Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 18, 2026

CommonWires LLC ("CommonWires", "we") operates a network of publications ("the Service"), each under its own brand, local or topical. This policy describes what information we collect across all network publications, how we use it, and the choices you have. It applies to our websites, email newsletters, podcasts, and games.

Information you give us

• Email subscriptions. When you subscribe to a newsletter (the morning briefing, Weather Watch, team newsletters), we collect your email address, the edition you subscribed to, the topics you chose, how you found us (the page and signup form you used, and any campaign tags on the link that brought you here), and the network address the signup came from, kept to stop floods of fake signups. We use it to send the newsletters you asked for, to count subscribers, and to learn which parts of the site people find worth subscribing from. Our email provider reports delivery, opens, link clicks, bounces, and spam complaints for the emails we send you; we keep those reports to measure what's worth writing and to stop mailing addresses that bounce. Every email includes an unsubscribe link.
• Reader accounts. If you create an account (sign-in is by one-time email link — we never store a password), we keep your email address and the preferences you save: followed teams, saved recipes, game progress and streaks, and your subscription settings. Sign-in links expire in minutes and work once; you can sign out everywhere or delete your account and its data at any time from the account page.
• Referrals. If you share your referral link, we associate signups with your referral code to credit your referral progress.
• Device notifications (web push). If you turn on "Get alerts on this device", your browser gives us a push subscription — an unguessable delivery address at your browser maker's push service (Google for Chrome, Edge and Brave; Apple for Safari; Mozilla for Firefox) and two keys that let only that device read what we send. We keep those with the edition and topics you chose (life-safety weather warnings, the morning edition) and your browser's user-agent string, and we send a notification only for those. The notification's text travels through that push service, which sees delivery details under its own policy. Turn it off from your account page or your browser's site settings; a subscription that stops working is retired on our side.
• Reader submissions. If you send us a recipe, a tip, a correction, or a message through the contact form, we keep the message (and the name and email you gave with it) to act on it. The contact form also records the network address it came from, to stop floods.
• Advertisers. If you buy a local ad, we collect your business details and payment is processed by Stripe — we never see or store full card numbers.

Information collected automatically

• Approximate location (edition routing). On your first visit we may use your IP address and standard request headers to guess your nearest edition and route you there; where our hosting provider does not supply a location, our server asks the ipwho.is lookup service for the address's approximate coordinates (your browser does not talk to them). We don't build a location history; the result is stored as a simple cookie. If you type a postcode into the edition finder, our server looks it up with OpenStreetMap's geocoder; your browser does not talk to them.
• Cookies. Every cookie we set is first-party. Preferences: your remembered edition (cw_edition, one year), a referral code if you arrived through a share link (cw_ref, 30 days), teams, conferences and players you follow (cw_teams, cw_confs, cw_players, one year each), a ten-minute flag that shows the "you're confirmed" panel after you click a confirmation link (cw_confirmed), a flag that you have joined a newsletter so the site stops asking (cw_joined, one year), a ten-minute flag that shows the "you're subscribed" state after signup (cw_subscribed), which version of the join page you were shown, so it stays the same on your next visit (cw_join, 30 days), and — only if you open a preview link to an edition that has not launched — the preview key (cw_pv, 30 days). Sign-in: a session token when you are signed in (cw_session, 90 days). Readership measurement: a random visitor id (cw_id, 13 months), a short-lived session id (cw_ses, 30 minutes), and how you found us — your first visit's source (cw_ft, 13 months) and your latest one (cw_lt, 30 days). The two "how you found us" cookies hold the referring site, the landing page, any campaign tags on the link (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content) and any ad click identifier the link carried (fbclid, gclid, ad_id), so a signup can be credited to the ad or share that brought you. None of our cookies is used for cross-site tracking; advertising partners may set their own (see below).
• Readership measurement (first-party). We measure how the Service is used with our own systems: pages viewed, how far down a page you read and for how long, which sections and modules you interact with, newsletter signup form views, game plays, completions and streak milestones, audio and video plays, share-button use, and clicks that leave our site. These events are keyed to the random visitor id above. When you are signed in, or once you subscribe to a newsletter, they are also linked to your account or subscription — that is how the account page shows your lifetime game stats, how "Download my data" can include them, and how we tell which parts of the site earn subscriptions. We use this to decide what to keep building and what to drop.
• Games. Plays, completions and streaks are recorded on our servers: against your account when you are signed in, otherwise against the random visitor id. A copy of your streak and of today's progress is also kept in your browser's localStorage so the arcade can show it instantly.
• Browser storage. Besides the game copy above, localStorage holds the playback position of the audio briefing, a "don't ask again for a week" flag for the newsletter bar, and a layout preference for the sidebar. None of it is sent to us.
• Link click measurement. Outbound sponsored, affiliate, and referral links route through our redirect endpoint, which logs the click event (which edition, which placement, a timestamp) for measurement and payout accounting. These logs are keyed to placements and the visitor id, not to your name.

