Privacy

What we collect

If you never sign in

Nothing that identifies you. You can read everything on the site without an account: every story, every event, the whole directory. Saving an event to My Fairview is the one thing that needs one, because the list is kept on your account rather than in your browser, so it is there on your phone and your laptop both.

If you sign in

Accounts are handled by Supabase, and you can sign in with Google or with an email address and password. We store your email address, a display name, and a profile picture URL if your provider supplies one, along with a role that determines whether you are a reader or an editor. We also store which events you marked yourself interested in and that is what My Fairview shows you. Only you can see it. If you sign in with Google we receive your name, email address, and profile picture. Nothing else comes from your Google account, and we cannot read your Gmail, contacts, or files.

If you comment on a story

A comment is public. It shows your display name and what you wrote, to anyone reading the story, signed in or not — your email address is never shown, and neither is anything else on your account. The name comes from your profile, so changing it in My Fairviewchanges it everywhere you have commented. Delete a comment and it is gone; an editor can also remove one, which leaves a note that it was removed so the replies under it still make sense.

Advertising

A local paper has to be paid for somehow, and the way this one is built to pay for itself is advertising rather than a subscription, because a paywall on the town's own news would defeat the point of writing it.

Some pages here are built to carry advertising served by Google, through its AdSense product. Where an advertisement appears, Google and its partners may set or read cookies in your browser, and may use what they already know about your browsing to choose which advertisement to show you. That information goes to Google rather than to us: we do not see who you are, we are not told what you were shown, and we cannot target an advertisement at any particular person or household.

You can turn personalized advertising off for every site at once, not only this one, at Google's My Ad Center, or opt out of a wider set of advertising vendors at aboutads.info. Doing either does not hide anything on this site or change what you can read; advertisements simply stop being chosen from your history and start being chosen at random.

What we will not do is let an advertiser decide what gets covered. Advertising here is bought against the paper, not against a story, and nobody who buys space gets to see what is coming or to keep it out.

If you join the weekly email

We store the address you type, and nothing else. There is no name, and it is not connected to an account unless you happen to use the same address for both.

Signing up takes one step. You are on the list as soon as you enter the address, and a welcome email goes out straight away saying that this address was added. If it was not you, that email carries an unsubscribe link that works immediately and without signing in, and one click removes the address for good. Every issue after it carries the same link.

Automatically

Our host, Vercel, keeps ordinary server logs including IP addresses and request times, which is how any website stays online and defends itself.

We also measure how the site is used, in three parts:

• Our own counters. We count how many times each directory page is opened, and we keep a list of searches that found nothing, so we know what Fairview looked for and we did not have. These are totals per day. No account, session, address, or device is recorded alongside them, so they cannot tell us what any one person did.
• Vercel Web Analytics. Page counts and rough referrer and device information, without cookies and without following you between sites.
• Google Analytics, only if you agree. This one uses cookies and sends data to Google, so we ask first and it stays off until you say yes. Saying no hides nothing from you and changes nothing else about the site. We have turned off Google's advertising features and ask it not to build advertising profiles from our readers.

Your answer is remembered in your own browser. Clearing your browsing data for this site will make us ask again.

Maps. Some pages show a Google map — a place in the directory, or a story about somewhere you might go. The map is loaded from Google, so opening one tells Google your IP address and that a map was requested. It is held back until you scroll to it, so a page you never read that far down never loads one, and it is asked not to pass on the address of the page you are reading. We do not use a Google Maps account, and no map on this site is tied to you.

What we use it for

• Signing you in and keeping you signed in.
• Showing you the events and places you saved.
• Letting editors publish, and recording who published what.
• Sending editorial email to our own staff about pending stories.
• Sending the weekly email, to the people who asked for it.

That is the whole list. We do not build an advertising profile from it and we do not send you marketing you did not ask for. The advertising described above is Google's, working from what Google already knows about a browser rather than from anything we hold or hand over: your account, your saved events, your comments and your email address are not shared with any advertiser or ad network.

We do not sell your personal information, and we never have. We will not share it with anyone else except where the law requires it of us.

Children

The Fairviewian covers schools and youth sports, so children appear in our coverage. But accounts are not intended for anyone under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us and we will remove it.

Being written about

This policy covers information you give us as a reader. It does not govern our journalism. Names, photographs, and other details appear in coverage because they are newsworthy, and that is an editorial decision rather than a privacy setting. If something we published about you is wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

Your choices

• See or correct your information. Ask us and we will tell you what we hold.
• Delete your account. Ask us and we will remove it, along with your saved items.
• Drop a saved event. Open My Fairview and remove it. Deleting your account removes them all.
• Take back a comment. Delete it from the story it is on. Deleting your account removes your comments with it.
• Leave the weekly email. Use the unsubscribe link in any issue. You do not need an account, and you do not need to ask us.
• Change your mind about Google Analytics. Clear this site's data in your browser and we will ask again.
• Turn off personalized advertising. Use Google's My Ad Center. It applies everywhere you browse, not only here, and nothing on this site is hidden or withheld if you do.

Deleting an account does not retract published journalism, for the same reason a newspaper does not unprint an edition.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes and we will say so on the site rather than quietly editing it.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or deletion requests go through our contact page, which sorts them by what they are. If you would rather write directly: editor@fairviewian.com.