The Good Neighbor Journal

Legal

Privacy Policy

Effective date: August 6, 2026

This page explains what The Good Neighbor Journal knows about you, how it comes to know it, who else is involved, and what you can ask us to do about it. It is written the way the rest of the paper is written: in ordinary words, without the long sentences that make a policy technically complete and practically useless.

In this policy, the Journal, we, our and us mean The Good Neighbor Journal, the publisher of the website at goodneighborjournal.com, which we call the Site. You means anyone who reads it or writes to us.

The short version: we are a small publication, not a store and not a clinic. We take no payments, keep no medical records, and hold no account for you because there is no account to hold. The amount of information involved is correspondingly small, and this page is mostly a description of how small it is.

What we collect

What you hand us yourself

If you write to us — by email, or through the form on the contact page — we receive what you put in the message. That ordinarily means your email address, whatever name you sign, and the contents of the letter itself.

Please write to us as you would write to a stranger with a filing cabinet. There is no need to send us details of your health, your prescriptions or your medical history, and we would rather you did not. We cannot advise you on any of it, and the safest place for that information is with your own physician. If you do send it, we treat it as confidential correspondence and delete it on request.

What arrives on its own

Like every website, the Site is served by a computer that keeps ordinary logs. Those logs record technical facts about the request rather than facts about you: an IP address, the type and version of the browser and operating system, the page requested, the page that referred you to it, a language preference, and the date and time. This is the same information your browser hands to every site you visit, and it is used to serve the pages, keep the Site standing up, and see which articles readers actually read.

What we do not collect

We do not ask for and do not want your date of birth, your Social Security number, your bank or card details, your address book, or your location beyond the rough region an IP address implies. We do not sell anything, so there is nothing to take payment for.

We do not build a health profile of you. We do not infer conditions from the articles you read, we do not keep a list of who read what, and we do not tag readers as having any particular concern. Nothing on this Site asks you to disclose a condition, and nothing here is written about any individual reader.

What we do with it

We use what we have to answer your letter, to publish and maintain the paper, to understand in aggregate which pieces are useful, to keep the Site secure and free of abuse, and to meet obligations the law places on us. If you ever ask to receive something by email, we use your address for exactly that and stop when you ask us to stop.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not rent, trade or otherwise hand over reader correspondence for anyone else's marketing.

Cookies and similar technologies

A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to keep. Related technologies — pixels, tags, web beacons, local storage — do much the same job by other means. This section covers all of them.

The institutional pages set no advertising or analytics cookies

The pages that make up the Journal proper — the front page, the articles, About, Contact, this policy and the Terms of Use — set no advertising cookies and no analytics cookies. There is no tracking pixel on them, no analytics tag, no advertising network script, and no third-party embed that would place one. You are not followed around the internet for having read an article here.

The typefaces used on the Site are served through fonts.bunny.net, a privacy-preserving proxy for a public font library that does not set cookies and does not pass your IP address on to an advertising company. We chose it for that reason.

Where advertising technology is used

We do use advertising to reach new readers, and some pages elsewhere on this domain — pages you would arrive at by following an advertisement, not by reading the Journal — carry the measurement technology that advertising requires. Where that is the case, the technology in question is provided by Meta Platforms, Inc. It records that a visit or an action followed an advertisement, so that we can tell whether the advertising is worth its cost.

That technology involves cookies and similar identifiers set by Meta and governed by Meta's own policies as well as this one. It is described here so that this policy covers the whole domain honestly rather than only the parts that are simplest to describe.

How to control cookies

Every current browser lets you block or delete cookies, either altogether or site by site; the setting is usually under Privacy or Site Settings. You can also use the industry opt-out pages at optout.aboutads.info and optout.networkadvertising.org, and readers in Europe can use youronlinechoices.com. The Journal's own pages read perfectly well with cookies switched off, because they do not use any.

Third parties

We keep this list short on purpose, and it is complete.

• Cloudflare, Inc. hosts the Site and delivers it to your browser. In doing so it processes the ordinary request information described above and provides protection against attacks and abuse.
• Meta Platforms, Inc. provides the advertising technology described in the section above, on the pages described there.
• Email. Letters you send us arrive through a conventional email provider and sit in a mailbox, as email does.
• The law. We may disclose information where we are required to by law, subpoena or court order, or where it is necessary to protect the rights and safety of readers, of the Journal, or of the public.
• A transfer of the publication. If the Journal were ever sold or merged, reader information would pass with it and would stay subject to this policy.

These are service providers doing work we have asked them to do. None of them is permitted to use reader information for their own unrelated purposes.

How long we keep things

Reader correspondence is kept for up to three years, so that if you write again we have the thread and are not asking you to repeat yourself. Server logs are kept for a short operational period, ordinarily measured in weeks, and then discarded. If you have asked to receive email from us, your address is kept until you ask us to remove it, and then it is removed.

Where the law requires us to keep something longer — a tax record, a record of a legal request — we keep it for as long as the law says and no longer.

Security

The Site is served over an encrypted connection. Access to the mailbox and to the publishing tools is limited to the people who run the paper and protected by the usual measures. We review what we hold from time to time and delete what we no longer need, which is the most reliable security measure there is.

