Privacy at HamiltonIQ

There is no advertising pixel on any page of this site. We measure how the publication is doing with our own endpoint and with Google Analytics, and the only personal information we hold is an email address, and only if you gave us one.

A small first-party script records four things: a page view, a click on a related story, whether a newsletter form came into view, and a newsletter signup. Each event carries the path of the page, what kind of page it is, its topic and neighbourhood where it has one, and the host of the referring site where there is one.

It also carries whether this browser has been here before, as a coarse bucket such as first visit or two to four visits. That count lives in your browser’s local storage on your own device. No identifier is generated and none is sent.

These four measurements exist to answer four questions: which topics bring people from search, which neighbourhoods bring people back, which stories lead to a subscription, and which parts of the site search engines send traffic to. Our own script collects nothing that does not answer one of those.

We also use Google Analytics 4. It counts page views and records clicks on links to other sites, on email links and on links to the Brief, and newsletter signups, along with the standard details Google Analytics records about a visit, such as the referring site and the type of device. It sets its own first-party cookies (_ga and _ga_*) to tell one visit from another, runs with Google signals and ad personalisation turned off, and is not linked to any advertising account. Google processes that data under its own privacy policy.

• No advertising or cross-site cookies. The only cookies are Google Analytics’ own.
• No stored IP address. Our collector does not read, derive or store one, and Google Analytics 4 does not log or store IP addresses.
• No device fingerprint or advertising identifier.
• No full referring URL in our own collector, only the host it came from.
• No query strings or fragments in our own collector; those are stripped before an event is recorded.
• No cross-site tracking, and no data shared with an advertising network.

You can block both scripts with any content blocker and every page will work exactly the same. Article text does not depend on JavaScript at all.

Subscribing stores your email address, the page you subscribed from, the time you subscribed, and the consent wording shown to you at the time. That is the entire record. We do not ask for your name, address or phone number, and we do not append anything to it from another source.

The subscription record also has empty fields for topics and neighbourhoods, so that a future option to narrow the Brief does not require you to subscribe again. Those stay empty unless you set them.

We do not sell, rent or share the list. Every issue carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes the address.

The one third-party script on this site is Google Analytics, loaded from Google. Fonts are the ones already on your device, so nothing is fetched from a font service. Links to source documents go to the City of Hamilton, the school boards and the Province; once you follow one, that organisation’s own privacy practices apply.

The site is served by a hosting provider, which necessarily processes the request in order to return the page. That is ordinary server operation rather than something we collect.

To have your email address removed, use the unsubscribe link in any issue or email editor@hamiltoniq.ca. To ask what we hold about you, email the same address; for almost everyone the answer will be either nothing or one email address.

If anything on this page stops being true, we will change it here before the change takes effect, in the same way we handle a correction. See our corrections policy.