Privacy

The short version: we keep almost nothing, and we do not sell, rent, or fingerprint your attention for advertising. A publication that profiles its readers is not a publication; it is a cage with a masthead.

What we collect

• Your IP address — hashed, and only to stop abuse. When you post a comment, we store a salted hash (a one-way, irreversible value) of your IP address, solely to rate-limit comment spam. We never store your raw IP address, and we cannot un-hash it. The raw IP appears in standard server logs for a short retention window and is not linked to any identity you give us.
• What you post. Your comment, tied to your sign-in account so it stays yours. We do not ask for a separate display name or email on the comment form.
• Your Google sign-in details (when you sign in with Google). We ask Google for your name, your email address, and your profile picture — and nothing else. We store them to recognize you between visits and attribute your comments. We do not post to your Google account, and we do not send your comments back to Google. You can sign out of the site at any time.
• A session cookie. A single first-party cookie that keeps you signed in and prevents a comment form from being re-posted by mistake. It is not shared and not used for advertising.

Analytics

The editors need to know what resonated. We run pageview statistics — never reader profiles:

• Self-hosted Umami. Page, referrer, browser, and IP address, collected by a script served from our own infrastructure and stored only on it. Used for aggregate reporting — how often a dispatch was read, where readers come from. Never linked to a sign-in account or a comment.
• StatCounter. An external service for independent pageview statistics (page, referrer, IP address, basic device info), in aggregate. No ad, remarketing, or goal tracking through it, and nothing is shared with it beyond the script's normal pageview calls.
• Google Tag Manager (carrying a Google Ads conversion tag). The page loads a GTM container, which currently fires one tag: a Google Ads conversion tag that measures the paid campaigns which drive readers to the site. On page visits it sends a measurement hit to Google (page URL and referrer), and Google sets a cookie so ad clicks can be attributed and campaign performance measured; the tag also participates in Google's remarketing collection, so Google may build audiences from site visits. We do not display ads on this site. The tag exists solely to measure, on the campaign's side, how well the paid placement works — nothing it collects is ever combined with a sign-in account, a comment, or a reader profile.
• Server access logs. Standard web-server logs (IP address, request line, timestamp) with a short retention window; the same logs feed our own raw traffic reports.

Umami, StatCounter, and the server logs produce aggregate numbers only — none of them build a profile of you or follow you across sites. The Google Ads tag is the one item that touches Google's ad infrastructure, for the reason above: measuring the campaigns that bring readers here, with no ads shown on the site itself.

What we do not do

• No ads on the site: no ad network serves our pages and no ad inventory is sold. (The only thing that touches ad infrastructure is the Google Ads conversion tag above — measurement of our own campaigns, disclosed in full.)
• No reader profiles: we do not identify, or track, which articles you read. The pageview statistics above are aggregate and never tied to a person, a comment, or a sign-in account. Dispatches also carry a lifetime view counter; no one is identified by it either.
• No sale of data, ever. The analytics above produce aggregate numbers, and nothing about a reader is sold, rented, or shared for advertising.

Comments

The Commons Floor — the comment section — is for signed-in readers. Signing in with your Google account is the only step; there is no separate membership or password to keep. A human editor reads comments; nothing is automated away. We remove comments that are harassment, spam, or dangerous, and we reserve the right to suspend repeat abusers (which also signs them out of the floor).

Contact

Questions about your data, or a request to remove your comments, go to editor@solidaritygrid.org. A person answers.