Effective Date: 05/24/2025
1. Introduction
Carroll County Observer (“we,” “our,” or “us”) is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you visit our website https://carrollobserver.com, including any other media form, media channel, mobile website, or mobile application related or connected thereto (collectively, the “Site”).
2. Information We Collect
We may collect information about you in a variety of ways. The information we may collect on the Site includes:
- Personal Data: Personally identifiable information, such as your name, shipping address, email address, and telephone number, and demographic information, such as your age, gender, hometown, and interests, that you voluntarily give to us when you register with the Site or when you choose to participate in various activities related to the Site.
- Derivative Data: Information our servers automatically collect when you access the Site, such as your IP address, browser type, operating system, access times, and the pages you have viewed directly before and after accessing the Site.
- Financial Data: Financial information, such as data related to your payment method (e.g., valid credit card number, card brand, expiration date) that we may collect when you purchase, order, return, exchange, or request information about our services from the Site. All financial information is stored by our payment processor, Stripe, and you are encouraged to review their privacy policy and contact them directly for responses to your questions.
3. Use of Your Information
Having accurate information about you permits us to provide you with a smooth, efficient, and customized experience. Specifically, we may use information collected about you via the Site to:
- Process your transactions and send you related information, including purchase confirmations and invoices.
- Manage your account and provide you with customer support.
- Send you technical notices, updates, security alerts, and support and administrative messages.
- Respond to your comments, questions, and requests, and provide customer service.
- Monitor and analyze trends, usage, and activities in connection with our Site.
4. Disclosure of Your Information
We may share information we have collected about you in certain situations. Your information may be disclosed as follows:
- By Law or to Protect Rights: If we believe the release of information about you is necessary to respond to legal process, to investigate or remedy potential violations of our policies, or to protect the rights, property, and safety of others.
- Third-Party Service Providers: We may share your information with third parties that perform services for us or on our behalf, including payment processing, data analysis, email delivery, hosting services, customer service, and marketing assistance.
5. Tracking Technologies
- Google Analytics:
We use Google Analytics to collect information about the use of our Site. Google Analytics collects information such as how often users visit the Site, what pages they visit, and what other websites they used prior to coming to our Site. We use the information to improve the Site and better understand user behavior. Google’s ability to use and share information collected by Google Analytics about your visits to our Site is restricted by the Google Analytics Terms of Service and the Google Privacy Policy.
6. Third-Party Websites and Plugins
Our Site may contain links to third-party websites, plugins, or applications. We are not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of those third parties. Interacting with third-party features, such as embedded maps, videos, or payment portals, may allow those third parties to collect or share information about you.
7. Data Security
We use administrative, technical, and physical security measures to help protect your personal information. However, no method of transmission over the internet or electronic storage is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
8. Children’s Privacy
Our Site is not intended for children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If we learn that we have inadvertently collected personal information from a child under 13, we will delete it as soon as possible.
9. Your Privacy Rights
Depending on your location, you may have the right to access, correct, or delete your personal data. You may also have the right to object to or restrict certain types of data processing. Please contact us at the email address below if you wish to exercise these rights.
10. Changes to This Privacy Policy
We reserve the right to update this Privacy Policy at any time. We will notify you of any material changes by posting the new policy on this page with a new effective date. Your continued use of the Site after changes are posted constitutes your acceptance of those changes.
11. Contact Us
If you have questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at:
Carroll County Observer
Email: editor@carrollcountyobserver.com
Who we are
Our website address is: http://carrollobserver.com.
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Who we share your data with
If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Where your data is sent
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.