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ottown

Privacy Policy

What ottown collects, what it does not, and how to get your data removed. Written to describe what the site actually does.

ottown is an Ottawa city guide and news site operated from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. This page describes what we collect, why, who it is shared with, and how to have it deleted. Questions or requests go to ottownsupport@gmail.com.

The short version

  • You can read ottown without giving us anything. Email is only collected if you hand it over.
  • Our own analytics are cookieless and never store your IP address.
  • Google Analytics and Google AdSense do set cookies, and advertising cookies are the main reason cookies exist on this site.
  • We do not sell personal information.
  • Ask us to delete your data and we will, at the address above.

What we collect

Site analytics (our own)

Every page view is recorded by our own analytics, which is cookieless and does not identify you. We store the page path, referring site, UTM campaign tags, approximate country, device type, browser, operating system, screen width, how long the page was actively open, and how far down it was scrolled.

Your IP address is never stored. It is used at the moment of the request to work out an approximate country, and to compute a one-way hash that lets us count returning visitors within a single day. That hash is salted and rebuilt daily, so it cannot be used to follow you from one day to the next or to link you to anything else. Analytics records are deleted after 365 days.

Google Analytics and Google AdSense

ottown uses Google Analytics to understand traffic, and Google AdSense to show ads, which is how the site is paid for. Both set cookies in your browser, and AdSense may use them to show ads based on your previous browsing. This data goes to Google, not to us, and is governed by Google's own policies.

You can control this directly with Google: ad personalisation at myadcenter.google.com, and Google Analytics with Google's opt-out add-on. Blocking third-party cookies in your browser also works, and does not stop you reading ottown.

We also use Vercel Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights, which measure page performance and do not use cookies.

The newsletter

If you sign up for our weekly email we store your email address, the date you signed up, and a random token used for the unsubscribe link. That is all. We use it to send you the weekly email and nothing else, we do not sell or share the list, and every email carries a one-click unsubscribe. Unsubscribing deletes your record outright rather than flagging it.

The contact form

If you write to us through the collaborate form, we store the name, email address, subject and message you sent, and a copy is emailed to us so we can reply.

What we never collect

ottown has no user accounts, no login, and no comments. We do not ask for your address, phone number, date of birth or payment details, and we do not run trackers that follow you across other websites beyond the Google services described above.

Our Threads integration

ottown publishes its stories to Threads as @ottownca through an application registered with Meta. That application:

  • Publishes ottown's own posts to ottown's own Threads account.
  • Reads the public replies left on those posts. We use this to spot factual corrections readers point out, so we can fix the article. A reply's text and the public username of whoever wrote it are read for that purpose.
  • Reads the engagement statistics for ottown's own posts.

Reply text is sent to Anthropic's Claude, an AI service, to judge whether the reply is reporting a factual error and what the correct fact would be. It is used for that single decision and is not used to build any profile of you. Nothing read from Threads is sold, published, or used for advertising, and we never contact you based on it.

If you would rather your Threads reply were not read this way, deleting your reply removes it from what we can see. You can also write to us at ottownsupport@gmail.com and we will delete what we hold.

Who your data is shared with

We keep data with a small number of service providers, each doing one job:

  • Vercel — hosts the website.
  • Supabase — stores articles, newsletter subscribers and contact form messages.
  • Turso — stores the cookieless analytics described above.
  • Resend — sends the newsletter and contact form notifications.
  • Cloudflare — stores images and media used on the site.
  • Google — Analytics and AdSense, as described above.
  • Meta — the Threads, Instagram and Facebook accounts ottown posts to.
  • Anthropic — the AI service that helps write articles and reads Threads replies for corrections.

Some of these are based in the United States, so data may be stored or processed outside Canada. We do not sell personal information to anyone, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing.

Your rights

Canadian privacy law (PIPEDA) gives you the right to ask what personal information we hold about you, to have mistakes corrected, and to withdraw consent. If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, the UK GDPR and GDPR additionally give you the right to a copy of your data, to have it erased, and to object to how it is used.

To use any of these, email ottownsupport@gmail.com. We will respond within 30 days. We may ask you to confirm the request from the email address on file, so that nobody can delete someone else's data by pretending to be them.

Children

ottown is written for a general adult audience. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has sent us their information, write to us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who it goes to, we will update the date shown on this page. This page describes what the site does as of the date above, not what it might do later.

Last updated .