Privacy Policy

This policy covers www.truecola.org: the pages published there, the two forms on the site, the emails those forms send, and the report download. It does not cover the government agencies, data providers, and other organizations we link to. Each of those has its own policy.

The subscriber list holds email and ZIP code only. Contact, press-notice, and report-download forms collect only what a person types to have a request answered: name, email, the message or request itself, and optional context such as organization, role, or geography, the format you chose, and which AI you use. The report-download address is used only to send the report. The reader category, the format you chose, and which AI you use are recorded with the request and never change access. We never collect Social Security numbers, dates of birth, income, or any other sensitive data, on any form.

The rules for using the site itself are separate and live in the Terms of Service.

You can read every public page, including the monthly report and all 435 district pages, without signing in. There is no password and no user account. The site does not create one, and it has nothing to create one with.

Opening a public page does send a small first-party activity record to our own server so the project can see, on an operator-only board, that the site is being used. That record holds the internet address the request came from, an approximate place (city, region, and country looked up from that address), the page path and title, the referring site if the browser sent one, a coarse device class (phone, tablet, or desktop), a browser name, and an operating system name. It can also hold campaign tags from the page address (utm source, medium, and campaign), viewport width, browser language, a coarse network type, scroll depth as a percent, and click position as a percent of the viewport. Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS, TTFB, and FCP), truncated JavaScript error messages, rage-click signals (repeated clicks in one spot), and dead-click signals (clicks that did not land on a link or button) are included so staff can see whether pages are slow or broken. The record does not include your name or email address, form values, or screenshots. It does not record every keystroke. Generated labels on the operator board (for example a color mark and a two-word tag such as Bright Finch) are not real names; they are made from a random session id so staff can tell one tab from another.

The approximate place is looked up through ip-api.com, which receives only the internet address, and is cached on our host so the same address is not looked up again and again. If that lookup fails, the board may show only a country from Cloudflare, or no place at all. It does not invent a city.

Visitor totals also come from Cloudflare Web Analytics. That service sets no cookies, keeps nothing on your device, and does not follow you from one site to another. It counts page views.

The contact form is how you reach a person here. Using it is entirely your choice: nothing on the site requires it.

The full report is free. The form exists so we can email a download link that belongs to you rather than posting the file in the open.

Like any website, this one runs on a web server that keeps ordinary request logs: the internet address a request came from, the time, the page asked for, and the browser that asked. Our hosting company and the security layer in front of the site keep those records to deliver pages, diagnose faults, and hold off attacks.

The site keeps two small records of its own. A flood guard notes which internet addresses recently used the report form, allows five requests an hour from any one of them, and forgets an address an hour later. A mail log records the time, the address a message went to, and whether the mail server accepted it, so a message that never arrived can be traced afterwards.

Both forms also carry a hidden field that only automated spam scripts fill in. When it is filled, the submission is dropped and nothing about it is recorded.

Contact messages and report requests are kept as a working record, not deleted on a fixed schedule, because a question or a correction can come back months later. Download codes are removed about a month after they expire. The flood guard forgets an address after an hour.

First-party page activity is kept as a rolling log of recent visits, not as a permanent profile. Older records are dropped as new ones arrive, typically within about a day and a half. The operator board is not public.

If you would rather we did not keep the record of what you sent, ask through the Contact Us page and we will delete it.

These service providers are involved in running this site, and each one sees only what its job requires.

• Web and email hosting. The pages, the private files described above, and the mailbox the site sends from all sit with our hosting company, on a shared cPanel server. Outgoing mail leaves through that same company.
• Content delivery and security. Cloudflare sits in front of the site, carries the pages to your browser, and filters abusive traffic before it reaches the server.
• Visitor analytics. Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device.
• Approximate location. ip-api.com receives the internet address of a public-page request so the operator board can show a city or country. It is not used for advertising.

Beyond those, we hand over information only when the law genuinely requires it, when valid legal process demands it, or when it is needed to stop fraud or abuse or to protect people from harm.

• We do not sell personal data. No arrangement exists under which anyone pays us for it, and none ever has.
• We do not share personal data with third parties for their own marketing, and we do not rent, trade, or publish mailing lists.
• We do not carry advertising. Nothing here builds an advertising profile or targets ads at you anywhere else.
• We do not create user accounts, so there is no password of yours for this site to hold or to lose.
• We do not ask for financial account numbers, medical information, or government identification numbers, and we would rather you did not send them through a form.

Public pages set no cookies of this site. They do write one value in session storage: a random session id named tc_pulse_sid, used only so the operator board can group page views from the same browser tab. Closing the tab clears it. The site still puts nothing in local storage on public pages.

The operator-only activity board, which is not a public page, uses a session cookie after a staff username and password are entered so that board stays signed in for that browser session.

It does save a copy of itself. A service worker keeps recent pages, the monthly data file, and the design assets in the browser cache so the site still opens when the connection does not. That copy is site content, not information about you: it stays on your device and is never sent back to us.

Clearing site data in your browser removes it. If you added TrueCOLA to a home screen from the app page, deleting the icon and its data does the same. The install button there remembers nothing between visits; it asks the browser each time whether TrueCOLA is already installed.

TrueCOLA is a general audience research publication. It is not directed at children, it carries nothing aimed at them, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from a child under 13. If you believe a child sent us something through a form, tell us and we will delete it.