Privacy Policy - New Britain Progressive

As a small, community organization, we, at the New Britain Independent Newspaper, Inc., which publishes the New Britain Progressive, do not think we are even required to have a privacy policy, but we want to make sure that we act with the ethics that we hope others do, as well.

We are a not-for-profit, volunteer, community organization, so, unlike Facebook, for example, we have zero interest in generating profit from gathering and trading on personally identifiable information about our individual readers’ and viewers’ use of our newspaper’s website. We do use various commonly used social media and other web services as part of our news service organization. Since, we are an all-volunteer organization, we are just as concerned that they follow ethical privacy policies on the use of our own personal information as you are, and we rely on the trust that they do so with information that our organization has and uses.

Other than in research related to news reporting, it is generally only when someone contacts us that we would know their name, email address and other personally identifiable information that comes to us because they actually communicated with us. People would generally know the personally identifiable information we receive because they voluntarily gave it to us.

In any event, generally, other than for news research and reporting, the only reasons we would receive or keep any of this personally information about you is:

1. First, obviously, for us to contact you, generally because you asked us to. If you sent any communication, we would have whatever information was provided in your message.
2. To send you our E-Mail Edition, if you asked to receive it.
3. If you donated to our organization (and by the way, thank you, again), we would know any information you provided to us. But we do not receive or keep any credit card, checking account or other such information from online donations. The services that we use (PayPal and Causevox) do not provide us with that information, which we prefer. If you donated by paper check, we would have that information as part of our financial and banking records.
4. If you contacted us about community events for our Weekly Events articles, we would have whatever information provided in that communication. We only use information submitted via our Community Events form to verify information submitted in the form. Names and email addresses are not transferred from submissions of that form for any other use.
5. Also, if you bought an ad in the New Britain Progressive, we would keep information that you provided to us related to that transaction. We use that information related to banking, accounting and taxes.
6. Information that is incidental to our use of web services, that we do not plan to use.

As a newspaper and media organization, it is important to us to protect information about our readers, viewers, volunteers, supporters and advertisement purchasers. As a small, volunteer news and media organization that reports, quite frankly, about powerful people and institutions, it is important to us to protect information about our writers and other content producers, unless they want their identities known. We will resist even governmental attempts to access information we have about people who ask to be on a subscriber list, or who volunteer for, donate to or otherwise support our organization. We will resist even governmental attempts to access information we have about people who contact or communicate with us, with the exception, of course, being information gathered and that we may publish as part of our function of reporting news. Other than the content of published advertisements, we will only disclose information about those who advertise with us in accordance with applicable tax laws. While we, of course, will use information about our readers, viewers, donors and other supporters and advertisement purchasers for the news and media services provided by our organization and the internal work of our organization, we will not otherwise transfer the information about the people who contact us, or who donate to or advertise with our news organization to any business or organization outside our organization for any commercial, charitable or political purpose.

We do use web-based services, including cloud services, to do our work and keep our data. We refer to their privacy policies concerning data that is collected.

We may use web services to make our website work better, to protect it from malicious attacks and for general web use statistics (such as from Google Analytics), but (except for contact information users voluntarily send to us) those services do not provide us with personally identifiable information. Services that we use might use cookies, but do not provide us with personally identifiable information from them. We use YouTube videos as part of our news service, which are embedded in some of our articles. Our web host and cloud services that we use have IP address data on site visitors. We use MailChimp to keep our subscription lists for and to send our E-Mail Edition and Google Forms and SurveyMonkey for forms and web-based surveys.

Of course, it should go without saying that any information that people disclose on publicly available social media, including on any social media or pages on those platforms related to our organization, may be available to anyone, based upon the privacy policies of those social media platforms, and, for the use of those platforms in any way, we refer to their privacy policies. Also, when web services that we use allow people to voluntarily make their names or other information public, people can expect that this information will be available in accordance with those web services’ privacy policies.

By the way, when we refer to “we”, “us”, etc. or to our organization, in addition to the New Britain Independent Newspaper, Inc., we refer to our officers, board members, editors and other volunteers to the degree that they are acting in their formal roles for the New Britain Independent Newspaper, Inc. or on management of our website or our organization’s web service accounts where information this privacy policy concerns are kept.

While, in the interwoven world of the web, this will not include all of the web services we might use, here are some privacy policies and statements for your information:

The privacy statement from PayPal can be found at https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-full.
The privacy policy for Causevox can be found at https://www.causevox.com/tos/#privacy.
Though it covers other services that we do not use, the privacy policy that covers Google Analytics and how Google uses data can be found at https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. How Google uses cookies can be found at https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies/. The use of Google services is under Google’s privacy policy at https://policies.google.com/privacy.
Though it covers other services that we do not use, the privacy policy provided by the company providing Jetpack and Akismet services can be found at https://automattic.com/privacy/.
MailChimp’s privacy practices can be found at https://mailchimp.com/legal/.
SurveyMonkey’s privacy policies can be found at https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/legal/privacy-policy/.
We allow users to share content via social sharing buttons, including from the Sassy Social Share plugin, which describes privacy policies here: https://support.heateor.com/gdpr-and-our-plugins/.

If you have any questions about our privacy policies, just ask by emailing to newbritainindependent@gmail.com.

Thank you very much for reading, viewing and participating in the New Britain Progressive !