Last updated: September 2026.
Lincoln Town Square is a local news and community information service for Lincoln, Maine. It is privately owned and operated by C.A. Lord Software Group LLC. It is not affiliated with, operated by, or endorsed by the Town of Lincoln, Maine, or any municipal entity. See our Ownership & Editorial Disclosure page for more about who we are and how we operate.
This policy covers the Lincoln Town Square website, our mobile app, and our newsletter. It does not cover any third-party site we link to.
We have tried to write this as a description of what our software actually does, rather than a list of things we reserve the right to do.
What We Collect
When you send us something
Our submission forms — events, community notices, directory listings, advertiser and sponsor inquiries, story tips, and the contact form — collect what you type into them. That normally means your name, your email address, and the content of your submission, and on some forms a phone number if you choose to give one.
We keep a copy of the complete submission exactly as you sent it, including your contact details, attached to the item in our system. We do this so an editor can always see what was originally submitted, and so a published item can be traced back to its source. That copy is not public, and it stays with the item for as long as we keep it. The contact details you give with an event are kept privately for our editors to follow up with you, and are never published.
When you create an account
Creating an account requires a username, an email address, and a password. We do not ask for your real name, your postal address, or your phone number.
Your account is not active until you open a link we email you. Until then it has no permissions at all.
You can set a display name. Other contributors see it on the developing stories you contribute to and in our contributor list, together with any contributor badges you earn. It appears on a public news story only if you choose “Credit me by my name”; otherwise you are counted as a contributor without being named. If you change that choice, the change applies at once, including to stories already published. Everything else about your account is private.
Business and organization accounts
A business or organization account also gives the organization’s name. A directory listing holds the contact details you choose to publish on it: phone number, email address, website, address and opening hours. If you ask to manage an existing organization, we keep what you tell us to support the request and our decision on it. If you invite someone to help run an organization, we keep their email address so the invitation can reach them.
Photos, video and audio
If you attach a photo, a video or an audio recording to a contribution, we store the file and keep it attached to that contribution. We do not transcribe audio or video, and we do not run face recognition or voice identification on anything you upload. We do not analyse where a photo was taken, but a photo can carry location data that your phone stored in the file, and we do not currently remove it. If that matters to you, turn off location tagging in your camera settings before taking the photo.
Saved items and follows
When you are signed in, the stories and items you save, and the stories and organizations you follow, are stored with your account, so the website and the app show the same list. When you are signed out, your saves are kept on your own device or in your browser, and are copied to your account the first time you sign in.
When you subscribe to the newsletter
Our newsletter runs on MailPoet. Subscribing stores your email address, and a first name if you give one, and asks you to confirm by email before we send you anything. MailPoet also records the IP address you subscribed and confirmed from, and which of our emails you open and which links in them you click, together with the browser or email app used. You can unsubscribe using the link in any email we send. You can also tick a box to subscribe when you buy advertising or a listing.
When you buy advertising or a directory listing
Payments are processed by Stripe. Your card details are typed directly into Stripe’s own payment fields and are never sent to, seen by, or stored on our servers. We receive confirmation that a payment succeeded, together with the billing name, email address, postcode, and street address if you give it, which we keep as our record of the order. The order also records the IP address and browser it was placed from, and how you reached our site, for example from a search engine or a link.
When you use the mobile app
The app signs you in and stores a credential in your device’s secure storage — the iOS Keychain or the Android Keystore. That credential is an app-specific password, not your account password. Each day the app uses it, our site records the date and the IP address it was used from.
The app does not use push notifications, and it does not collect a device identifier, an advertising ID, or your location. Your alert preferences, event RSVPs and recent searches are kept on your own device. Saved items and follows are described above. When the app shows an advertisement, we count that it was shown or tapped, as a total for that ad, without recording who saw it.
The app asks for camera and photo library access only when you attach media to a contribution, and for calendar access only when you add an event to your own calendar. You can refuse any of these and still use the rest of the app. The app cannot use your microphone.
Analytics
We use Burst Statistics, which runs on our own server and stores its data in our own database. For each visit it records the page you looked at, the site or search that sent you to us, your browser, operating system and device type, your country, how long you stayed on the page and how far down it you scrolled.
It is set to its most private mode. No cookie is set for analytics, and no lasting identifier is stored: visits are grouped using a scrambled value worked out from your IP address and a secret that changes regularly, which cannot be turned back into your IP address and stops being usable once that secret changes. Your IP address itself is used only for that calculation and to look up your country, and is never written to our database by our analytics.
What that means in practice is that we can see a page was read, and roughly from where, but not that it was you, and not what else you read last month. No analytics data is sent to Google or to any other analytics company.
Analytics older than 12 months are deleted automatically, we honour your browser’s "Do Not Track" setting, and visits by our own staff are excluded.
