Privacy Policy
What we collect
If you submit an editorial: your full name, grade, school name, school email address, and the text of your editorial, through the form on Submit an Editorial. We collect these so we can verify you're a Miami-Dade County student and reach you about your draft. If your editorial is published, the only part of it a visitor ever sees is your first name and last initial — your surname, grade, school, and school email are not shown anywhere on the public site.
If you're staff: your email address and login credentials, managed through our authentication provider (Supabase), for the admin dashboard used to review submissions and publish content.
If you're on a student city team: your email address and login credentials, so you can sign in to the dashboard and draft coverage for your city. That's all we ask for — we don't collect a name, grade, or school for a city team account. City team members are students, and we never publish their names: a city page says a student team runs it, and who is on that team is not shown anywhere on the public site.
If you subscribe to email updates: just the email address you enter in the signup field in the site header. We don't ask for a name or anything else.
If you use the district finder: the address you type is sent to the U.S. Census Bureau's public geocoding service through our server, so we can tell you which commission district it falls in. We don't store the addresses you look up.
General site use: we don't run advertising trackers, and we don't use any third-party analytics service. Your browser may store a small amount of local data (like your chosen site language) that stays on your device.
On our links page only: the page at /links, which is what our Instagram bio points to, keeps an anonymous count of how many times it was opened and which of its links were tapped. Each count is a standalone tally with no IP address, cookie, device identifier, or session attached to it, so the counts cannot be linked to each other or traced back to you, and we cannot tell how many separate people they represent. No other page on this site counts anything.
Why we collect it
Name, grade, school, and email on editorial submissions let us verify you're a Miami-Dade County high school student before anything is reviewed or published, and let us follow up with you about your draft. If your editorial is published, the byline shows only your first name and last initial; your surname, grade, school, and email address are never published or shared. We use your email only to contact you about your submission.
A city team member's email address is used to create and sign in to their account, and to reach them about the coverage they're working on. It is not published, shared, or added to any mailing list.
If you subscribe to email updates, we use your email address only to send you: a one-time welcome email when you sign up, an email when a new meeting's agenda is posted, and an email after each meeting summarizing what happened. We don't use it for anything else, and we don't sell or share subscriber email addresses with anyone.
The anonymous counts on our links page tell us which topics people actually want to read about, so we know what to cover and how to lay that page out. Because the counts carry no identifiers, they can't be used for anything else.
Who can see it
Unpublished and rejected submissions are visible only to Miami-Dade Commission Watch's founders and any staff we've given admin access to review submissions. We don't sell, rent, or share your information with any third party for marketing purposes.
Coverage a city team is still working on is visible only to that team and to our staff reviewers. Nothing a city team writes reaches the public site until a staff editor reviews and publishes it; until then it isn't readable by visitors, by other city teams, or through our public data interface.
The list of subscriber email addresses isn't visible to anyone through the site, including staff: the admin dashboard only shows aggregate counts (like how many people are subscribed), never the addresses themselves. The list is used only by our automated sending system to deliver the emails described above.
Where it's stored
Editorial submissions, staff and city team accounts, city coverage, and newsletter subscriptions are stored with Supabase, our database provider. Newsletter emails are sent through Resend, our email delivery provider, which necessarily processes your email address to deliver each message (and, like any email service, keeps its own delivery logs). The site itself is hosted on Vercel. All three are reputable providers used broadly across the industry; none has any right to use your data beyond what's needed to store, send, or serve it on our behalf.
How long we keep it
If your editorial is published, the public record we keep is the byline and the text — your first name, last initial, and what you wrote — the same way a newspaper keeps its archives. Your full name, grade, school, and school email stay in our private review records and are never part of what's published. If it's not published, whether rejected or simply never reviewed, we keep it only as long as needed for our review process, and delete it on request (see below).
We keep published city coverage as part of the public record, the same way we keep meeting summaries. If you leave a city team, or ask us to, we remove your account and your access; the coverage the team published stays up, because it was never credited to you by name in the first place.
We keep your email address on our subscriber list until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it.
Your choices
You can ask us to correct or delete any information we hold about you, including a published editorial, by emailing contact@miamidadecommissionwatch.com. We'll respond within a reasonable time and confirm once it's done.
Every email we send has a one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom. Clicking it removes you from the list immediately and stops all future emails; no login or confirmation needed.
Children's privacy
Miami-Dade Commission Watch's editorial submission form is intended for high school students in grades 9–12 only, and the form itself only accepts those grade levels. Student city teams are made up of high school students too; because those accounts hold nothing but an email address, and because we never publish a team member's name, a city team member's identity isn't disclosed by anything on this site. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we learn that we've unintentionally collected information from a child under 13, we'll delete it promptly; contact us at the email above if you believe this has happened.
Security
We use industry-standard practices to protect the data we hold, including encrypted connections (HTTPS) and access controls that limit who can see submitted content before it's published. No website can guarantee perfect security, but we take reasonable steps appropriate to a small civic organization holding a modest amount of information.
Translations
Spanish and Haitian Creole translations on this site are generated automatically by Google Translate and aren't reviewed by us. When in doubt, refer to the English original, including for this policy.
Changes to this policy
If we materially change what we collect or how we use it, we'll update this page and change the "last updated" date above.
Terms of Use
What this site is
Miami-Dade Commission Watch is an independent, student-run project. It is not affiliated with, operated by, or endorsed by Miami-Dade County government, or by any city or other municipal government we cover. Content is provided for informational and civic-education purposes and isn't a substitute for the county's and cities' own official records, which are linked throughout the site.
Accuracy
We source every factual claim and try hard to get things right, but we're students, not a newsroom with a copy desk. Information may occasionally be outdated or contain errors. If you spot one, please let us know and we'll correct it.
Information about public officials
Our officials directories list people who hold or seek public office, along with the contact details their office publishes — office email addresses, official profile pages, and the like. This is public-record information about people acting in a public capacity, taken from the government's own directories; we don't publish officials' personal addresses, personal phone numbers, or personal email addresses. If you're an officeholder and something we list is wrong or out of date, tell us and we'll correct it.
Submitted content
By submitting an editorial, you confirm it's your own original work and grant Miami-Dade Commission Watch a non-exclusive license to publish, edit for length and clarity, and display it on this site under a byline of your first name and last initial. Your full name, grade, school, and school email are never published. You retain ownership of your writing. Editorials represent the views of their individual authors, not Miami-Dade Commission Watch.
If you write for a student city team, you confirm the same thing about your work — that it's your own, and that every factual claim in it comes from a source you actually checked — and you grant us the same non-exclusive license to edit and publish it. City coverage is published under the Miami-Dade Commission Watch name rather than an individual byline, and unlike editorials it is our reporting: it goes out only after a staff editor reviews it, and it is held to our nonpartisan standards.
Acceptable use
Don't use this site to submit false information, impersonate someone else, or attempt to disrupt the site's operation (including automated scraping of submission forms or attempts to access non-public data).
No warranty
This site is provided "as is," without warranties of any kind, to the extent permitted by law.
Contact
Questions about these terms or our privacy practices: contact@miamidadecommissionwatch.com.