Last updated October 18, 2023. 

By accessing THE CITY’s site or other services, you agree to be legally bound by and comply with this policy. If you do not agree to comply with this policy, you are not authorized to use this site.

We built our website to publish reporting and data resources that serve the people of New York. It’s critical to our success that you feel that your personal information is safe when you interact with us. Here are the ways we collect and use your personal information: 

We use tools for analytics, communication, and fundraising that track information about how you use our site, donation systems and email newsletters. They record information including details about your browser, operating system or device, your IP address, information about the links you click, and other details of your activity. This information is not linked to your personal information, such as your name, address or email address, unless you have specifically provided us with that information.

If you do choose to provide us with your personal information, The City Report, Inc. (which is THE CITY’s legal name), its service providers, and the other entities identified in this policy are the only organizations that have access to this information we collect.

We use the services and service providers below to host our website, manage our newsletter, and take online donations (collectively, “Service Providers”): 

From time to time we change the services and Service Providers we use. We’ll do our best to keep this list up to date. 

These services, as well as services they use in turn, may place cookies on your device when you visit our website. If you have provided us with an email address, the services we use may let us customize our website, donation systems and email newsletters for you. For instance we might show a newsletter promotion only to people who are not yet subscribers to our newsletter. 

We do not host user comments or message forums, and a login is not required to use our site. There are places on our site where we accept feedback, tips, suggestions, and other from readers (“Feedback”). We limit access to such user data, as well as data gathered for the purposes of newsletters, fundraising, and customer service, and we require employees with access to these systems to use secure authentication methods. When you provide us any Feedback, you grant us the right to use your Feedback for any purpose we deem appropriate, such as to improve our services or generate content for our site.

We do not share donors’ personal information with any third parties other than our Service Providers.

We maintain historical records of donor giving histories for certain types of gifts. We keep this information so we can properly account for donations to the IRS purposes as well as to analyze giving histories. This applies to donations and donor information received both online and offline. Our Service Providers that we use to process your donations may also keep these historical records for their own reporting and regulatory purposes per their privacy policies.

Donors who contribute more than $5,000 are listed in our Form 990 filings with the IRS, as required by law, but otherwise, we do not disclose donor information to any third parties other than our Service Providers without your explicit consent.

We do not track visitors to our site as they access other sites. However, we do use a service called the Republication Tracker Tool, which tracks readership of THE CITY stories republished by other websites and counts how many times such stories are read. It doesn’t track any personal information, or place or read any cookies. For more about this technology, see our guidelines, the plug-in’s page, or the open-source code. 

From time to time THE CITY may publish an interactive journalism project in which you allow us to determine your location, or in which you enter information such as a street address, school, etc. in order to show you relevant information. We do not use this information for anything other than providing that service, as well as gathering usage data in the aggregate.  

Other services — such as those that prevent fake sign-ups, serve banner ads, and provide social media conveniences such as sharing articles — may place cookies on your device that collect information about your browsing behavior on our website and may even track you across other websites. We don’t have any way of knowing how such services handle the resulting data, although we are mindful about privacy when we’re considering business relationships that involve your data.

We take protecting your information seriously, and we undertake reasonable measures to help protect the information we possess. No data storage system or data transmitted over the Internet can be guaranteed to be completely secure. You provide us with this data at your own risk. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE CITY DOES NOT ACCEPT LIABILITY FOR UNINTENTIONAL DISCLOSURE OF ANY DATA YOU PROVIDE OR MAKE AVAILABLE TO US.

Our site and newsletters are designed for and targeted to United States audiences and are governed in accordance with United States law. 

Our site and services are not intended for children under 13 (or other age as required by local law), and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 (or other age as required by local law). If you believe we might have any personal information from or about a child under 13, please contact us. If we learn that we have collected any personal information in violation of applicable law, we will promptly take steps to delete such information.

We may provide links to other Web sites or Internet resources for your convenience only, and such links do not signify or imply our endorsement of such other website or resource or its contents over which we have no control and which we do not monitor. You use those links at your own risk and should apply a reasonable level of caution and discretion in doing so. You agree that we shall have no responsibility or liability for any information, software, or materials found at any other web site or internet resource.

We may share your information in connection with a corporate transaction, such as an acquisition, a merger, consolidation, asset sale, or bankruptcy.

If we believe it is reasonably necessary, we may read, preserve, and disclose your information to comply with the law, including to respond to law enforcement; to protect and defend ourselves or others; and to stop any activity that we consider illegal, unethical, or legally actionable. If we receive a subpoena, warrant, discovery order, or other request or order from a law enforcement agency, court, other governmental entity, or litigant that seeks your data, we will make reasonable attempts to direct the requesting party to seek the data directly from you. Nothing in this policy is intended to limit any legal defenses or objections that you have to a third party’s (including a government’s) request to disclose your information.

We have a duty as the holder of certain personal information to verify your identity when making requests to know or delete personal information and to ensure that dissemination of that information would not cause harm to you if it were distributed to another person. To verify your identity, we will request and collect additional personal information from you to match it against our records. We may ask for additional information or documentation if we feel it is necessary to confirm your identity with the necessary degree of certainty. We may communicate with you through email, a secure message center, or other reasonably necessary and appropriate means. We do have the right to deny requests under certain circumstances. In such cases, we will notify you of the reasons for denial. We will not provide you with specific pieces of personal information if the disclosure creates a substantial, articulable, and unreasonable risk to the security of that personal information, your account with us, or the security of our systems or networks. In no event will we disclose, if we have collected it, your Social Security number, driver’s license number or other government-issued identification number, financial account number, any health insurance or medical identification number, an account password, or security questions and answers.

