Privacy Policy

Information We Collect

My Local Press collects information you provide directly to us, such as when you create an account, publish content, or contact us for support.

• Account information — Name, email address
• Content — Stories, events, and other content you create
• Location data — With your permission, to show local content. We collect three types of location information: Your Area (determined automatically, approximate), GPS coordinates (opt-in, precise), and Primary Contributing Location (manually set in your profile)
• Usage data — How you interact with our platform
• Voice recordings — If you set up voice narration, a short sample of your voice, used to create your AI voice model

How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Provide services — Maintain and improve the platform
• Show local content — Display location-based news and information. Location drives your local feed content
• Verify local participation — When a poll or survey is limited to local voters, we use your general network area to check you're nearby. We keep only the approximate area, and creators see totals — never where any one person is
• Process payments — Handle transactions and send related information
• Support — Respond to your questions and provide assistance

Information Sharing

We do not sell, trade, or rent your personal information. We share information only in these limited cases:

• With your consent — when you explicitly agree
• Legal compliance — when required by law or legal process
• Safety — to protect rights, property, or safety
• Service providers — with trusted vendors who help us operate the platform, such as cloud hosting and storage, payment processing, email delivery, SMS verification, analytics, and AI services.

Data Security

We work hard to protect your information, but no system is perfectly secure.

We store your own location at reduced precision — enough to know the area, never your exact position — and we never show your location to other people. When you attach a precise location to something you publish, that pin is part of what you published, and it's public with it.

Artificial Intelligence

My Local Press uses AI to power a growing set of features — writing assistance, voice narration, search, and creation tools. When you use an AI feature, the content involved is processed by the AI providers we work with (today, Anthropic for language features and ElevenLabs for voice) to run that feature.

Voice narration and biometric data. If you opt in to voice narration, you provide a short voice recording so an AI model of your voice can read your content. We send that recording to our voice provider, ElevenLabs, which creates the voice model and keeps your recording with it; My Local Press never stores a copy of the raw audio — only the voice-model reference and your consent record. Because a voice model can identify you, we treat it as biometric information: we use it solely to narrate your own content, we never sell or share it beyond the provider needed to run the feature, and you can delete it at any time in Settings (which deletes the voice model and your recording from ElevenLabs and removes our stored reference). For the full retention and destruction schedule, see our Voice & Biometric Data Notice.

Connected Apps and Assistants

You can connect an outside AI assistant — Claude or ChatGPT, for example — to your My Local Press account. What you direct that assistant to send us reaches us through that connection and lands in your account as a draft. The conversation itself happens in the assistant, and the company that makes it handles that conversation under its own privacy policy, not this one.

A connection acts as you, signed in. It reaches your own drafts and nothing else — not another person's content, and not your account settings.

Connecting and disconnecting. Connecting stores an authorization for that app: an access token that lasts an hour, and a refresh token that lasts up to seven days. Disconnect the app in the assistant's own settings and the authorization stops working. Drafts it already created stay in your account, and you can finish, publish, or delete them like any other draft.

Data Retention

We keep your account information and content for as long as your account is active. When you delete your account, we permanently remove your profile, content, messages, and reading relationships within 30 days, except where we're required by law to keep specific records (for example, payment records for tax compliance). Backups are overwritten on a rolling basis.

A few things run on their own schedule:

• Connector logs — Server logs from connected apps are kept for 7 days
• Connected-app authorizations — Access tokens last 1 hour; refresh tokens last up to 7 days
• Upload authorizations — The short-lived permission to add a file to a draft expires after 15 minutes

Your Privacy Rights

You can review and update your profile and content in Settings, or permanently delete your account from your profile page in Settings. For anything else, reach out through the Feedback page. If you can't sign in — for example, you've deleted your account — email hi@mylocalpress.com.

California residents. Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, you have the right to know the categories of personal information we collect (account information, content you publish, location, usage data, technical identifiers), the sources (you, your device, our service providers), the business purposes (operating the platform, processing payments, account security, AI features), and the categories of third parties we share with (service providers, as described above). We do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

EU, UK, and EEA residents. You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection under the GDPR. We process your information to provide the services you signed up for, to operate and secure the platform, and with your consent where applicable (for example, precise location). Some of our service providers are based in the United States; we use Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent legal mechanisms for those transfers.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to understand website traffic and improve our search presence. These tools collect anonymous, aggregated data about how visitors use our website. They are not used to track individual users or activity within the mobile apps.

We also measure how the platform is used ourselves. When you're signed in, that usage is associated with your account; when you're not, it's only ever counted in aggregate. We use these measurements to understand and improve the platform. We never sell them, and we never share them beyond the service providers that help us run the platform.

Children Under 13

My Local Press is not intended for children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, let us know through the Feedback page and we'll delete it.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new policy on this page and updating the effective date.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email hi@mylocalpress.com.