Privacy

The Carpenter’s Trace Journal is a neighbor-run site. You can read all of it without an account. We collect as little as the site needs to work, we do not sell or rent anything about you, and we show no ads.

Reading the site

No third-party analytics or advertising scripts, and no tracking cookies.
To count how many people read each story, we record one line per story per visitor per day. The visitor is a scrambled code made from your IP address and browser name with a secret key. We never store the address itself, and the code cannot be turned back into it.
To see which pages people read and how they found the site, the site counts page views itself. For each page you open we record the page address, the site that sent you (on your first page of the day), your country, the kind of device, browser and operating system, and how long the page was on screen. You are identified only by a scrambled code made from your IP address and browser name with a key that changes every day and is then thrown away, so visits on different days cannot be connected and the code cannot be turned back into your address. These records are deleted after 13 months. Subscribing to one of our calendars is counted the same way. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, page views are not counted at all.
Your browser remembers your light or dark theme choice, and whether you closed the scanner player. That stays on your device.

Accounts

You need an account only to post on /neighbors. When you create one we keep:

your email address and the name you give, which appears on your posts;
your password, stored only as a one-way hash, if you sign up with email;
a sign-in cookie that keeps you logged in, and with each sign-in session the IP address and browser it came from, so we can stop abuse and spot sign-ins that aren’t yours.

We email you only to confirm your address and to reset your password. Mail is sent through Amazon SES.

Signing in with Google or Apple

If you choose Google or Apple, that company tells us your name, your email address and that the address is verified. Google may also send your profile picture. We ask for nothing else: no contacts, calendar, files or other account data. Apple lets you hide your real address; if you do, we receive a relay address that forwards to you. If your Google or Apple address matches an account you already have, the two are joined. You can remove the site’s access at any time from your Google or Apple account settings.

Neighbor posts

We keep your post’s title, text and photos, the time you sent it, and the admin’s review decision.
Photos are resized and re-saved before anyone sees them, which removes hidden details such as the camera’s GPS location and the time the picture was taken.
Approved posts are public under your account name. Posts waiting for review or declined are seen only by you and the admins.
Neighbor posts are kept apart from the news, events and other material the site gathers from public sources. A removed post can stay in our content delivery network’s cache for a short while before it disappears everywhere.

Forms you send us

A correction or removal request for a scanner entry keeps your message and any contact details you choose to give. Your IP address is held in memory for an hour to limit repeat requests, and is not saved.
A copyright notice keeps the name, email, mailing address, phone number and signature that the law requires a notice to include. See the copyright page.

Services that see your visit

Cloudflare delivers the site and the live scanner audio, so it sees your IP address and the pages you request.
The neighborhood map loads its map pictures straight from OpenStreetMap.
Links to official sites, news outlets and calendar apps take you to those services, which have their own policies.

Deleting your data

You can ask us to take down any of your posts, or to delete your account and everything tied to it by writing to [email protected] from the address on your account. We act on requests within 30 days. Copyright notices and records of posts removed for copyright are kept as long as the law requires.

Children

The site is not meant for children under 13, and we do not knowingly create accounts for them.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, we will say so at the top of it.