Privacy Policy

The Privacy Policy outlines the types of information we gather when you visit our website, as well as some of the steps we take to safeguard it. By using our website, you consent to our privacy policy. This online privacy policy applies only to information collected through our website and not to information collected offline.

Personally Identifiable Information

Personal information that is provided in communications to the Planning Department is subject to disclosure under the California Public Records Act and the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance. Personal information provided will not be redacted.

Members of the public are not required to provide personal identifying information when they communicate with the Planning Department and its commissions. All written or oral communications that members of the public submit to the Department regarding projects or hearings will be made available to all members of the public for inspection and copying. The Department does not redact any information from these submissions. This means that personal information including names, phone numbers, addresses and similar information that a member of the public elects to submit to the Department and its commissions may appear on the Department’s website or in other public documents that members of the public may inspect or copy.

We do not collect personal information about you when you visit our website unless you choose to provide that information to us.

We collect limited non-personally identifying information your browser makes available automatically whenever you visit a website. This information includes the Internet Address of your computer or network, the date, time, and page you visited on our site, your browser and operating system, and the referring page (the last webpage you visited before clicking on a link to our site).

We use the aggregated information from all of our visitors to measure server performance, analyze user traffic patterns and improve the content of our site.

We sometimes track the keywords that are entered into our search engine to measure interest in specific topics, but we do not track which terms a particular user enters.

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) took effect on January 1, 2020 and applies to retail companies which:

• make over $25 million annually
• buy, sell, or collect data of 50,000 or more consumers for commercial purposes; and
• make 50 percent or more of their revenue from selling consumers’ personal information

Other details are provided in the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) Fact Sheet.

Information volunteered by you through your filling out of our optional online form(s) is used to help us enhance our web sites, and may be shared with City and County of San Francisco employees and contractors for that purpose.

We do not give, share, sell, rent or transfer any personal information to a third party, unless we have your consent.

Learn more about the California Consumer Privacy Act.

We use cookies to improve quality of our service and not to track any personal information.

The use of cookies is a standard practice among Internet websites and most Internet web browsers may be customized to reject cookies, to only accept or reject cookies by user intervention, or to delete cookies. However, some features may not function properly without cookies.

We use a tool called "Google Analytics" to help understand how visitors interact with our website so that the site can be improved. This site has activated the "Anonymize visitors IP address" setting, which tells Google Analytics to anonymize the information sent by the tracker objects by removing the last octet of the IP address.

You can read Google Analytics Terms of Use and the Google Privacy Policy for Google Analytics.

You can choose not to have your data collected by Google Analytics by downloading their opt-out browser add-on.

The City and County of San Francisco Planning Department website uses link and search capabilities to navigate publicly available information from dozens of agencies that are not part of the City and County of San Francisco, and over whom the City exercises no control.

The privacy policies and procedures described here do not necessarily apply to those sites. We suggest contacting these sites directly for information on their data collection and distribution policies.

While links that are created on this website (exclusively for this website) are checked for accuracy and reliability, links to external websites (including other City and County of San Francisco websites) may occasionally "break" and create a "file not found" or similar error message. This can occur if the external website has not provided redirects (the old link is directed to a newer link), or the website has removed a link or webpage completely. The San Francisco Planning Department is not responsible for link errors on external websites, but on occasion will review the reliability of links on this website in an effort to fix any errors.

We monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information or to otherwise cause damage to the site. Anyone using this website expressly consents to such monitoring.

We take appropriate security measures to protect unauthorized access, alteration or destruction of data.