Full control of your signatories' information

You choose what is asked

When you create a petition, the Signatories section offers two starting points. "Popular choices" asks for first name, last name, city, country, email and an optional comment. "Define manually" lets you build the form yourself: every field has three settings, Required, Optional or Not asked.

The fields you can turn on are first name, last name, city, country, street address, postal code, state, email, phone number, a comment and a drawn signature, plus up to three questions of your own. You can change all of this later: open your petition, choose "Edit" in the petition menu, and the same form builder is there.

What you see that visitors do not

Open the signatures page of your petition. A visitor sees the name, the city and the country. As the petition author you also see, for every signature:

• the email address, and whether it has been confirmed
• whether the signatory wants email about updates to this petition
• the phone number, street address, postal code and state, when the form asked for them
• the answers to your own questions, including the ones you set to be visible to you only
• the signatories who asked not to be listed publicly

The "Search signatures" button on the same page finds a single signatory by name, or by email address when the petition collects email addresses.

A concrete example

A residents' association collects signatures against a planned road. The chair wants to call the people who offered to speak at the council meeting, so the form asks for a phone number as an optional field and adds one question of its own: "Would you be willing to speak at the hearing?" Both answers are visible on the signatures page and in the downloaded file, and neither is ever shown publicly.

Why this matters

A petition is only as useful as the contact you can make afterwards. If the service keeps the email addresses for itself, the campaign ends the day the petition closes. Here the signature list is yours: you can read it, search it, download it as a file and hand it to the decision-maker. The people who signed stay reachable as long as they agreed to be reached.

Limits worth knowing

• The privacy policy we create for your petition bases every purpose on the signatories' consent. We recommend asking for consent for every purpose, so that nobody is surprised, disappointed or upset by how their information is used. If you rely on another legal basis, such as legitimate interest, publish your own privacy policy, link it to the petition and document your balancing test.
• You may keep the personal data only while your chosen retention period lasts.
• A co-manager sees the contact details only if you grant the right "View all signatures, also those not shown publicly", and downloads them only with "Download and print the signatures".
• Ask for as little as you need. Every extra required field costs you signatures.
• Once the signatures have been anonymized, the personal data is gone for everyone, including you.