Privacy policy

You can use The Ledger without signing in. We do not build advertising profiles of readers. We use a privacy-friendly analytics service to count page views and referrers in aggregate.

How you may reuse the archives is covered in the usage guidelines.

In ordinary browsing we process:

• Anonymous visit data such as pages viewed, approximate region (country or similar), browser and device class, referrer, and time of visit. This is for traffic measurement, not identity.
• Technical delivery signals that hosting and content delivery may log briefly (for example IP address and user agent) to operate the site, resist abuse, and debug outages. We do not use those logs to market to you.

We do not require an account or payment details to browse. If you create an account, we also store profile and private workspace data as described under Optional accounts. If you use the contact form, we receive the message and reply address you submit so we can answer. Those fields are not published on the site.

Paid and invited accounts use email and a password. You can also turn on two-factor authentication with a TOTP authenticator app (for example Google Authenticator or Apple Passwords). We store your email (and optional display name) in a profile tied to your sign-in so you can manage or close the account later.

Signed-in readers can use a private research workspace: bookmarks, folders, saved searches, notes, and optional alerts tied to pages on the site. Those items are visible only to you. From Account settings you can download a JSON export of your profile and workspace before closing. Closing your account permanently deletes the sign-in, profile, workspace data, and alert history. If you have a paid subscription, closing also cancels that Stripe subscription so recurring charges stop.

If you create an alert, we store the watch criteria and deliver in-app events in your workspace. When email delivery is configured, we may also send notice to the address on your account. Auth and workspace storage are hosted by Supabase on our behalf. Billing for Research and Professional plans is handled by Stripe. The public archives stay free without an account.

Aggregate traffic is measured with Plausible Analytics, a cookieless analytics product. It is designed to avoid personal identifiers and cross-site advertising profiles.

We look at totals and trends: which shelves people open, whether the map or downloads get used, and whether a release broke a popular page. We do not use analytics to follow you around the web.

• We do not sell personal information.
• We do not run advertising networks on The Ledger.
• We do not require an account, newsletter, or tracking pixel to read the archives.
• We do not use account email for advertising or sell contact lists.

Some pages link out to publishers (Treasury, Congress.gov, FEC, CourtListener, civicAPI, and others). When you follow those links, their privacy practices apply. Optional accounts use Supabase for authentication and profile storage.

The Race live map may request unofficial tallies through our own API routes. Those requests are for race data, not for building a dossier on you. Archive downloads are static files from our cache.

Hosting and DNS providers process the minimum needed to serve https://readtheledger.org.

If this policy should change, we will update the date at the top of this page. For questions about privacy or usage, use the contact form. We do not publish a personal inbox or source-host profile on this site.

Related pages: usage guidelines, methodology, data cache.