Privacy policy

If you are merely reading GroundUp articles on our website we do not pass any of your information to any third-party.

In fact, unless you're a GroundUp employee, freelancer or contributor, we don't even know who you are.

If you write a letter to the editor, we prefer to publish your name. We will only pass on your email address if you ask to be connected to someone (e.g. one of our sources or a reporter), if you threaten to harm yourself (we try to put you in touch with LifeLine) or you threaten to harm others (we will let the police know).

We count the visitors to our site but we do not track you. We DO NOT use Google Analytics anymore, or any third-party server for gathering statistics. Our analytics software tries to identify the city you are browsing from, but no finer level of detail than this.

We use cookies to manage article updating by logged in users (editors and reporters) and forms (such as letters to the editor). Cookie sessions expire after two weeks on your device.

Sometimes our articles contain embedded Youtube, Twitter or Facebook videos or tweets. We suspect that if you are logged into one of these services, they will track that you visited our page (you may be able to avoid this by reading GroundUp from a private browser session or, even better, via a VPN on a private browser session). We hope in the future to do something to avoid this, but for now it isn't practical. For example, we simply don't have the bandwidth on our server to host videos: very few news sites do.

Some of our very old articles still have the Disqus comment system enabled. Disqus  may be able to track you if you are logged into their service, but we're not sure.