Privacy policy

Who we are

The Lansing Journal is a daily online and occasionally in-print news source serving Lansing, Illinois, and surrounding communities.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

This website is free to visit and browse. For users who want to receive notification of new stories published, we request your email address so that we can send you a Daily News email. That information is gathered with your permission and stored in The Lansing Journal’s account at Mailchimp.com.

For readers who choose to support The Lansing Journal financially, and for organizations who pay to advertise on our website, the credit card information you enter will not be stored, but it will be shared through a secure connection with the following payment gateways to process the payment:

Comments
When visitors leave comments on an article on this 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. Our Akismet anti-spam service collects information about visitors who comment on our articles. The information we collect typically includes the commenter’s IP address, user agent, referrer, and Site URL (along with other information directly provided by the commenter such as their name, username, email address, and the comment itself).

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.

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.

Authors and users of the site, when you log in, we will 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 one day.

Embedded content

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 you have 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.

Analytics

The Lansing Journal uses Google Analytics to determine which articles are being visited and what geographic locations our news is reaching.

Who we share your data with

If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.

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.

If your organization appears in our Local Business Directory, the content of the listing and its metadata are retained indefinitely. Website visitors can see the contact name, website URL, phone number, address and other information included in your directory listing. Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

Caching

This site utilizes caching in order to facilitate a faster response time and better user experience. Caching potentially stores a duplicate copy of every web page that is on display on this site. All cache files are temporary, and are never accessed by any third party, except as necessary to obtain technical support from the cache plugin vendor. Cache files expire on a schedule set by the site administrator, but may easily be purged by the admin before their natural expiration, if necessary.