Privacy Statement

What we collect

We collect information in two ways. Most of it you choose to give us, in the two places described below. One thing, a count of page views, is recorded automatically for every visitor, and it has its own section further down.

• Petition signatures: your full name, your email address, and your town. A ZIP code and a comment are optional, and the form works without them. We do not ask for your street address and there is no place in this system to store one. To be plain about a limit of this: nothing verifies where you live. The town box accepts whatever is typed into it, so the signature list should be read as self-reported, not as a verified roll of Hopatcong residents.
• Contact form messages: your name, your email address, and the message you write. Your email is used to reply to you.
• Recorded automatically with both forms: the date and time, the identification string your browser sends about itself (its name and version), and a scrambled one-way code made from your IP address. See the IP address section below for what that code is and is not.
• Server logs: like nearly every website, the company that hosts this site records basic technical information about requests, which can include your IP address, browser type, the page requested, and the time. Those logs are kept by the hosting company under its own practices, not by us, and we use them only for security and troubleshooting.

If you sign a petition, your name may appear publicly

If a petition is running on this site, its form has a checkbox that says your name can be shown publicly. It is unchecked by default, and if you leave it unchecked your name is never displayed anywhere on this site.

If you do check it, your full name is published on the petition page, where anyone on the internet can read it. The page shows the 50 most recent names of people who consented. Nothing else you entered is ever published: your email address, town, ZIP code, and comment stay private in all cases, whether or not you check the box.

The total number of signatures, and the date of the most recent one, are also public. Those are counts only and are not tied to any name.

If you checked the box and later change your mind, tell us through the Contact Us page and your name will be taken off the public list.

What we do with your IP address

When you submit either form, your IP address is combined with a secret value and run through a one-way scrambling function. Only the scrambled result is saved. Your actual IP address is never written to our database.

That scrambled code exists for one purpose: to notice that many submissions are arriving from the same connection in a short period, so automated spam can be slowed down. The petition accepts up to 3 signatures per hour from one connection and the contact form accepts up to 5 messages per hour.

What we do not collect

We do not use third-party analytics, trackers, advertising pixels, or social media widgets. We do not place cookies for tracking or profiling. This site is built to serve everything it needs from its own address: the fonts, the map, the logo, and the published documents all come from this site rather than from an outside company.

We do count page views ourselves, on our own server. That is a real form of measurement and we would rather name it than let the paragraph above imply this site counts nothing. The next section lists exactly what it records.

How we count visits

We count page views so we can tell how many people find this site. The counting happens on our own server as the page is built. There is no tracking script in your browser, no cookie, and nothing is sent to any outside company.

For each page view we record five things: which page was viewed, the name of the website you came from if you followed a link (just the name of the site, never the full link, so your search terms are never stored), a scrambled code that stands in for your device, whether the visit looked like an automated search engine robot, and the date and time.

The scrambled code is made from your IP address combined with a secret value and the day's date. Your IP address itself is never saved. Because the date is part of the scramble, the code changes every night, so the same visitor cannot be followed from one day to the next. We do not record your browser or device details, your location, or your screen size.

Nothing in this record leaves our own database, and the list above is the whole of it.

Where your information goes

• Petition signatures are stored in this site's own database and are not sent to any outside company. They are used to count support and to present the petition to the Mayor and Borough Council. Signatures are not submitted to the Borough automatically.
• Contact form messages leave the database in one way, and you should know about it. So that a message is actually seen rather than sitting unread, a notification copy is sent by email through Resend, an outside email delivery company. That copy contains your name, your email address, and the full text of your message. The message is also saved in this site's database, so nothing is lost if that email fails.
• Nothing else is shared. We do not sell your information. We do not give it to advertisers, data brokers, or social media platforms. We may disclose information if we are required to by law or to protect someone's safety.

Who can read what you submit

The database refuses to hand out petition signatures or contact messages to the public at all. Reading the full records requires signing in to a single account belonging to the person who runs this site.

There are two narrow exceptions, and they are the only paths by which any petition information reaches a visitor: one that returns the signature count and the latest signature date, and one that returns only the names of people who consented to be listed. Neither can return an email address, town, ZIP code, or comment.

The page view records described above are closed in the same way. The database will not hand out an individual visit record to anyone, and the person who runs this site sees only totals: how many views a page got, how many on a given day, and which sites linked here. No single visit is ever looked at on its own.

That describes who can read your submission through this website, which is not quite the whole picture. This site runs on servers and a database operated by other companies, and staff or automated systems at those companies can technically reach what is stored on them. One setting on the hosting account currently allows the host to draw on information from this site to help diagnose problems. None of that is unusual, it is how nearly every website is built, but it is the difference between saying one person can read what you send and saying one person can read it through this site.

The documents published in the Records section are stored in a private location and are delivered through this site's own server, not from a public file link.

Traffic to and from this site is encrypted in transit.

How long we keep it

Plainly: there is no automatic deletion. Nothing on this site erases petition signatures or contact messages after a set period. A signature or message you send today stays in the database until someone removes it by hand.

We would rather say that than repeat the usual promise to keep information "only as long as necessary," which would describe a schedule that does not exist. If you want your information gone, ask, and it will be deleted.

There is one exception, and it is the one part of this site that does erase itself. The page view records described above are deleted automatically after 90 days by a scheduled job inside the database. That schedule runs on its own; it is not a promise that someone has to remember to keep.

Your choices

You can ask us to correct, update, or delete your petition signature or contact message, or to stop showing your name publicly, by reaching out through the Contact Us page. We will honor your request unless we are required to keep the information for legal reasons.

Children's privacy

This site is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe we have collected information from a child under 13, please contact us so we can remove it.

Changes to this statement

We may update this statement from time to time. The latest version will always be posted on this page with the updated date.

Contact us

If you have questions about this privacy statement or how we handle your information, please use the Contact Us page.