Privacy
What this site collects, and what it does not
Some of the people reading this own the ground it is about. This page says plainly what happens to your details if you give them to us, and what your browser sends while you read.
Who runs this
The Cayuga Island Record is an independent documentary record of the contamination investigation at the west end of Cayuga Island, carried by New York State as DEC site 932008. It is not a government site. It is not affiliated with NYSDEC, NYSDOH, or the City of Niagara Falls, and nothing here is legal, medical, or real-estate advice. More about how the record is kept.
If you sign up for updates
What we ask, and where it goes
The signup form asks for a name and an email address. Everything else is optional: a phone number, whether you live in the affected area, and a free-text box for anything you want to tell us.
What you submit is sent to a Google Form and stored in a Google Sheet held in the operator’s Google Drive. Google processes and stores it on our behalf under their terms. We use it for one thing: telling you when this record changes.
- It is not sold or rented. Not to anyone, for any purpose.
- It is not passed to any agency. Not to NYSDEC, not to NYSDOH, not to the City. If you want an agency to have your details, contact them yourself — the addresses are on the For residents page.
- The free-text box is read by a person and is not published. Nothing you write there appears on this site, and no individual property is ever identified here.
- Your signup is not connected to the analytics below. The two are kept separate.
What your browser sends while you read
What loads from outside, and what gets logged
We would rather say this exactly than reassure you vaguely.
- Analytics
- Google Analytics 4
Added through the Site Kit by Google plugin, measurement ID G-XZWMHFR1SW. Your browser contacts googletagmanager.com and google-analytics.com, and two cookies are set,
_gaand_ga_XZWMHFR1SW. It records which pages are read, roughly where the reader is in the world (derived from IP address), and what browser and device they use. It is not tied to a name. - Fonts
- Two typefaces from Google Newsreader and Archivo load from fonts.gstatic.com. That request tells Google your IP address. Nothing else is sent.
- Video
- Nothing until you press play The broadcast clips are still images served from this site. Nothing is requested from YouTube until you press play, and only then does a player load from youtube-nocookie.com, at which point YouTube’s own terms apply.
- Hosting
- WP Engine Standard server logs are kept for security and troubleshooting: IP address, time, page requested, and browser.
If you would rather not be counted by the analytics, your browser’s tracking protection or Google’s own opt-out add-on will block it, and the site will work exactly the same.
What we do not do
No accounts, no comments, no advertising
There is no login, no comment section, and no advertising on this site. We do not profile readers by property, we do not attempt to work out who owns what, and we do not build a picture of any household. No one is added to the update list without asking for it.
Your choices
Asking for a copy, a correction, or removal
Write to privacy@cayugaisland.com and ask for any of the following. You do not need to give a reason.
- A copy of what we hold about you.
- A correction if any of it is wrong.
- Deletion. Your row is removed from the sheet and you stop hearing from us. We act on removal requests promptly.
Please do not send anything sensitive about your health or your property to that address. It is for questions about your details on this site only. For anything affecting your household, contact DEC or the Department of Health directly using the addresses on the For residents page.
Signup details are kept until you ask for them to be removed. Analytics data is kept according to Google’s retention settings. This site is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.
If this page changes
The date at the top is the date this was last reviewed. If what we collect or where it goes ever changes materially, this page will say so and carry the new date, in the same way the rest of the record carries its corrections.