ELi's Privacy Statement

ELi (East Lansing Info) is a public service nonprofit news organization. It is important to us that visitors to our site understand what information we gather about them, how we use it, and how we work to protect it.

When you donate to ELi, sign up for our newsletter, or comment about our work on social media, we may see some personal information about you, such as your name, email address, or home address.

We will not release your name, email address, or any other personal information to anyone outside ELi without your consent unless we are under a legal order to do so or there is an emergency involving danger to a person or property. If you donate to us or interact with us through a third-party service like Patreon, PayPal, or Facebook, you will be subject to their policies, over which we do not have control.

We sometimes track how visitors use our website, newsletter, and social media accounts, so that we can see what people use and don’t use. We also sometimes analyze and aggregate information about use patterns and share the aggregated data internally among staff. When we are tracking how you use the website, this is done through your IP address only; we don’t know anything else about your identity simply because you read the site.

Cookies

A cookie is a small amount of data, which often includes an anonymous unique identifier that is sent to your browser from a website's servers and stored on your computer. Each website can send its own cookies to your browser if your browser's preferences allow it, but (to protect your privacy) most browsers only permit a website to access the cookies that the same website has already sent to you, not the cookies sent to you by other sites.

ELi makes very little use of cookies, and only for temporary purposes. For example, if you are using the map on the front page and adjust it, the settings are stored in cookies, and one of our form-protection modules stores a cookie to indicate that it has determined that your browsing session belongs to a human and not to a netbot.

All computers and servers on the internet use IP addresses to recognize and communicate with each other. We may collect IP addresses to administer and analyze our site and report aggregate, non-personal information (such as how many visitors we have). When you call up our site on your computer, our servers enter the IP address of that computer into a log. We do not associate IP addresses with records containing personal information.

We do not and cannot use cookies or IP address tracking to retrieve personal information from your computer.

Security

Our website does not require you to log-on to use it, and we do not collect donations directly through our website but use offsite services such as PayPal and Patreon. Therefore our website does not collect nor store personal information of readers or donors with the exception of when you enter an email at our Contact page or submit the form from our Event Submission page, in which case that information is stored for only a brief period, usually less than a day, and is seen only by our administrative team, or by our tech team when they check the site for signs of malicious activity.

ELi employs a number of security methods designed to prevent unauthorized access, maintain data accuracy, and ensure correct use of information.

Links to Other Sites

ELi sometimes provides links and pointers to websites maintained by other organizations. ELi does not operate or control such sites. ELi disclaims any responsibility for the information on those sites and any products or services offered there, and cannot vouch for the privacy policies of such sites.

Disclaimers and Limitations of Liability

Although we take reasonable steps to prevent the introduction of viruses, worms, or other destructive materials and programs to our site, we do not guarantee or warrant that our site or materials that may be downloaded from our site are free of such destructive features. We are not liable for any damages or harm attributable to such features.

Questions

If you have any questions regarding our Privacy Policy or our use of your information, please contact us.