Privacy Policy
What Valor Times collects, why, where it is kept, who else handles it, and how to have it removed. Valor Times is run by students of Valor Christian Learning Community.
The short version
Reading Valor Times does not require an account, and readers never sign in. We do not run ads, analytics or tracking cookies, and we do not sell or rent anyone’s information.
The only account the site uses is the paper’s own Gmail account, timesvalor@gmail.com, which sends a “new stories are up” email. No reader’s Google account is ever connected to this site.
The news email
When new stories are published, one email goes to a list of school email addresses and mailing lists from the Valor community. The list is kept as an encrypted environment variable on Vercel, not in the site’s public code, and it is used for nothing except this email. The email contains the new stories’ headlines, bylines, summaries and links. It has no tracking pixels and no tracking parameters on its links.
The email is sent through Gmail, so Google handles the message and its recipient list under Google’s Privacy Policy. To stop receiving it, email the webmaster (below).
What we collect from readers
Comments. If you post a comment we store the name you typed (or “Anonymous” if you left it blank), what you wrote, when you posted it, and a random browser ID (see below). Your name, comment and the time are shown publicly under the story. The browser ID is never shown. Please don’t put personal details, like your phone number or address, in a comment.
Likes. When you like a story we store your random browser ID against that story, so the button can be a toggle and you can take the like back.
Views. We keep a single view count per story. To avoid counting the same reader twice, your browser ID and the story are kept briefly in the server’s memory. They are never saved.
Your browser ID. The first time you open a story, your own browser makes up a random code and keeps it in its local storage (vt.reader). It isn’t linked to your name, email or any account. It only lets your browser delete its own comments and undo its own likes. The name you last commented with is also kept in your browser (vt.reader.name) so you don’t have to retype it. Clearing your browser’s site data removes both.
IP addresses. To stop spam and password guessing, the server briefly uses the IP address of a request to limit how often comments can be posted, views counted and editor sign-ins attempted. These counts live only in the server’s memory, are never written to storage, and are gone whenever the server restarts.
Cookies. Readers get no cookies from this site. Editors who sign in to the newsroom desk get one cookie (vt_admin) that keeps them signed in for up to 12 hours.
Email to us. If you email the desk or the webmaster, for example to pitch a story, your message is kept in that school inbox like any other email.
Where it is stored and for how long
Comments, likes and view counts are stored on the servers that run the site, hosted by Vercel. There is no separate database. There is no fixed date on which they are deleted: a comment stays until you delete it, or the paper removes it, and a like stays until you undo it. Because of how the site is currently hosted, this data can also be cleared when the site is updated or restarted, so it should not be treated as a permanent record.
The Gmail app password and the news email list are stored as encrypted environment variables on Vercel and kept until the paper replaces or removes them.
Seeing or deleting your information
You can delete your own comments from the same browser you posted them with, and undo a like by pressing it again. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes your browser ID and saved name.
To ask what we hold about you, to have a comment removed, to come off the news email list, or for anything else about your information, email the webmaster at jiho.han@valorschool.org. Comments are not tied to an account, so tell us the story, the name you used and roughly when you posted so we can find it. Questions about the paper itself go to the desk at harim.oh@valorschool.org.
How information is protected
The whole site is served over HTTPS only. Google credentials, the email list and the editors’ password live in encrypted server-side settings, never in the site’s code or in a web page. Gmail access is limited to sending, so even a leaked token could not read the paper’s inbox. The newsroom desk is password-protected with sign-in attempts rate-limited, and the site blocks scripts from other websites from running on its pages. No system is perfectly secure, but we collect as little as we can so there is little to lose.
Changes to this policy
If what the site collects or how it uses information changes, we will update this page and the “last updated” date at the top before the change goes live. This page is always available at valortimes.org/privacy, linked from the bottom of every page.