Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 20, 2026

Leanwise is operated by Extant 2000 LLC, a Virginia limited liability company. This policy describes what the Leanwise website and browser extension collect, what they do not, and how to reach us.

The short version. Leanwise has no accounts, no passwords, and no payments. We do not ask who you are. The browser extension does send the domain of the site you are viewing to our server so it can look up that company — that is the main thing worth understanding, and it is explained in full below.

1. Availability — United States only

Leanwise is offered only to people located in the United States. Access from outside the United States is blocked at our network edge, and the service is not directed to or intended for individuals in any other country.

2. What the website collects

Company searches

When you search for a company, we store the search term (the company name), the election cycle, the time, and the resulting totals in our database. This is a cache: it makes repeat lookups fast and avoids hammering the government APIs we rely on.

Recent searches are public. Leanwise publishes a list of recently searched companies, including timestamps. It contains company names only — never your IP address, your identity, or anything linking a search to the person who ran it. But it is genuinely public, so treat a Leanwise search the way you would treat a public post: do not search anything you would not want listed.

Analytics

We use Pulse, our own self-hosted analytics, to count page views and understand which features get used. It is served from crm.hitthosting.com, a system we operate ourselves — your analytics data is not sent to Google Analytics or any third-party advertising network. If you arrived from one of our marketing emails, Pulse may associate your visit with that email so we can tell which messages were useful.

Server logs

Our web servers keep standard access logs, which include IP addresses, timestamps, requested URLs, and browser user-agent strings. These are used for security, abuse prevention, and debugging.

What the website does not collect

No accounts, usernames, or passwords — there is nothing to sign up for
No payment or financial information
No advertising or cross-site tracking cookies

3. What the browser extension collects

This is the part that deserves the most attention, so it is spelled out precisely.

The domain of sites you visit

To show a political-lean badge, the extension reads the hostname of your active tab (for example example.com) and sends it to our server to look up that company. This happens automatically as you browse — when you switch tabs and when a page finishes loading.

These automatic badge lookups are read-only. They check our existing cache and never create a new database record, so ordinary browsing is not written down anywhere.

Opening the popup is different. When you click the Leanwise icon to open the panel, we perform a full lookup, and the company name derived from that site is recorded in the search cache described above — the one whose recent entries are public. The record contains the company name and a timestamp, not your identity. Still: if you would rather a site not appear in that list, do not open the popup on it.

What the extension explicitly does not do

It does not read the content of pages you visit — it has no content scripts and cannot see the text, images, or data on a page
It does not capture keystrokes, form entries, passwords, or anything you type
It does not read your browsing history or your bookmarks
It does not see full URLs — only the hostname, never the path, query string, or page fragment
It does not build a profile of you, and it has no advertising or third-party trackers

The extension also uses local browser storage purely to cache results so it does not re-request the same site repeatedly. That cache stays on your device. Uninstalling the extension removes it.

4. Information about other people in our data

Leanwise displays campaign-finance and lobbying records published by the U.S. Federal Election Commission and the U.S. Senate Office of Public Records. Federal law requires those bodies to publish certain donor information, which can include individuals' names, employers, cities, and contribution amounts.

We did not gather this information and we cannot amend it — we display public records as published. If you believe a record about you is wrong, the correction has to come from the source: contact the FEC or the filer who submitted it. Once corrected at the source, the change flows into Leanwise as our cache refreshes.

Company-to-donor name matching is fuzzy and imperfect. Leanwise shows money flow, not endorsement, and it is not evidence of any individual's political beliefs.

5. We do not sell your data

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We share data only with the infrastructure providers that run the service (see below), or where we are legally required to.

6. Service providers

OVH US — application and database hosting, Warrenton, Virginia
Cloudflare — DNS

Leanwise queries the FEC and Senate lobbying APIs to retrieve public records. Those requests come from our servers, not from your browser, so those agencies do not receive your IP address.

7. Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit with TLS. The service runs behind a web application firewall (ModSecurity) and intrusion detection (CrowdSec), and is hosted in the United States. No online service can promise perfect security, and we do not claim any certification we have not obtained.

8. Retention

Cached search results and committee details are kept indefinitely so the service stays fast, and are refreshed as underlying government data changes. Server access logs are rotated on a rolling basis. Because we do not collect accounts or identifiers, there is no personal profile to delete.

9. Your privacy rights

We extend the following rights to everyone who uses Leanwise, regardless of where you live and regardless of whether a particular state privacy law applies to us:

Know what personal data we hold about you
Get a copy in a portable, machine-readable format
Correct inaccurate data
Delete your data

Exercising any of these will never result in worse treatment. In practice, Leanwise holds very little that is tied to you — most requests will be answered by explaining what is in our logs. Email privacy@extant2000.com. We may need to verify your identity first, and we will respond within 45 days.

10. Children

Leanwise is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

11. Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. Material changes will be noted on the site.

12. Contact

Questions about this policy or about privacy generally: privacy@extant2000.com

Extant 2000 LLC
7051 Brookfield Plz
Springfield, VA 22150
United States