The Public Record's Privacy Policy – TPR Hamilton | Hamilton's Civic Affairs News Site
Ed Wiens
May 9, 2024
Your privacy is important to The Public Record. We don’t just say that, we mean it. Our website collects the bare minimum of information, and avoids any third-party calls to protect your privacy. Our full privacy policy is below.
Our Privacy Policy covers the use of our website, applications, and our collection of information in journalistic endeavours.
We strive to protect your privacy when visiting our website, we minimize our use of third-party plugins and embedded content to protect your privacy.
If you have any concerns about this policy, or find a third-party call that is not triggered by embedded content or fonts (Google Fonts, YouTube videos, Twitter embeds, etc.), please contact us at privacy@thepublicrecord.ca
The Public Record’s primary purpose is to make public information publicly available. We regularly collect public information, store that information, and display that information in a format that makes it easy to find. (By people, and by search engines)
We treat the information you provide to us to use or support this website as private information. We treat as public the information we receive in response to journalistic inquiry and activity, including information that we discover in our journalist activities.
Our use of journalistically obtained information is described in our Code of Ethics and Journalistic Practice.
Remember that any information you share in public areas, such as The Public Record comments area, becomes public and therefore this Privacy Policy does not apply to any information you choose to make public. We encourage visitors to be cautious about what they disclose and that they do not post any personal information that they expect to keep private.
When visiting ThePublicRecord.ca, the IP address used to access the site will be logged along with the dates and times of access. This information is purely used to analyze trends, administer the site, track users movement and gather usage information for internal use. Any recorded IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information.
The Public Record operates all our pages via HTTPS to protect your privacy. This means your Internet Service Provider is able to see that you are visiting The Public Record but not the page you are visiting. Some of our older content, such as photos, is served via HTTP (not HTTPS), we are working to correct this over time.
All of our pages which collect information are fully HTTPS compliant.
The Public Record uses Stripe as our payment processor for monthly patron subscriptions. Stripe is a security payment processor that meets the highest standards of security.
We do not store any of your payment information or process any of your payments on our servers.
Therefore, any information regarding your payment processing and security must be verified in Stripe’s own Terms of Service Agreement and Privacy Policy.
Stripe may provide us with unique authentication tokens to make payments requests with. The payment processor ‘Stripe’ may also provide us with information such as your name, credit card type, expiration date, and the last four digits of your credit card number. This information is used only to verify your information in the event you make a request related to your payment.
In addition, we may also request and receive any payment history between the user and The Public Record.
The Public Record cannot view and does not store your credit card details.
The Public Record uses Indiegogo for our crowdfunding campaigns. Indiegogo’s privacy policy is here.  Indiegogo provides us your name, email, and the amount you contribute.
All payments on Indiegogo are processed by Stripe.
Our newsletter service provider is MailChimp. We collect subscribers emails, and if they choose to provide their name. Mailchimp provides mail tracking analytics, which use to measure and improve our newsletters.
Mailchimp’s Privacy Policy can be found here.
The Public Record uses Google Fonts (Privacy FAQ on Google) to increase the speed of page loading.
We regularly embed videos from YouTube, YouTube’s privacy policy can be found at www.youtube.com/t/privacy_at_youtube.
While we generally avoid using third party embeds, preferring to link instead, there are times we do use third-party embeds. We are not responsible for the privacy policies on these websites. You should be aware that the privacy policies of these sites may differ from our own.
We have included links on this site for your use and reference. We are not responsible for the privacy policies on these websites. You should be aware that the privacy policies of these sites may differ from our own.
The Public Record uses WordPress as our content management system. When you comment, we log your IP address, and the name and email address you enter with your comment.
We use this information to whitelist some commenters, and to moderate comments. Some IPs are blacklisted.
The contents of this statement and our Privacy Policy may be altered at any time, at our discretion.