Cookie and Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 19, 2026

Information You Provide

Depending on how you use the site, Niagara's Hub may collect information you provide directly, including account registration details, username, email address, password credentials in protected form, profile updates, poll and stat responses, member survey answers, suggestions, comments, petition suggestions, petition signatures, optional petition comments, concern reports, concern addresses, map coordinates, contact name, contact email, contact phone, and messages or form submissions.

If you use the concern tools, the site may save the concern locally, prepare a city-ready clipboard handoff, and provide a link for you to continue to the official City 311 form. Information you choose to submit to the official City 311 form is handled by the City or its vendors, not by this policy alone.

Industrial Complaint Reports

Industrial complaints in Niagara?s Industrial Future are separate from City 311 reports. Approved complaint details, reported source names, map coordinates, nearby street or landmark, observation time and duration are public. Reports and comments enter moderator review before publication. Signed-in members can support a report once; support totals are public, while voter account identifiers are not included in public report listings. Approved comments display the member?s username and posting date. Submission receipts and unpublished reports remain available through the existing private submission-review workflow.

Surveys and Public Vote Totals

Survey participation requires a signed-in account. The site stores a completed survey's answers with the account identifier to prevent duplicate responses. Each member can submit one response to a survey; sharing a question does not create a separate ballot. Individual survey answers and the account associated with a ballot are not published. Authorized administrators can access stored responses for site operations.

Aggregate totals are public while a survey is open. Survey pages and individual-question share cards can show each choice, its vote count, its percentage, and the total number of votes for that question. These are counts from completed survey responses, not a public list of who answered. A question can be shared and its totals viewed without signing in. Surveys are voluntary, self-selected civic feedback, not a representative sample or an official vote.

Information Collected Automatically

When you visit the site, we may collect technical and usage information, including IP address, request parameters, pages visited, timestamps, browser or device information, session identifiers, account session status, feature settings, and security or diagnostic events. Visitor logs, admin activity logs, audio diagnostics, import logs, and similar operational logs may contain page URLs, usernames or user IDs, IP addresses, user-agent strings, request data, and action details.

Share-card and crawler diagnostics may record request paths, timestamps, response codes, IP addresses, and user-agent information to troubleshoot access and preview generation.

Live audio features may collect a hashed listener session identifier, user account details if logged in, IP address, browser or device user-agent, listener status, timestamps, and, if live audio location access is required and you permit it, latitude, longitude, and location accuracy. Audio streams may also be recorded and archived for administrative playback when recording is enabled.

Public and Imported Civic Data

The site may display, cache, process, or search public civic data such as City 311 records, budget documents, payroll transparency data, property sales, maps, public meeting or event information, and related records. These records may come from public agencies, third-party services, user submissions, or site administrators. Public source data may include addresses, ticket numbers, statuses, notes, dates, and other details from those sources.

Survey Discussions

Survey discussions are separate from survey ballots. Approved comments, replies, usernames and posting dates are public. Posting a comment does not publish or identify your survey answers, and you can discuss a survey without submitting a ballot. Comments and replies go through moderator review before publication. Do not include private or sensitive information in a discussion.

Submission Review

Suggestions and some concerns or comments enter a review process before public publication. Authorized moderators review proposed public content; administrators may access additional records for moderation and operations. A submission awaiting review is not the same as a public post, but material intended for publication may become public if approved. Do not include private account information or sensitive personal information in a public-content suggestion.

Public Share Cards and Preview Images

Published polls, stats, concerns, industrial concerns, surveys, individual survey questions, history entries, local facts, and events may have public share-card pages and automatically generated preview images. These cards use public content and, where available, aggregate counts. Survey question cards and images do not include account identifiers, account names, contact details, or individual ballot records.

The site caches generated images and creates updated versions when the displayed content changes. A preview is a snapshot; a previously shared image may show older totals. Social networks, search engines, messaging services, and other recipients may fetch, copy, cache, or redistribute public pages and preview images. Niagara's Hub cannot control how long those third parties retain copies or guarantee that removing or updating a page removes copies already shared elsewhere.

Opening a Share link displays a public card; it does not submit a response or automatically publish a post to a social network. If you then share the link through another service, that service's own privacy practices apply.

Maps and External Requests

Maps may request tiles, map styles, supporting software, road labels, imagery, or weather overlays from external services. Depending on the feature and site settings, these may include OpenStreetMap, OpenFreeMap, MapQuest, USGS, Esri, NOAA, and software delivery services such as unpkg. Geocoding and reverse-geocoding services may receive the address or coordinates needed for a lookup.

When your browser connects to a map or software provider, the provider may receive your IP address, browser request information, referrer information, and the geographic area or coordinates needed to deliver that feature. Loading a map does not itself grant browser GPS permission. Features that request device location are subject to your browser's permission controls. Provider practices are governed by their own policies.

