Privacy

What we collect

Nothing.

There is no form on this site, no signup, no petition, no comment section and no login. There is nowhere to type your name, your address or your email address, so we never receive any of them.

We set no cookies. This site stores nothing on your device.

We do count things, which is a different matter from collecting things about you: how many people load a page, and how many press a button. Both are described below.

The button that emails Town Council

It is worth being precise about this one, because it would be reasonable to assume otherwise.

The button opens the email program on your own device with a message already written. You can change any of it, and nothing is sent until you send it. It goes from you to Council. It does not pass through this site. We never see it, never receive a copy, and have no way of knowing whether you sent it.

Counting visits

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to see how many people are reading the site and which pages they reach, because a campaign needs to know whether anyone is listening.

Cloudflare states that it uses no cookies or other storage on your device for analytics, and that it does not track people over time by IP address, browser user agent, or any other fingerprinting technique. What we see is counts: page views, which pages, roughly which country, what kind of device, and which site someone arrived from. We cannot pick individuals out of it and we cannot identify you from it.

We also count buttons. We count taps on the things that do something: the email draft, the share buttons, the phone number, the meeting links, the navigation, the buttons that enlarge a map sheet, and on the map the layer switches, the view buttons and the links out to county parcel records. The links to source documents in the article are not counted. When you tap a counted control, the page asks this site for a short address of its own, like /go/share. That request is the entire measurement. It tells us a button was pressed and nothing else: no name, no address, no marker left on your device, nothing that could be traced back to you or joined up with anything else. We do it because a campaign that cannot tell whether anyone is emailing Council is guessing, and because counting presses is the least we can collect and still know.

We keep those counts. Cloudflare deletes them after about a week, so once a day we copy them into a private file of our own. It holds a date, a button name and a number, nothing else, and there is nothing in it that could point at a person.

That is Cloudflare describing its own product rather than something we can verify from the inside. Their explanation is public if you would rather read it yourself.

Other companies your browser contacts

Loading any web page means your browser requests files from wherever they are kept, and whoever keeps them sees the request. On this site that means Google Fonts, which supplies the typefaces on every page. If you open the map, it also means unpkg, which supplies the mapping software, and Carto and ArcGIS Online, which supply the map imagery.

Each of those sees your IP address and your browser's user agent, because every web request carries them. That is how the web works rather than anything particular to this site, but we would rather tell you than let you assume otherwise. We have no arrangement with any of them and they send us nothing about you.

Links to other sites

This site links to the Town of Townsend, the Delaware Office of State Planning Coordination, New Castle County and other public bodies, mostly so you can read the source documents yourself rather than take our word for anything. Once you follow a link you are on their site, and their practices apply instead of ours.

Where the site is hosted

On Cloudflare Pages. Cloudflare handles the request when you load a page, which means it sees your IP address, as any web host does.

If this changes

The date at the top changes with it. If the site ever starts collecting anything, a mailing list or a petition for instance, this page will say so before that goes live.

Questions

Write to [email protected].