How our content is made (and what that means for data)

Our articles, forecasts, games, and guides are written by AI from public records, cited sources, and official data feeds (e.g., the National Weather Service, official league statistics, public reference works), with the checks described on our Standards page. Public source material is processed by third-party AI providers (currently Google's Gemini models and Anthropic's Claude models), and the audio briefing's voice is synthesized by ElevenLabs from a script. Subscriber emails and personal information are not sent to AI models.

Advertising, affiliate links, and sponsorships

• We show standard display advertising, which may be served by advertising partners who use their own cookies or identifiers subject to their policies.
• Some links are affiliate links — including Amazon Associates, ticket marketplaces, wine merchants and travel booking partners (flights, hotels, experiences, car rental, insurance, eSIM). If you click one and make a purchase, the partner may pay us a commission and will know the click came from our site. Affiliate placements carry a disclosure where they appear.
• Sponsored placements in newsletters and podcasts are labeled.

Third parties our pages load

Each of these receives your network address and standard browser details when its code or content loads, and applies its own policy to them. One line each:

• Google AdSense loads on every page in production to serve display ads, under our publisher id, and honors the non-personalized setting described under your choices below.
• Google Analytics 4 loads where it is configured, for aggregate readership (pages viewed, approximate geography, device type). It sets its own cookies.
• Google Ad Manager loads where it is configured, to serve the same display slots through Google's ad server.
• Travelpayouts loads where it is configured, to turn plain links to its travel partners into tracked affiliate links.
• Impact is the tracking network behind some merchant affiliate links; where those links are on, the click is tracked by Impact.
• Cloudflare Turnstile runs on the contact form, where configured, to tell people from scripts.
• OpenStreetMap map tiles load on the nearby game and the one-tank-trip page.
• Google Maps loads on the nearby game where it is configured.
• YouTube (the youtube-nocookie domain) embeds trailers on culture pages; the player loads when the page does.
• Windy.com embeds the interactive weather radar on weather pages.
• Wikimedia serves freely licensed imagery.
• Google Fonts serves the typefaces.

Behind the scenes, and without your browser talking to them: Resend (email delivery), Stripe (advertiser payments), Google and Anthropic (AI generation), ElevenLabs (the briefing's voice), Captivate (podcast hosting: it receives the audio and reports downloads to us), the push services named above (device notifications), the data feeds named on our sports and weather pages, and standard web infrastructure providers. Each processes only what its function requires.

Children

The Service is for a general audience and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13 — an account, a newsletter subscription, a device notification or a leaderboard name each requires you to be 13 or older. If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal information, write to legal@commonwires.com and we will delete it.

What we don't do

• We don't sell your personal information.
• We don't send subscriber data to AI models.
• We don't run cross-site behavioral tracking of our own.

Your privacy choices

• Global Privacy Control. We honor the GPC signal. When your browser sends it, we set no measurement or attribution cookies (and no cw_joined flag), collect no visitor-keyed readership events, and request non-personalized ads from our advertising partners — treating it as a "do not sell or share" opt-out under the CCPA/CPRA and similar state laws.
• Personalized advertising. Display ads may be personalized by our advertising partners, which some state laws treat as "sharing" personal information. Turning on GPC in your browser (or a browser extension that sends it) opts you out; you can also use Google's ad settings.
• Email. Unsubscribe from any email via its footer link, or manage topics from your account page.
• Cookies & storage. Clear our cookies and localStorage in your browser at any time — everything we set works without an account and regenerates harmlessly.

Retention & your rights

We keep subscriber records while your subscription is active. When you unsubscribe, the address is marked unsubscribed and kept on a suppression list so it is not mailed again — an address we forgot could be re-added by mistake; ask us and we delete the record outright. Readership measurement is kept as event logs and is aggregated for reporting. Signed-in readers can exercise access and deletion themselves from the account page — "Download my data" exports everything we hold as JSON, and "Delete my account" permanently removes the account, subscriptions, teams, recipes and streaks, and detaches your readership events from the account. You can also email us to access, correct, or delete information we hold about you. California and other state residents may have additional statutory rights (access, deletion, correction, non-discrimination, and opting out of "sale" or "sharing"); we honor verified requests regardless of state, and we do not discriminate against anyone for exercising them.

Children

The Service is general-audience and is not directed to children under 13; we do not knowingly collect their personal information. Sports-betting-related content, where it appears at all, is gated to 21+ in permitted states.

Changes & contact

We'll update this page when our practices change and revise the date above. Questions or requests: privacy@commonwires.com. CommonWires LLC.

Written by AI from public records and cited sources, with this publication's point of view. Not a substitute for official information. See our Standards. Some links are affiliate links — see our Terms.