Privacy

This website attempts to respect your privacy while still gathering some aggregate information.

We would like to evaluate how useful the site is to people, and to generate talking points we can use when promoting the project to others (for example: “Our project got X number of views the week before the election.”)

We would like to answer the following kinds of questions:

• Roughly how many people used our site?
• Which wards had the most engagement?
• Which resources did people find most useful? Meeting recordings? Candidate websites? Opinion pieces? Something else?

We do not have advertising or other monetization on the site. We do not intentionally share individualized data with third parties.

Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager

Somewhat reluctantly, we use Google Analytics 4 to track website usage. You can read its privacy policy here. To enhance privacy, we have taken the following steps:

• We respect the Global Privacy Control standard. Many browsers have support for this standard built-in, except for Google Chrome. On that browser, there are some extensions such as Privacy Badger which provide Global Privacy Control functionality.

• We respect the Do Not Track header. This is considered deprecated but still supported in many web browsers.

• We have disabled local cookie storage for Google Tag Manager. This means we can no longer track unique visitors effectively. Oh well.

• We have requested that Google Analytics/Tag Manager anonymize IP addresses.

You can see how we call Google Analytics/Tag Manager in the source code.

Many ad blocking plugins (such as UBlock Origin) will block Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager automatically.

A more extreme solution is to disable JavaScript. This will break the following:

• The front-page map will not work.
• Some JavaScript is used to hide and expand content. This content will be expanded without JavaScript.
• Favouriting candidates will not work. Notes you make about candidates will disappear if you close the page.

However, all of the site content should remain accessible.

Local Storage and Cookies

Some functionality (such as favouriting candidates) uses JavaScript Local Storage to remember your selections when you close your browser. This information is never transmitted over the Internet.

You can clear the notes and favourites you have made by clearing your local storage. [CLICK HERE?]

Third-Party Services

We host this website on GitHub Pages. They collect server logs for security purposes. As far as we know we have no access to these logs.

We use OpenStreetMap for the front page map. They also collect logs and some user data.