Privacy Policy

Last updated: November 8, 2026

Communities News, Inc., an Alaska business corporation ("we", "us", "our") operates the Communities News platform. Newsrooms run on the platform under their own community-specific domains; the first is Alaska News at alaskanews.com. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and protect your information when you use any newsroom built on the Communities News platform, and when you use Voting Monitor at votingmonitor.org, which collects much less and is described in its own section below.

1. Information We Collect#

Account Information: When you create an account on a Communities News newsroom, we collect your email address. You can sign in with a password you choose, a magic link sent to your email, Google, or Facebook. A password is stored only as a one-way hash by our authentication provider, and magic link, Google and Facebook users have none. If you sign in with Google or Facebook, we receive the basic profile that service shares: your name, email address, profile picture and an account ID. We receive nothing else from it, such as your posts, friends or activity there. If you are signed in to Google in your browser, a prompt from Google may offer to sign you in to the newsroom; if you have signed in with Google there before, it may sign you in without a click. Signing out stops that until you choose Google again.

Profile Information: You may optionally provide a display name, bio, avatar photo, timezone, and location (latitude/longitude). Location is used to personalize your feed with nearby content and to determine sunrise/sunset times for automatic light/dark theme switching.

Content You Create: Articles, reviews, comments, and photos you submit to community newsrooms or community photo galleries.

Preferences and Activity: Topics, locations, organizations, and authors you follow. Theme preference (light/dark/auto). TTS voice preferences for article audio. Saved locations for location-aware feed ranking.

Payment Information: Subscriptions and tips are processed by Stripe. We do not store credit card numbers or bank account details. We keep your Stripe customer ID, your subscription, records of tips you send or receive, and records of payouts we make to you (the amount, method and reference). If you tip without an account, we keep the email address Stripe gives us, so the tip can join an account you later sign in to with that address. Before paying you, we may record that we received a tax form from you; the form itself is not kept on the platform.

Usage Data: We collect analytics including page views and article view counts (using SHA-256 hashed IP addresses for deduplication). Each article view records whether it came from a phone or a computer and the name of the browser and operating system, such as "Safari on iOS" or "the Facebook app on Android"; we keep only those names, never the full browser identification string. Audio playback data (play events, listening duration, playback speed) is collected for analytics. External link clicks are tracked via redirect for click analytics. On our own pages we also record which page was viewed, how long it stayed open and how far it was scrolled, which of our own story links was clicked to reach a page, and which sign-in offers were shown and pressed, against the same session as article views and with no third-party scripts. When you are signed in, this activity is linked to your account, and so are the searches you run.

Photos and Videos: Photos and videos you upload are stored in our cloud storage and analyzed by AI for moderation, titles and descriptions, and search. From a photo's metadata we keep where and when it was taken and the camera; that location is visible only to the newsroom's editors, and the photo shows the town it was taken in. A video's original file is deleted once we have made the copy we publish. When you send a photo or video for a story, we also keep the story it was for, your statements about it, and the editors' decisions on it.

News Tips: When you send a news tip, we keep the tip, any files you attach (with their metadata removed), and whatever contact details you choose to give. Editors may reply to you. A tip an editor turns into a story is processed by our AI pipeline like other source material.

2. How We Use Your Information#

Provide, maintain, and improve the platform
Authenticate you by password, magic link email, Google or Facebook
Process subscriptions, tips and payouts through Stripe
Personalize your feed based on topics, locations, and authors you follow
Rank nearby content using your location (if provided)
Process community content through our AI-assisted pipeline (transcription, classification, article drafting)
Generate text-to-speech audio for published articles using your voice preference
Moderate uploaded photos using AI vision analysis
Detect and prevent abuse or unauthorized access
Communicate service updates when necessary

3. AI Processing#

The Communities News platform uses AI to assist with content creation, moderation, and accessibility. Government meeting transcripts are processed through our pipeline to extract key statements and draft articles. Uploaded photos are analyzed for content moderation and tagging. Published articles can be converted to audio using text-to-speech. All AI-assisted content is clearly labeled and passes an automated review before it can publish; human editorial review happens before or after publication depending on the story.

We do not use your personal data to train AI models. Content processing uses third-party AI services (see Section 4) solely to operate platform features for your community newsroom.

4. Third-Party Services#

We use the following third-party services to operate the platform:

Supabase and AWS: Database, authentication, and file storage
Stripe: Subscription billing and payment processing
Google: Sign in with Google, Gemini AI (classification, embeddings, image moderation, audio script preparation), Maps (place names for photos and profiles)
Meta: Sign in with Facebook, if you choose it
Anthropic (Claude): AI article drafting and review
OpenAI: Text-to-speech audio generation (standard tier), AI article review
ElevenLabs: Text-to-speech audio generation (premium tier)
AssemblyAI: Audio transcription
OpenRouter, xAI and Perplexity: AI processing of public records and newsroom content
Railway: Application hosting
Cloudflare: Delivers and protects our sites, and sends account emails: sign-in links and codes, password resets and welcome emails
Postmark: Sends the daily and weekly reader emails you choose to receive

Each provider has their own privacy policy. We only share the minimum data necessary for each service to function.