How Information May Be Used

• To operate, maintain, and improve the site
• To create and manage accounts, sessions, profiles, responses, comments, petitions, concern reports, suggestions, and admin workflows
• To publish, organize, review, moderate, archive, or remove public-facing submissions and civic records
• To prepare City 311 handoffs, search City 311 records, geocode or reverse-geocode locations, and show maps or location-based information
• To operate live audio, audio recording, listener access controls, geolocation checks, diagnostics, and abuse prevention
• To send users to outside payment, government, mapping, share, or service-provider tools they choose to use
• To monitor platform security, misuse, fraud, spam, errors, performance, and availability
• To comply with legal obligations, enforce site policies, resolve disputes, and protect users, administrators, the public, and the service

Cookies

Niagara's Hub may use cookies or similar technologies to support basic site functionality, remember preferences, maintain sessions, and protect the site. Some cookies are essential to how the site works.

• Session cookies may keep you signed in, maintain security tokens, and support account or admin features.
• The site may use an active-user cookie for short-term login status checks.
• The footer preference cookie remembers whether you closed the sticky policy footer.
• Browser local storage or session storage may remember whether you dismissed the welcome notice, interface preferences, live audio volume, live audio playback state, admin display preferences, and similar settings. These preferences can remain until cleared or reset. Dismissing a notice does not change browser permissions or delete information already stored by the site.
• Third-party services, such as payment platforms, official government sites, mapping services, or browser features, may use their own cookies or storage when you interact with them.

You can usually control cookies through your browser settings. Blocking cookies or storage may prevent account, admin, audio, preference, form, or security features from working correctly.

Location, Clipboard, and Browser Permissions

Some features ask your browser for permission before using sensitive browser capabilities. Live audio may request geolocation when location access is required. Concern tools may use map clicks and reverse geocoding to fill address fields. Concern handoff and share tools may use your browser clipboard only when you click or permit the action. Your browser controls whether those permissions are granted.

Sharing of Information

Niagara's Hub does not sell personal information and does not share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising as those terms are commonly used in state privacy laws. Information may be shared, disclosed, or made available in these situations:

• Public features may display submissions, usernames, petition signature names, optional petition comments, concern information, comments, timestamps, vote or signature counts, and public civic records.
• Service providers may help with hosting, databases, maps, geocoding, public-data processing, security, diagnostics, payment redirects, audio tools, or other site operations.
• Official government sites and third-party services may receive information you choose to send to them, such as City 311 form details, City 311 searches, map/geocoding requests, or payment details entered with Cash App or Venmo.
• Administrators may review submissions, logs, account details, listener sessions, IP addresses, geolocation records, public-data imports, and other records for moderation, security, troubleshooting, and operations.
• Information may be disclosed when needed to comply with law, respond to lawful requests, enforce policies, prevent misuse, protect rights or safety, or address security incidents.

Data Retention and Security

Information may be retained for as long as reasonably necessary to operate the site, maintain public civic records and engagement history, manage accounts, provide audio archives, investigate misuse, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce site policies, and improve or secure the service. Some public or administrative records may remain in backups, logs, archives, imports, or public-source caches even after a feature changes.

Niagara's Hub uses reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards appropriate to the site, but no internet-based system can guarantee absolute security. You should use a unique password and avoid submitting sensitive information that is not needed for the feature you are using.

Your Choices

You may choose not to create an account, not to submit forms, not to provide optional contact fields, not to grant browser location permission, or not to use third-party services linked from the site. You may also use browser controls to manage cookies, local storage, location permission, and clipboard permission.

If you contact the site regarding personal information, account-related concerns, moderation, deletion, correction, or access requests, Niagara's Hub may review and respond as appropriate based on the type of request, identity verification, public-record status, legal obligations, and available records. Some information cannot be changed or deleted by Niagara's Hub because it belongs to a public agency, payment provider, browser provider, map provider, or other third party.

State Privacy Rights

Depending on where you live and whether a privacy law applies to Niagara's Hub, you may have rights to request access, deletion, correction, portability, limits on certain uses, or information about how personal information is collected, used, or disclosed. Niagara's Hub will not discriminate against users for exercising applicable privacy rights. We do not knowingly sell personal information or use it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

Children's Privacy

Niagara's Hub is not directed to children under 13, and children under 13 should not create accounts or submit personal information. If you believe a child under 13 has provided personal information through the site, contact the site administrator so the issue can be reviewed.

Third-Party Links and Services

This policy does not control third-party websites or services. Official government websites, City 311 systems, map and geocoding providers, Facebook/Meta and other social networks, messaging services, Cash App, Venmo, browser clipboard tools, Google Maps links, and other outside services may collect and use information under their own policies.

Corrections and Privacy Requests

For a correction to public site content, use the suggestion form. Identify the page or public record and, where possible, provide a supporting public source. Suggestions are reviewed as potential public content, so do not include private account details or sensitive information.

For a private account or personal-information request, use a private contact method the site owner has provided to you. No dedicated privacy email address or confidential privacy-request form is currently listed on this site. Do not submit passwords, identity documents, financial information, or other sensitive details through suggestion, concern, or comment forms. Those forms are publication workflows, not confidential privacy-request channels.

Policy Updates

This Cookie and Privacy Policy may be updated from time to time. Any revised version will apply once posted on this page.

This page is a general site policy and is not legal advice.