Privacy

What we don’t collect

The Public Gallery has no accounts, no sign-in, and no payments. We never ask for your name, email, phone number or address, and there is nowhere on the site to give them to us. We don’t sell data, we don’t run advertising, and we don’t use retargeting cookies.

What we do collect

Three services record technical information about your visit. Vercel Analytics counts page views and measures load speed, using no cookies and no cross-site tracking. Google Analytics records which pages were read and where the visit came from, with IP anonymization on, so your full address is never stored. Microsoft Clarity records scrolling and clicks to produce heatmaps, and masks anything you type.

Why

To find out whether the site works and whether anyone is reading it: how many people visit, which stories they read, and whether the pages load fast enough. None of it builds a profile of you or identifies you personally.

How to turn it off

Continuing to use the site is implied consent under Canadian privacy law, disclosed here. You can withdraw it with the Google Analytics opt-out add-on, by blocking cookies for this site, or by using a content blocker. Nothing on the site stops working if you do. No feature depends on being tracked.

People named in our coverage

This is separate from information about you as a reader, and it matters more. Elected officials, filed candidates, and city staff acting in their official roles are named, because their public conduct is the subject.

Members of the public who speak at a meeting are not. Their names are in the official record and the meeting video, but we don’t publish them, we don’t create pages about them, and we don’t make them searchable. They are described by the role they stated, and if they didn’t say, we say only that they spoke. More on how that works in how scores work.

Everything else

We share nothing beyond those three analytics providers and our host, Vercel. We may disclose information if required by law. Analytics data is kept according to each provider’s own retention settings; we keep no separate copy. Under PIPEDA you can ask what we hold about you, correct it, withdraw consent, or ask us to delete it, though in most cases the answer is that we hold nothing.

Questions go to sacha@publicgallery.app.