Privacy Policy

What this page is for

AKRON SCORE is free to read and paid for by advertising, which means data about your visit passes through more hands than we would like. This page says whose hands, what they receive, and how you stop most of it. We have tried to write it in plain language rather than in the dialect these documents usually arrive in.

You do not need to give us anything to read a story. There is no account to open, no registration wall, and no email address demanded before a breaking update. Most of what is collected is not a dossier about you, it is a record of requests and pages, a distinction that matters a good deal less to advertising technology than it should.

What we collect

Log data arrives whether or not anyone intends it. Our host and content delivery network record the IP address making each request, the browser it reports itself as, the page you asked for, where you arrived from, and the time. That is simply how a web server works, and it is how we tell a genuine traffic surge on a big story from a script hammering the site.

On top of that sit analytics, an email address if you subscribe to a newsletter, and whatever you choose to put in a message to us. Advertising is the noisy part. The ad server and the exchanges bidding on our inventory set their own identifiers, cap how often a given advertisement reaches you, and, where you have consented, select advertisements from a profile built elsewhere on the web. We run no device fingerprinting and never ask for your precise location.

Why we process it, and on what legal basis

The purposes are short to list. Serve the site and keep it standing when a major story multiplies our traffic in minutes. Count readers, because knowing which stories are actually read is how a small team decides what to cover next. Send newsletters that people asked for. Guard against abuse and invalid ad traffic. Sell and serve advertising. Keep the narrow records the law requires us to keep.

Under the GDPR and its equivalents, consent covers analytics, advertising and newsletters, and withdrawing it costs you no articles. Legitimate interest covers server logs, security and aggregate measurement, because a site that cannot see its own traffic cannot stay online. Legal obligation covers the small remainder. Nothing here feeds an automated decision about a person, because we do not make decisions about people. We publish stories.

Who else receives it, and where it travels

We list recipients by category, because the specific companies change and a list frozen in prose is stale within a quarter: our host and delivery network, our analytics provider, the ad server and the programmatic exchanges with their downstream partners, the newsletter service, and, rarely, an adviser or an authority acting on a valid legal order.

Real-time bidding fires a request at many companies at once, and we will not pretend we can name every one from memory. The consent manager holds the list that is actually current for your session. Your email address is not sold, swapped or rented, and we do not identify our sources to anyone. Because these providers run servers in several countries, your data is processed outside the country you are sitting in. Where data covered by European or comparable law crosses a border without an adequacy finding, the transfer runs on standard contractual clauses or another approved mechanism. No legal instrument makes a foreign server local, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Cookies and the consent banner

Strictly necessary cookies keep the site working and remember the choice you made at the banner. Analytics, preference and advertising cookies wait for your consent where the law requires it, and refusing them breaks nothing you came here to read. The categories, who sets them, how long they last and how to change your answer are set out at length in our cookie policy. If you clicked through the banner quickly, the consent manager reopens from the footer on every page, and your new answer replaces the old one.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct, delete or restrict it, object to processing we run on legitimate interest, withdraw a consent, and take what you gave us in a portable form. You can complain to your data protection authority without coming to us first. Write to support@akronscore.org with PRIVACY at the front of the subject line, and we answer within the period the law allows, usually a month.

One limit, stated plainly. Where a request is really an attempt to erase or rewrite published journalism, data protection law in most places carves out journalism, and we treat the matter as a question of accuracy instead. If a story is wrong about you, that is a correction, and our corrections policy says what happens next.

California and similar regimes

If you are covered by a state privacy law such as California’s, you can know what we collect and disclose, have it corrected or deleted, opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, limit the use of sensitive information, and not be treated worse for exercising any of it. We take no money for handing over anyone’s personal information, but serving behaviourally targeted advertising still counts as sharing under these statutes, so we treat it that way rather than argue about wording. Use the Do Not Sell or Share control in our consent manager, and we honour the Global Privacy Control signal, which is quieter and more effective than any button.

How long we keep things, and children

Delivery and server logs are held for around thirty days, then discarded or reduced to counts with no identifier attached. Event-level analytics is capped in the provider’s settings at fourteen months. A newsletter address stays until you unsubscribe, after which a minimal suppression record survives so we do not email you again by mistake. Aggregate reports that contain nothing about any individual are kept indefinitely.

This is a general-news site for adults. It is not directed at children, we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age set by your local law, and there are no games or rewards here built to coax a child into handing over an address. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child has given us something, write with PRIVACY in the subject and we will delete it and confirm.

Changes, and where to write

When this policy changes in a way that affects you, the date below moves and a short note sits at the top of the page for a while saying what shifted. Where the law requires fresh consent, we ask again rather than treat an old click as permanent. The rules governing your use of the site itself are separate and live in our terms of service. Everything here routes to one address, support@akronscore.org, and other ways to reach us are on our contact page.

Last updated: August 2026