Mid Island News is a reference site that is read, not signed in to. The pages do not ask visitors for any personal information, and nothing on the site sets up an account, a profile or a tracking record. This page sets out what that means in practice.

Who is responsible

Mid Island News is run by its author, Waldo Swift, 3423 4 Ave S, Lethbridge, Alberta T1J 0G7. Questions, requests and complaints about this page go to [email protected].

What the site does not do

  • It sets no cookies and writes nothing to the browser's local or session storage.
  • It has no sign-up, comment, search or contact form. No text a visitor types is sent to the site.
  • It runs no analytics, advertising or social-media scripts, and it loads no tracking pixels.
  • It embeds nothing from other websites. Fonts, images, charts and scripts are all served from the site itself, so reading a page does not send a request to a font service, a video host or an advertising network.
  • It does not ask for a visitor's location, camera or microphone.

What the pages do run

A few small scripts handle the menu, the "On this page" list, the scroll-to-top button and the fade-in of article cards. They work only inside the visitor's own browser and do not send anything back. Each page also carries structured data in its source, in a form search engines read, which describes the article, its author and its sources.

What any web server receives

Like every website, the server that delivers these pages receives the address of the page requested and the visitor's IP address in order to send the page back. The pages themselves do not record, store or read that information. Whatever ordinary logs the hosting provider keeps on its own servers are outside the content and code of the site.

Email and post

The contact page lists an email address and a postal address. A message sent to [email protected] goes to the site's author, Waldo Swift, and includes whatever the sender chooses to write, together with the sender's email address. The site has no newsletter or mailing list, and no form that collects an address.

Access, correction and deletion

The only personal information the site can hold is what a person chooses to send by email or post. A sender can ask to see what is held about them, ask for a correction, or ask for the message and any reply to be deleted, by writing to the contact address. A complaint about how personal information is handled can be taken to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, which oversees Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act. The site does not sell or share correspondence with other organizations.

Articles end with a list of sources, and many of those entries link to pages run by governments, councils, newspapers and other organizations. Those sites have their own privacy practices. Following a link leaves Mid Island News, and nothing is passed along with the visitor except what the browser normally sends when it opens any link.

RSS feed

The site publishes an RSS feed at /rss.xml. A feed reader fetches that file directly. The site keeps no list of who subscribes.

Changes to this page

This page describes the site as it is built. Anything added later that collects or stores visitor information, such as analytics or a form, would need to be reflected here. Questions about it go to [email protected]. The contact page has the postal address.