We collect as little as we can. We don't sell personal information, we don't run ads, and we don't use advertising trackers.
Reading the site
We use privacy-focused analytics (Plausible) to count visits and see which stories are useful. It uses no cookies and doesn't collect personal information. To count returning readers without tracking you, the site saves the date of your last visit in your own browser; it never leaves your device except as an anonymous "returning visit" count.
Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, processes basic technical information such as IP addresses to deliver the site and protect it from attacks.
Weather forecasts, radar and story maps
Live county and town forecasts, the animated radar, and the maps shown on some traffic stories load directly into your browser from third-party services: the U.S. National Weather Service (forecasts and alerts), RainViewer (radar tiles, aggregated from national weather services, including the NWS), OpenStreetMap (map images) and OSRM (road geometry used to draw road-closure lines).
When these load, those services receive your IP address and standard technical request data, the same as any request a browser makes. We don't send them anything about you beyond the request itself, and nothing you read or type on our site is shared with them. Their own handling of request data is described on their sites.
Sending a tip
When you send a tip, the form is handled by Formspree (formspree.io), a third-party form service. Formspree receives what you submit (what you write, the town and time you mention, any photos you attach, and the contact details you choose to give us) and forwards it to our editors by email.
- What we keep: tips stay in our editors' email inbox and are seen only by editors. Tips are never published automatically.
- Anonymous tips: if you choose to send anonymously, we don't ask for or keep any contact details. Formspree and network providers may still keep their own technical logs, so anonymous does not mean untraceable.
- Photos: photos are stored as we receive them. If you want location data or other hidden details removed from a photo, remove them from the file before sending it.
- How long we keep tips: we delete tips and their photos after 90 days, unless a tip is part of a story we are still working on.
- Our own tip system: we are building a tip system that encrypts contact details and strips hidden photo data automatically. Until it is live, the form on this site is the Formspree form described above.
To ask us to delete a tip you sent, use our contact page.
Videos from TikTok
Some stories link to our TikTok videos. The TikTok player loads only if you choose to play the video. TikTok then handles your information under its own privacy policy.
Contact
Questions about this policy? See our contact page.