Privacy and what others see

This page is about what other people can see. For how the system defends itself — secrecy of results, unguessable links, rate limits — see Security and privacy.

What a poll reveals about you

It depends on two settings the organiser chooses, and neither is yours to change:

Credited contributions. If the organiser turned on submitter names, an option you suggest is shown with the name on your profile. If they turned it off, it is shown as anonymous — to everybody, including them.

Named or anonymous results. With anonymous results, published totals show what was chosen and never who chose it. With named results, the list of participants and whether each voted is published — but how anybody voted is never published, in either mode. That is not a setting; there is no way to turn it on.

Both settings are visible on the poll before you take part. If you are not comfortable with them, the time to decide is before voting.

What a poll reveals to its organiser

While a poll is running, an organiser can see how many people have joined and how many have voted. They cannot see totals before publication — not for their own poll, and neither can an administrator. That rule has no exceptions, which is the point of it.

Private polls

A private poll is visible only to its organiser and the accounts on its invitation list. To anyone else it reports as missing rather than forbidden, so its existence is not disclosed by asking for it.

Being invited to one is not public. It appears on your dashboard and nowhere else.

The public poll directory

A public poll is readable by anyone holding its link. Whether it is also advertised is a separate choice its organiser makes:

• Listed — it appears in the public directory for anyone to find by browsing.
• Link only — readable by whoever you send the link to, but not listed anywhere.

Private polls never appear in the directory, whatever else is set.

The public leaderboard

Your display name and points total appear on the rankings page unless you turn that off. Your email address is never shown there, and nor is anything about which polls you took part in — only totals: how many votes cast, how many polls run.

To leave the board, go to Settings → Privacy. You keep your points, other people stop seeing you, and you can still see your own position. See Rankings for the details.

The settings you control

On your account page:

• Your name. Shown wherever you are credited. Changing it updates every contribution you have made.
• Your email address. Never shown to anybody. Changing it requires confirming the new one, which also pauses your ability to create polls until you do.
• Language and appearance. Yours alone; nobody else sees them.
• Leaderboard visibility. Described above.

What cannot be removed

Ballots are permanent once voting has closed. A result computed from ballots that could later be withdrawn would not be a result anybody could rely on, so Democratia does not offer to withdraw one.

For the same reason an account that has taken part in a poll, or owns one, cannot be deleted outright — removing it would either destroy a ballot or orphan somebody else's poll. Cancelling a poll keeps its ballots and its audit trail rather than erasing them.

If you need something removed for a legal reason, that is a conversation with whoever runs this installation, not a button.