5. Data Security#

We implement industry-standard security measures including encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS), row-level security policies on all database tables, rate limiting on API endpoints, Content Security Policy headers, and private storage buckets with signed URLs for media access.

Article view tracking uses SHA-256 hashed IP addresses for deduplication. Audio files are stored in private buckets and accessed via time-limited signed URLs.

6. Cookies and Local Storage#

Essential cookies: Authentication session cookies required for login to function. A short-lived cookie to prevent hero article reshuffling during browsing sessions.

Analytics and preference cookies: A session cookie, kept for a year, ties your page views, story views and audio plays together; it identifies a browser, not a person. Other first-party cookies remember your search and sort choices.

Local storage: Your theme preference (light/dark/auto) is stored in browser local storage for instant page rendering without flash. The way you last signed in (Google, Facebook or email) is also kept there, so that button can be shown first; it records the method only, not who you are.

We do not use advertising cookies or third-party tracking cookies.

7. Data Retention#

Account data: Retained until you delete your account.

Published articles: Retained as part of the community record, even if your account is deleted. Author attribution may be anonymized upon request.

Photos: Retained until you delete them. If you delete your account, photos you published stay with the community record, credited to the name you used.

Audio playback data: Individual heartbeat records are compacted daily into summary statistics.

Tips and payouts: Kept as financial records.

API request logs: Kept for up to 90 days, then deleted.

8. Your Rights#

You have the right to:

Access your personal data
Export your articles, photos, and profile data, on request to [email protected]
Delete your account and associated personal data
Correct inaccurate information
Unfollow topics, locations, organizations, and authors at any time
Remove your location data from your profile at any time
Opt out of non-essential communications

How to delete your account: Sign in, open your settings (on Alaska News, alaskanews.com/profile/settings), choose Delete my account, and type DELETE to confirm. This deletes your account, comments, follows, settings and email subscriptions, and ends any paid subscription now, without a refund; tip shares and photo or video payments not yet paid out to you are forfeited. Your name and contact details are removed from tips you sent and news tips you sent, and your searches are deleted. If you signed in with Google or Facebook, the profile we received from them is deleted with your account. Articles and photos you published stay on the site, as section 7 describes. If you cannot sign in, email [email protected] from the address on your account and we will delete it for you. To also remove Alaska News from your Facebook account, open Facebook's Settings, then Apps and Websites, and remove it there.

California Residents (CCPA): You have the right to know what personal information we collect, request deletion, and opt out of the sale of personal information. We do not sell your personal information.

EU Residents (GDPR): You have additional rights including data portability, restriction of processing, and the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

9. Children's Privacy#

Our service is not intended for children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, please contact [email protected].

10. Data Breach Notification#

In the event of a data breach that affects your personal information, we will notify affected users within 72 hours of discovery via email and a notice on the platform. To report a security concern, contact [email protected].

11. Changes to This Policy#

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Changes will be posted on this page with an updated revision date. Continued use of the platform after changes constitutes acceptance.

12. Voting Monitor (votingmonitor.org)#

Voting Monitor measures how consumer AI products answer voter-style questions about elections. It works differently from the newsrooms, and this section is the whole of what it collects. Sections 1 to 8 describe the newsrooms and do not apply to it.

No accounts and no cookies. Voting Monitor has no sign-up, no login and no cookies. If you choose a light or dark theme, that choice is kept in your browser's local storage and never sent to us.

Visitor statistics. Pages carry Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page loads and measures page performance without cookies. We use it for visitor numbers. There is no Google Analytics or other advertising or tracking script.

Hosting. The site is served through Cloudflare (network and security) and hosted on Railway. Like any website, these services handle your IP address to deliver pages, and their logs are kept under their own policies.

Feedback form. The feedback form is currently switched off, and the site points you to email instead. When it is on, it stores your comment, an email address if you give one, the page you were on and its settings, how long you had been on the page, your browser's user agent and language, and a salted, truncated SHA-256 hash of your IP address, which is used for rate limiting. Your raw IP address is never stored.

Weekly emails to campaigns. Voting Monitor emails candidates' campaigns a weekly summary of their race. Addresses come from publicly listed campaign contacts, not from visitors, and official government addresses are excluded. The emails are sent through Google Workspace (Gmail). Each one carries an unsubscribe link, and an unsubscribe is recorded so that address is not emailed again. The text is drafted by Anthropic's Claude from the candidate's name and the race's public data; the email address is never sent to an AI model. We keep a record of what was sent to whom.

AI providers. The questions Voting Monitor asks AI models (from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI) are a fixed set of standard voter questions. No visitor information is sent to any of them.

Retention. Feedback, the record of sent emails and the unsubscribe list are not currently deleted on a schedule. Unsubscribes are kept so that we keep honoring them. To have a feedback comment or email record about you deleted, write to [email protected].

13. Contact#

Communities News, Inc. Anchorage, Alaska