Privacy Policy

This policy explains how CKNow (“we”, “us”), an independent local newsletter serving Chatham-Kent, Ontario, handles personal information on cknow.ca and in our emails. We follow Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).

What we collect

When you subscribe, we collect:

• Your email address.
• Your newsletter choices — the daily posts, the weekly briefing, or both.
• Where you signed up — if you subscribe from the box under a ward lookup on our election page, we note that ward (for example, Ward 8) so we can send ward-specific election updates. We don’t keep the address you looked up.
• Email activity — whether you open our emails and which links you click. Beehiiv, the service that sends CKNow, records this automatically.
• A record of your consent — the date and time you ticked the consent box and the exact wording you agreed to. CASL requires us to be able to show that you asked to receive our emails.

Subscribing doesn’t require your name, and we don’t collect payment information. There are no accounts or passwords on cknow.ca.

The contact form

When you send a message through our contact page, we collect your name, email address, the topic you choose, and your message. We store it so nothing gets lost, and email a copy to our inbox so we can reply. We use it only to respond to you and handle your request, and delete it when we no longer need it for that.

The ward and voting place lookup

When you type an address into the lookup on our election page, our server sends it to the Municipality of Chatham-Kent’s public address service to find the matching address, then works out the ward and voting place. We don’t save or log the addresses you look up, and they aren’t linked to your email.

“Directions” buttons open Google Maps with only the voting place’s address — never yours. Once you’re on Google Maps, Google’s privacy policy applies.

How we use it

• To send you the newsletters you chose.
• To manage your subscription, including honouring unsubscribe requests.
• To see which stories readers find useful, using open and click information.
• To reply if you contact us.

We don’t sell, rent, or trade your information, and we don’t use it for advertising targeting. Sponsors who appear in CKNow never receive our subscriber list.

Cookies and tracking

cknow.ca doesn’t use advertising trackers or cookies. Like any website, it’s served by a hosting provider (Vercel) that keeps standard technical logs, such as IP addresses and browser type, for a limited time for security and to keep the site running.

Page-view counts. We use Vercel Web Analytics to see which pages people visit, where visits come from (such as a search engine or social media), and what kind of device and browser they use. It doesn’t use cookies, doesn’t follow you to other websites, and doesn’t identify you: visits are counted using a short-lived anonymous code that resets every day, and we only ever see totals.

Our emails are different. Beehiiv uses a small invisible image and tracked links to record whether each email is opened and which links are clicked. Links in our emails also carry labels (such as “utm_source=cknow.ca”) so the sites we link to can see the visit came from CKNow — these labels don’t identify you. Our newsletter archive at cknow.beehiiv.com is hosted by Beehiiv and may use Beehiiv’s cookies.

Service providers and where data is stored

We rely on a few companies to run CKNow. They process information only on our behalf:

• Beehiiv sends our newsletters, handles unsubscribes, records email activity, and hosts our newsletter archive. Beehiiv privacy policy
• Vercel hosts cknow.ca and processes the technical logs and page-view counts described above. Vercel privacy notice
• Neon stores the subscriber records and contact messages sent through cknow.ca. Neon privacy policy
• Resend delivers contact-form messages to our inbox. Resend privacy policy

All four are based in the United States, so your information may be stored or processed there and may be accessible to authorities there under local law. We choose providers that protect data with safeguards comparable to our own.

How long we keep it

We keep your email and preferences while you’re subscribed. When you unsubscribe, we stop emailing you within 10 business days, as CASL requires, and delete your email and preferences from our signup database. Beehiiv keeps a record that you unsubscribed so you aren’t emailed again. We may keep a minimal record that you consented and later unsubscribed, so we can show we followed the law and don’t email you again by mistake.

Your choices and rights

• Unsubscribe using the link in any CKNow email, or by emailing contact@cknow.ca.
• Access or correct the information we hold about you.
• Ask us to delete your information.

Email contact@cknow.ca and we’ll respond within 30 days. If you’re not satisfied with our answer, you can contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Security

cknow.ca uses encrypted connections (HTTPS), and our database requires encrypted connections too. Access to subscriber data is limited to the people who run CKNow. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable steps to protect your information and will tell affected subscribers if a breach puts them at real risk of significant harm, as PIPEDA requires.

Children

CKNow is written for adult readers. We don’t knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you think a child has subscribed, email us and we’ll remove them.

Links to other websites

We link to candidate websites, the Municipality of Chatham-Kent, local businesses, and other sites. Their privacy practices are their own; this policy covers only CKNow.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your information, we’ll update this page and the date at the top. For significant changes, we’ll let subscribers know by email before they take effect.