Privacy

This page says exactly what is kept about you, by whom, why, and for how long. Last updated October 2, 2026.

Draft under legal review. Real donations open once the partner charity is signed and these pages are final.

Looking up a charity

You can search, read any charity's checks and ratings, and read stories without an account and without telling us who you are. Our server keeps ordinary request logs (address, page, time) for up to 30 days for security and fault-finding.

Measuring visits with Google Analytics

To learn how many people use the site, where they come from and which pages they open, the public pages use Google Analytics. It sets cookies in your browser (named _ga, lasting up to two years) so that visits from the same browser can be counted as one visitor. Through it Google receives the pages you open on this site, including what you type into the charity search, the website that sent you here, your browser and device type, and your approximate location worked out from your internet address, which Google does not keep. We also tell it when a Give button or the email sign-up is used, but never an email address, a name or anything you type into a form. Google keeps visit-level records for up to 14 months and processes them on our behalf under its own terms.

Its advertising features are switched off. We do not advertise, and nothing here is used to build an advertising profile of you.
It is never loaded on pages that are yours alone: your account, your gifts, links from our emails, and the staff area.
It is not loaded at all if your browser sends the Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal, or if your device is set to a European time zone, because there we would need your consent first and we would rather not interrupt you to ask.
You can also block it with Google's opt-out add-on or any content blocker. Everything on the site works the same without it.

What we count ourselves

To stop our forms being abused, we count how many times a form is sent from one address in an hour, and how many sign-in links are asked for one email address. The count is kept against a salted hash, which cannot be turned back into the address or the email, and is deleted after a day.

We count how many times each story is read and, when a reader arrives through a link in one of our own social media posts, which post it was. These are daily totals. They record nothing about who read the story.

Pages load fonts from Google Fonts, which means your browser sends its request, including your address, to Google. The site is hosted on Google Cloud in the United States.

Asking the assistant

Questions you type into the assistant are sent to Anthropic's Claude API to produce the answer, together with the public records the answer draws on. We do not store your questions or the answers. To cap our costs we count questions per visitor per day using a salted hash of your address, which cannot be turned back into the address; counts are deleted after 90 days. Anthropic's handling of API inputs is described in its own privacy policy.

Signing up for updates

If you leave your email for updates we keep the address, where on the site you gave it, and the date. We use it only to send the updates you asked for. Every message has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing deletes the address.

Giving on a charity's own website

Today the Give button takes you to the charity's own website. We count how many times each charity's button is used, as a daily total that records nothing about who used it. The address we send you to ends in a short label saying the visit came from Veridonate, so the charity can see that in its own statistics; it says nothing about you. Once you are on the charity's website, what you give and what it keeps about you are between you and the charity, under its privacy policy. We never learn whether you gave.

Giving through the site, when it opens

When you give we keep your email, the name you give (optional), the amount, the method, the tip you chose, the charity or fund, the date, and the record of where the money went. We keep this for as long as you have an account and for seven years after your last gift, because tax records must be kept that long. Your payment details are collected by our partner charity's payment processor on its own pages; card and bank numbers never reach Veridonate.

Your email and name are shared with the partner charity, which issues your tax receipt and is the legal recipient of your gift, and the partner may share them with the charity you chose so it can thank you. We do not sell or rent your details to anyone, and no charity may buy access to donors.

Your account

There are no passwords. To sign in we email you a link that works once and expires in 30 minutes. A signed-in session is a cookie named vd_donor that lasts 30 days; we keep only a hash of the session token. Signing out deletes the session. Impact summaries you choose to share are reachable only by the link you share, which you can delete from your account.

Writing to us as a charity

If you use the form on a charity's page to claim it, ask to opt in or out, or send a correction, we keep your name, role, work email and message, and the decision a person made about it, as a record of what the charity asked for and when.

Staff

Our staff area is behind Google sign-in; it stores a signed cookie named vd_staff and an audit log of every decision a staff member makes about a story, an extracted result or a charity's request.

Your rights

Whoever and wherever you are, you can ask us what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. Write to the address on our About page. We answer within 30 days. Deleting a donation record is limited by the tax rules above, but everything not required by law is removed on request. If you are in California, the European Union or the United Kingdom you have these rights under law as well as by our policy, and we honor the "Do Not Sell or Share" signal, although we never sell or share for advertising in any case.

Children

The site is for adults. We do not knowingly keep anything about anyone under 18.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, we say so on the page and, for people with an account, by email.