Privacy policy

You can use The Ledger without signing in. We do not build profiles of individual 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 accounts or payment details. 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.

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 accounts, newsletters, or tracking pixels to read the archives.
• We do not intentionally store the contents of forms that ask for private identity, because we do not ship those forms.

Some pages link out to publishers (Treasury, Congress.gov, FEC, CourtListener, civicAPI, and others). When you follow those links, their privacy practices apply.

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 We do not publish a personal inbox or source-host profile on this site.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.