We should be honest about the limit of that: no website and no mailbox is perfectly secure, and nobody who tells you otherwise is being straight with you. Please do not send us anything by email that you would mind being read by someone else.

California residents: your rights under the CCPA and CPRA

If you live in California, the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, gives you specific rights over your personal information. You may exercise all of them by writing to hello@goodneighborjournal.com.

• The right to know. You may ask what categories of personal information we have collected about you, where it came from, why we collected it, and to whom it has been disclosed, and you may ask for a copy of the specific pieces we hold.
• The right to delete. You may ask us to delete personal information we hold about you, subject to the narrow exceptions the statute allows.
• The right to correct. If something we hold about you is wrong, you may ask us to fix it, and we will.
• The right to opt out of sale or sharing. You may direct us not to sell or share your personal information. See the paragraph immediately below.
• The right to limit the use of sensitive personal information. You may direct us to limit the use and disclosure of sensitive personal information to what is necessary to provide the Site. We do not ask for sensitive personal information as California law defines it, and we do not use any for advertising, profiling or inference — but the right is yours and we will honor a request under it.
• The right not to be discriminated against. Exercising any of these rights costs you nothing and changes nothing about what you can read here. The Journal is the same paper either way.

We do not sell your personal information. We have not sold personal information for money in the past twelve months and we have no intention of starting. California law defines "sale" and "sharing" broadly enough that the advertising measurement technology described above may fall within them on the pages where it is used. To opt out, write to hello@goodneighborjournal.com with "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" in the subject line, and we will honor it. You may also switch off advertising cookies in your browser, which achieves the same end immediately.

Authorized agents. You may use an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf. We will ask the agent for written proof of your permission, and we may ask you to confirm directly with us that the agent is acting for you and to verify your own identity, unless the agent holds a valid power of attorney. This is not obstruction; it is how we avoid handing your information to someone who is not you.

We will confirm receipt of any request within ten business days and answer it within forty-five calendar days, extending once by a further forty-five days if the request is complicated, in which case we will tell you why.

Visitors from the EEA and the United Kingdom: your rights under the GDPR

The Journal is written for American readers, but anyone can open a web page. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, the General Data Protection Regulation and the UK GDPR apply to us in respect of you, and the Journal is the controller of your information.

The legal bases on which we process it are these:

• Legitimate interests — publishing the paper, keeping the Site secure, and understanding in aggregate which pieces are read. We have weighed these against your rights and consider the effect on you minimal, since we build no profile of you.
• Consent — where consent is required, such as for non-essential cookies or for sending you email you asked for. Consent can be withdrawn at any time, and withdrawing it does not affect anything done before you withdrew it.
• Legal obligation — where a law requires us to keep or produce something.

Your rights are to access the information we hold about you; to have it rectified if it is inaccurate; to have it erased; to restrict how we process it; to receive it in a portable, machine-readable form; to object to processing carried out on the basis of legitimate interests; and to withdraw consent where consent is the basis. Write to hello@goodneighborjournal.com and we will answer within one month.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your national supervisory authority — your data protection authority in the EEA, or the Information Commissioner's Office in the United Kingdom. We would rather you came to us first, but the right is yours regardless and does not depend on our permission.

Information leaving your country

The Journal is published from the United States and its mailbox and servers are there. If you read the Site or write to us from elsewhere, the information involved travels to the United States, where the law protecting it is not the same as the law where you live. Where a transfer of that kind requires a safeguard, we rely on the standard contractual clauses adopted for the purpose.

Children

This Site is written for adults, and for readers sixty and over in particular. It is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of thirteen, as the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act uses that term. We do not ask any visitor's age, and there is nothing here designed to appeal to a child.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child under thirteen has sent us personal information, write to hello@goodneighborjournal.com with the word "COPPA" in the subject line. We will find it and delete it promptly, and we will tell you when it is done. If we discover such information ourselves, we delete it without waiting to be asked.

Do Not Track

Some browsers can send a "Do Not Track" signal. There is still no agreed standard for what a website should do when it receives one, so rather than claim to honor a signal nobody has defined, we will tell you plainly what we do: the Journal's own pages do no tracking at all, whatever your browser asks for. Where the advertising technology described above is used, the most reliable control is your browser's cookie settings or the opt-out links listed earlier. We do also honor the Global Privacy Control signal as an opt-out of sale and sharing for California readers.

Other websites

Where we link to somewhere else, we are pointing at it, not vouching for it. Once you follow a link off this Site you are covered by that site's privacy policy and not by ours, and we have no control over what it collects. It is worth a glance at their policy before you type anything into their pages.

Changes to this policy

If our practices change, this page changes with them, and the effective date at the top changes too. When a change is a material one we will say so here plainly rather than quietly reissuing the page. The version you are reading is always the current one; we do not keep a separate policy elsewhere that says something different.

How to reach us

Questions about this policy, or a request under any of the rights described in it, go to the same place as everything else:

The Good Neighbor Journal
[REPLACE: street address, city, state, ZIP]
hello@goodneighborjournal.com

A letter in the post is perfectly welcome and will be answered. If you would rather telephone about a privacy matter, say so in writing and we will arrange it.