Privacy Policy

Reading the site

No account is needed and none exists. We run no third-party ad networks, no tracking cookies, and no third-party services. Any sponsorship or promotional placement the Reel carries is local, plainly labelled, and chosen and placed by us, never by a tracking system: no ad network is involved, nothing follows you around the web, and a placement never affects what we cover (see our support page). For usage statistics we run our own privacy-respecting, cookie-free analytics (see below): every request your browser makes stays on antigonishreel.ca, including the analytics, which we proxy through our own domain and host on our own hardware in Canada (we host our own fonts for the same reason). The site is hosted in Canada.

Like nearly every website, our server keeps standard technical logs (IP address, page requested, browser type) for security and troubleshooting. These are rotated and discarded automatically and are not used to profile readers.

One cookie supports form submissions (a CSRF token, a standard protection against forged requests). It expires within 24 hours, identifies nobody, and is not used for tracking. A second cookie exists only for the site operator's admin login.

When you send us something

Five surfaces accept submissions, and all work the same way:

• Contact form: your message, plus a name and a way to reach you if you choose to give them. Anonymous messages are welcome.
• Event submissions: event details, plus an optional contact name and email so we can follow up.
• Ask a Local: your question and an optional way to reach you.
• Obituary listing removal requests: your reason, plus optional name, relationship, and contact details.
• Yard sales: the address of the sale, its dates and times, an optional name and note, and a contact email. This one is different from the others, because the address is meant to be published. See below.

With each submission we also record the IP address it came from. That is our spam and abuse defence, nothing more.

What we do with it: respond to you, review the submission, and publish what is meant to be public (an approved event listing, for example). Contact details are never published, never sold, never shared with anyone outside the service, and never used for marketing. We would disclose information only if required by law.

How long we keep it: personal information in a submission, including contact-form message text, contact details, and IP addresses, is automatically and permanently deleted 90 days after your submission is dealt with, or 180 days after it arrived, whichever comes first. Content that was meant to be published (an approved event listing, a published answer to a local question) stays up as part of the public record of the site. Yard sales are the exception in the other direction: the whole row is deleted, published content included. See below.

Email submissions

You can also send us a submission by email: general submissions to submit@antigonishreel.ca, or event notices to events@antigonishreel.ca. We record the sender's address, the subject and body of the message, and any image or PDF attachments, for the same reason as the forms above and under the same rule: a person reads every email before anything from it goes on the site.

To help draft a submission from what you sent, we use a third-party AI service (Anthropic) to read the email and propose a title, a date, or a summary. This step never decides what gets published, never approves anything, and never sends a reply on its own -- a person does all of that, from the email itself. A message from an address we do not already recognize, sent to events@, is held for a person to look at before this step runs at all.

How long we keep it: an email submission sent to submit@ using a known contributor's routing code is kept for 12 months after we finish reviewing it, whether or not we publish it. Everything else sent by email is kept for 90 days from when it arrived -- anything sent to events@, whoever sent it; a message from an address we do not recognize; or one from a blocked sender.

Yard sales, and publishing an address

A yard sale listing is the one place on the Reel where we publish a private home address on purpose, so it is worth setting out plainly.

What is published: the address you give us, the dates and times, the optional name and note, and a pin on a public map that we place ourselves from the address. It appears on the yard sales page, on that map, and in the Reel's round-up articles. Anyone on the internet can see it, and search engines may keep their own copy after we take a listing down, which is not something we can undo for you.

Why we can publish it: because you asked us to. The form will not accept a listing without a ticked box confirming that you are holding the sale, or have the owner's permission, and that you want the address published. We store that confirmation together with a record of the exact wording you agreed to, so that what you were shown at the time can be established later. Nothing is published automatically: every listing is reviewed by a person first.

Your contact email is never published. It exists so we can reach you if something about the listing needs checking, which is also how we deal with a listing that looks like it was posted by somebody other than the seller.

Taking one down: ask us and we will remove it, usually the same day. You do not need a reason. We can also remove a listing on our own initiative, and we will if we have any doubt that the person who posted it had the right to.

How long we keep it: a yard sale has no lasting value once it is over, so the whole record is deleted rather than archived. Rejected listings go 30 days after we review them. Published ones go 60 days after the sale ends, or 90 days after we reviewed them, whichever comes first. Listings that were never reviewed go after 90 days. Contact details on anything still present at 180 days are erased as a backstop.

Obituary listings

The Reel indexes death notices already published by local funeral homes: the name, the dates, and a link to the funeral home's own page. We store and republish nothing else. Family members or funeral homes can have a listing removed using the "request removal" link on any entry, or by emailing us. Removal requests are treated as sensitive: contact details are visible only to the operator, access is logged, and the same deletion schedule applies.

Content from public sources

Most of what the Reel shows (events, notices, weather, road conditions) is gathered from public sources and credited to them. If something about you appears in aggregated content and you want it corrected or removed, use the contact form (choose "correction" or "privacy") or email us. See our Terms of Use for the correction and takedown process.

Analytics

We use Plausible Analytics, a privacy-respecting tool we run ourselves on our own hardware in Canada. It measures overall site usage, such as which pages are visited, roughly how many people visit, and which outbound links or file downloads are clicked, without cookies and without collecting or storing any personal information about you. There is no cross-site tracking, no advertising technology, and no visitor profiles. Visitor counts come from a one-way fingerprint that rotates daily, cannot be reversed, and is discarded each day. The analytics script and the data it sends are served from antigonishreel.ca itself, so nothing goes to any outside company, and we keep no server access logs for the analytics requests.

Your rights

You can ask what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it: email info@antigonishreel.ca. We will respond within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with our handling of your personal information, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (priv.gc.ca).

Changes

Changes to this policy will be posted on this page with a new effective date. We will not weaken the commitments above retroactively.