Donor Lens — Privacy Policy

Last updated: April 26, 2026

Donor Lens is a Chrome extension that displays publicly reported federal political contributions on LinkedIn profile pages. The donation data is sourced from the United States Federal Election Commission's public API at api.open.fec.gov. This policy explains exactly what data Donor Lens reads, where it goes, and what is stored.

What the extension reads from LinkedIn

When you open a profile page at linkedin.com/in/<handle>, Donor Lens reads the following from the page DOM:

• The person's displayed name.
• The location text shown under the name (used to derive a U.S. state for the FEC search).
• The visible "Education" and "Experience" sections (used to suggest possible states based on schools and employers when the listed location is outside the U.S. or ambiguous).

No other parts of LinkedIn are read. The extension does not run on feeds, messages, search results, company pages, or any LinkedIn surface other than profile pages.

What is sent over the network

Donor Lens makes a single type of outbound request: a query to the FEC's public contributions API. Each query contains:

• The profile's name (transformed into FEC's LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME format).
• The state (a two-letter U.S. state code, if known).
• An API key (used by the FEC to rate-limit requests).

No LinkedIn URL, profile handle, headline, employer, school, or any other LinkedIn content is transmitted to the FEC or to any other server.

Self-hosted proxy

To avoid distributing a personal API key inside the extension bundle, Donor Lens may route its FEC queries through a small proxy server operated by the extension's developer. The proxy:

• Receives only the same parameters listed above (name, state).
• Forwards them to the FEC, attaches the API key, and returns the FEC's response.
• Does not log request bodies or response bodies. Aggregate counts (e.g., total requests per day) may be retained for capacity planning.
• Does not associate requests with any user identity. The extension does not have a user account and sends no identifier beyond the standard HTTP request metadata.

What is stored locally

Donor Lens uses Chrome's local extension storage (chrome.storage.local) to:

• Cache FEC API responses by profile, so re-visiting a profile does not re-query the API.
• Remember user-set overrides (e.g., a manually entered name or selected state for a specific profile).
• Cache derived metadata for known schools, employers, and committees, so future lookups are faster.

All of this data lives only on your computer, in your browser profile. Nothing is synced to Google, to the developer, or to any third party. You can clear all of it at any time via the extension's popup or by removing the extension.

What is not collected

• No analytics, telemetry, or crash reporting.
• No advertising identifiers.
• No IP-based geolocation. The "state" used for FEC queries comes only from the location text already displayed on the profile.
• No browsing history. The extension only activates on LinkedIn profile pages.
• No selling, sharing, or transferring of any data to third parties.

Third-party services

• FEC.gov / api.open.fec.gov. A public service of the U.S. Federal Election Commission. Their privacy practices are published at api.data.gov/about and fec.gov/about/privacy-and-security-policy.
• LinkedIn. Donor Lens reads the LinkedIn page that you, the user, are already viewing. It does not log into LinkedIn, scrape additional pages in the background, or contact LinkedIn's servers on its own. Use of LinkedIn remains subject to LinkedIn's own terms.

Children

Donor Lens is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect any data from them.

Changes to this policy

Material changes will be reflected in the "Last updated" date above and announced in the extension's release notes on the Chrome Web Store.

Contact

Questions or concerns: open an issue on the project's GitHub repository, or contact the developer at the email listed on the Chrome Web Store listing.