Privacy policy

We don't run advertising trackers, analytics, or third-party pixels. We don't sell or rent your information. We don't build advertising profiles, and we don't use your information to target you.

If you submit a news tip through this site, we collect the name and contact details you enter, the town you select, the text of your submission, and any photos you attach. If you email us at info@orangeburg411.com, we keep your message, your email address, and any attachments.

We use this to report the news. That means a person on our team reads it, may contact you to check details, and may publish a story based on it. Nothing you send is published automatically.

Your contact details are not published. If you'd rather not be named in a story, say so in your submission and we will honour it.

Photos are stripped of embedded metadata before they are stored. Digital photos often carry the GPS coordinates where they were taken, along with the device and timestamp. We remove that — in your browser before upload, and again on our server — so the copy we keep does not carry the location of the person who took it.

Reader-submitted photos are stored in private storage that is not publicly reachable. A photo only becomes public if it is used in a published story.

We use a small number of outside services to run the site. They only receive what they need to do their job:

• Vercel — hosting. Receives ordinary web request data such as IP address and browser type.
• Supabase — database and file storage. Holds submissions, photos, and staff accounts.
• Google (Gmail API) — lets the site read the tips mailbox so emailed tips reach our queue.
• Anthropic (through Vercel's AI Gateway) — writes a first draft from a submission for an editor to review. The text of your submission is sent for this.
• Meta — when we publish a story, we may post its headline and link to our Facebook and Instagram accounts. Reader submissions are not sent to Meta.
• Resend — sends email on our behalf.
• Tomorrow.io, the National Weather Service, and SCDOT — weather and road conditions. No reader information is sent to them.

Reading the site does not require an account and does not set advertising cookies. Staff and volunteers sign in to a private admin area, which uses a cookie to keep them signed in. That is the only login on the site.

Submissions and emailed tips are kept in our newsroom queue so we have a record of where a story came from, including submissions we decide not to publish. Ask us to delete yours and we will, unless it has already been published as part of a story.

This site is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has sent us something, contact us and we will remove it.

Write to us at info@orangeburg411.com to ask what we hold about you, to correct it, or to have it deleted. Corrections to published stories are handled the same way — tell us and we will fix it.

If this policy changes we will update the date at the top of this page.