. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as California law uses those terms. Nothing is disclosed to a data broker, an advertiser, or a marketing partner.
- Never shown as work. Your documents are not published as samples, put in a portfolio, quoted in a proposal, or reused on another client’s job. A glossary or translation memory built from your material belongs to your program and stays with it.
- Seen only by the people doing the job. The assigned linguists, and the small core who handle intake, terminology, layout, and delivery. Every linguist is engaged under a written confidentiality obligation covering the material, its handling, and its deletion, and receives only the document they are assigned, for as long as the assignment runs. No one else sees it.
The providers in the chain.
Running the work takes a small number of ordinary business services. We describe them by the job they do rather than by brand name, because the brand can change and the role does not:
- Email delivery. Carries messages between you and us, including what the quote form sends.
- File transfer and storage. Moves large files and holds the job record while the work is live.
- Website hosting. Serves these pages and keeps the server logs described above.
- Accounting and invoicing. Holds the billing record — the agency, the purchase order, the amounts. Not the documents.
We select providers whose terms do not take a license to your content and do not retain it for training, and confidential material is not pasted into public web tools or consumer services. If your department needs the specific providers named before you send a file, ask and we will put them in writing for your job. If your department requires a particular arrangement — your own transfer system, your own storage, a security addendum for us to sign — send it with the first request and we will tell you plainly whether we can meet it.
Retention
How long we keep it, and how to have it deleted.
Retention here is tied to a reason rather than to a number we picked. Where you set a period of your own, yours replaces ours.
What we hold, and why.
We keep the source file as received, the delivered translation, the signed certificate of accuracy, and the correspondence that explains a decision on the job. There are three reasons for that and no others: to deliver the work; to reissue a file or a certificate later if you need a copy; and to answer an audit question about what was translated, into what, and on what date. When those reasons have run out, so has the reason to keep the material, and our default is to dispose of it.
You can set the period instead.
The default is ours only because you have not set one. Tell us your retention period at intake — deletion on delivery, a fixed number of months, deletion at contract close, or a longer hold your own schedule requires — and we work to yours. What we agree is written into the quote or the agreement, and that document governs over this page.
Where you require deletion on a fixed date, we confirm in writing when it is done. The trade is worth stating: once the record is gone we cannot reissue the certificate and we cannot answer a later audit question from documents.
Asking us to delete something.
Email contact@civictranslation.com with the job reference number from the certificate or the invoice, or with the document name and roughly when you sent it. We confirm in writing what was deleted and when.
Two caveats, stated rather than buried. Copies inside routine backups age out on the backup cycle rather than disappearing the same afternoon; they are not returned to use in the meantime. And we will not delete material you have instructed us to preserve, or that we are required to keep.
If you are a public agency, your rules govern.
Public agencies carry records-retention schedules, disclosure obligations under the California Public Records Act, and sometimes a litigation hold. Those obligations attach to your records, and the copies we hold on your behalf sit inside them. Where your schedule and this page disagree, yours governs. We do not determine what your schedule requires, and we do not decide what is disclosable — tell us the rule and we will work to it.
Your rights
California residents, children, and how to reach us.
California privacy rights.
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, California residents generally have the right to:
- Know what personal information a business has collected about them, where it came from, and who it was disclosed to.
- Have that personal information deleted.
- Correct it where it is inaccurate.
- Opt out of the sale of personal information and of sharing it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
- Limit the use and disclosure of sensitive personal information.
- Not be treated worse for exercising any of these rights.
We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. There is no opt-out control on this site because there is no sale or sharing to opt out of, and a Global Privacy Control signal from your browser therefore has nothing here to switch off. We do not profile anyone from this information and make no automated decisions with it.
Making a request.
Email contact@civictranslation.com and say what you want — to know, to delete, to correct. We may ask for enough information to be satisfied that you are the person the request concerns, or that you are authorized to act for them; what you send for that purpose is used for that purpose and then discarded. An authorized agent may make a request on your behalf with your written permission.
One point decides where most requests should go. Much of the personal information we hold arrived inside a client’s document, and for that material we act on the client agency’s instructions rather than our own. If your request concerns a document a public agency sent us to translate, send it to that agency. Tell us as well if you like, and we will flag it and support their response.
Children.
This site and these services are directed at public agencies and organizations, not at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Documents an agency sends us do sometimes contain information about children — a school notice, a benefits application, a child welfare form. That material is handled under the confidentiality, access, and retention terms above, on the agency’s instructions.
Security, stated without exaggeration.
Access is kept narrow: the people on the job, for as long as the job runs. Confidential material is not put into public web tools or consumer services. Nobody can honestly promise that transmission over the internet is perfectly secure, so we do not. If your department requires a specific handling method or a security addendum, send it with the first request and we will tell you plainly whether we can meet it.
Changes to this policy.
If this policy changes, the date on this page changes with it. Where a change is material and affects a live engagement, we tell the client directly rather than relying on anyone to re-read the page.
Contact.
Privacy questions, requests, and complaints go to contact@civictranslation.com. Put “Privacy” in the subject line and it is routed on arrival.
- San Francisco, CA
- Monday–Friday, 9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. Pacific