Newspack

Newspack is the service that provides the technology that runs our site. They’re a division of Automattic, Inc., which is the company that makes Wordpress, among other things. In addition to the data listed in Automattic’s privacy policy, they collect data that has been stripped of personal information about how people use our site, such as how often they visit, when and on what page they donated, subscribed to our newsletter, etc.

Newspack uses this data to help us and their other clients to benchmark the effectiveness of our audience engagement and fundraising, and for their internal product development purposes.

Right to Know and Delete

If you are a California resident, you may have the right to delete the personal information we have collected from you and the right to know certain information about our data practices in the preceding 12 months. In particular, you may have the right to request the following from us:

  • The categories of personal information we have collected about you;
  • The categories of sources from which the personal information was collected;
  • The categories of personal information about you we disclosed for a business purpose or sold;
  • The categories of third parties to whom the personal information was disclosed for a business purpose or sold;
  • The business or commercial purpose for collecting or selling the personal information; and
  • The specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you.
  • To exercise any of these rights, please submit a request through our online form or email us at info@thecity.nyc. In the request, please specify which right you are seeking to exercise and the scope of the request. We will confirm receipt of your request within 10 days.

Intellectual Property 

Unless otherwise indicated, The City Report, Inc. and its licensors own all intellectual property rights and title in and to this site and the materials included in it, such as photographs, software, text, graphics, and images (“Content”). Content owned and created by THE CITY may be republished for free under a Creative Commons license as further described on our Republishing Page.

Disclaimers and Limitation of Liability

YOUR USE OF THE SITE IS AT YOUR RISK. THE CONTENT, INFORMATION, MATERIALS AND SERVICES PROVIDED ON OR THROUGH THE SITE ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, SECURITY OR NON-INFRINGEMENT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. NEITHER THE CITY NOR ANY OF ITS AFFILIATES WARRANT THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE INFORMATION, MATERIALS, OR SERVICES PROVIDED ON OR THROUGH THE SITE. THE CITY DOES NOT ASSUME ANY RESPONSIBILITY, NOR WILL THE CITY BE LIABLE, FOR ANY DAMAGES TO YOUR COMPUTER, DATA, TELECOMMUNICATION EQUIPMENT, OR OTHER PROPERTY CAUSED BY OR ARISING FROM YOUR ACCESS TO, USE OF, OR BROWSING THIS SITE, OR YOUR DOWNLOADING OF ANY CONTENT FROM THIS SERVICE. IN NO EVENT WILL THE CITY, OR ANY OF ITS OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, SHAREHOLDERS, AFFILIATES, AGENTS, SUCCESSORS OR ASSIGNS, NOR ANY PARTY INVOLVED IN THE CREATION, PRODUCTION OR TRANSMISSION OF THE SITE, BE LIABLE TO YOU OR ANYONE ELSE FOR ANY INDIRECT, SPECIAL, PUNITIVE, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OF ANY KIND (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THOSE RESULTING FROM LOST PROFITS, LOST DATA OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION), WHETHER BASED ON WARRANTY, CONTRACT, TORT OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY AND WHETHER OR NOT ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. THE FOREGOING LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY DO NOT APPLY TO THE EXTENT PROHIBITED BY LAW. PLEASE REFER TO YOUR LOCAL LAWS FOR ANY SUCH PROHIBITIONS.

IN THE EVENT OF ANY PROBLEM WITH THE SITE OR ANY CONTENT, MATERIALS, INFORMATION, OR SERVICES CONTAINED ON ANY OR ALL OF THE SITE, YOU AGREE THAT YOUR SOLE REMEDY IS TO CEASE USING THE SITE. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE CITY’S TOTAL LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ALL DAMAGES, LOSSES, AND CAUSES OF ACTION WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, NEGLIGENCE), OR OTHERWISE EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS (US $25.00) OR (B) THE VALUE OF THE SERVICES PURCHASED OR TO WHICH YOU SUBSCRIBE THROUGH THE SERVICE.

Changes

We update these terms from time to time at our discretion and will notify you of any material changes to the way in which we treat personal information by posting a notice on this page. We may also provide notice to you in other ways at our discretion, such as through contact information you have provided. Any updated version of these terms will be effective immediately upon the posting of the revised terms unless otherwise specified. 

Your continued use of our site, newsletters and other services after the effective date of the revised Privacy Policy (or such other act specified at that time) will constitute your consent to those changes.

Termination

We reserve the right to terminate the site and this policy at any time without notice for any reason, including, in the case of the policy, for your violation of any of its provisions. The Limitation of Liability and Governing Law Sections of this policy and your agreement to it shall survive any such termination.

Governing Law

This policy and your agreement to it will be governed by the laws of the State of New York applicable to contracts made and performed there without regard to its conflicts of law principles. You agree to submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts sitting in the State and County of New York and waive any jurisdictional, venue, or inconvenient forum objections to such courts.

Contact Information

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or our practices, you may contact us:

The City Report, Inc.
Attn: Nic Dawes, Executive Director
85 Broad St., 12th Floor
New York, N.Y. 10004
nic@thecity.nyc