IP addresses
Your IP address is recorded in these places, and nowhere else:
- when you sign in, together with your browser type, for as long as that sign-in lasts
- each day the app, or our editors’ dashboard, uses its stored credential
- with each form you submit
- with each order you place or invoice you pay
- with each directory listing you submit
- when you subscribe to the newsletter and when you confirm it
We use these records for security and to prevent fraud and abuse, and our staff can see them. To slow down automated abuse of sign-in, registration and submissions, we also keep a scrambled form of your IP address for up to an hour, after which it is discarded.
Cookies
When you sign in, WordPress, the software our site runs on, sets its standard sign-in cookies. The website also sets two cookies of its own:
- one that records whether you are signed in and what kind of account you have, so that cached pages show you the right menu. It lasts as long as your sign-in.
- one set when you sign up for a business account, which holds your account number and a random code for up to 48 hours, to confirm that you finish signing up in the same browser you confirmed your email in
If you save items while signed out, the list is kept in your browser’s own storage, not in a cookie. Our shop, invoicing and newsletter plugins set their own cookies, including cookies the shop uses to record how you reached our site, and Stripe’s payment fields set cookies when you pay.
Services Your Browser Contacts
Some parts of our pages are loaded from other companies’ servers, and those servers see your IP address when your browser contacts them:
- our pages load their fonts from Google Fonts
- directory maps are drawn from OpenStreetMap
- event pages with an address show an embedded Google Map
- checkout loads Stripe’s payment fields
“Get directions” opens Google Maps, or your phone’s own maps app, only when you choose it.
How We Use What We Collect
We use it to review and respond to submissions, to publish what you have asked us to publish once an editor has reviewed it, to run your account, to send newsletters you asked for, to process payments, and to keep the site working and secure. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.
How We Use AI
We use AI behind the scenes as an editorial tool. It is not a chatbot, it does not speak to the public, and it never publishes an alert or reviews a submission on its own. The AI we use is Anthropic’s Claude, reached through Anthropic’s API. Anthropic handles what we send under its terms for business customers; its Privacy Center explains how, in its section for commercial customers. Here is everything we send it, and when.
When you send a tip, a notice or a story contribution
If you send a tip, a community notice from our app, or a contribution to a developing story without choosing the story, we send its title and text to find out whether it belongs to a story we are already covering. Alongside it we send the titles and summaries of our published developing stories. We do not send your name, your email address, or anything else you typed into the form.
If it does not match a story, we send its title and text again together with the titles and text of up to 20 other tips and community notices that are waiting for review, to see whether several of them describe the same event. If they do, the AI drafts a story, which stays unpublished until an editor has reviewed it. This means the text of your submission can be sent alongside someone else’s, and theirs alongside yours.
When a contribution to a developing story is approved
Once an editor approves a contribution to a published developing story, we send the story’s current text, the contribution’s title and text, your display name and the date, so the AI can add what is new to the story. The update is labelled on the story as written by AI, with the date and time, and an editor can undo it. If the AI finds nothing new in the contribution, it returns it to you for more detail instead, and tells you why.
News from official sources
When we pick up a post from an official source we follow, such as the town’s website or a public department’s page, we send its title and text to suggest a headline, a summary and tags for an editor to consider. These are public posts, not anything you sent us.
Tools our editors use
When an editor asks for it, we send the text of a story, including the contributions published on it, to suggest people to contact about it. To draft questions for one of those people, we also send their name and role, never their email address or phone number. An editor can also send the text of an article or a submitted notice to score it against a journalism checklist. The AI works only from what is already in the text. It never invents a person or a contact detail, and nothing it drafts is sent to anyone until an editor has read it and chosen to send it.
What we never send
We never send your email address, account details, password, payment information, or the photos, video and audio you attach. Anything you write in the text of a tip or contribution is sent as written, so please leave out personal details you do not want shared.
How we hold the AI to our standards
The AI follows the same community standards our editors do. It never judges, groups or returns a submission because of the opinion it expresses or whom it criticises, and it keeps a contributor’s point of view as they wrote it. We record what each call was for, when it ran, what it decided and what it cost. Alerts are never written, suggested or published by AI.
People We Contact About a Story
When we report a story we sometimes need to contact people who have no account here — an official, a business owner, a witness. To do that we keep their name, role, email address, and sometimes a phone number and our own notes, in an internal source directory.
We only contact someone after an editor has reviewed and approved that specific message, and we keep a record of every message sent. AI never invents a source or a contact detail, and nothing is sent automatically. A person’s name and role may be sent to our AI provider to help an editor draft questions for them, as described above. If you would like your details removed from that directory, contact us and we will remove them.
Who We Share It With
We share personal information only with the service providers that make the site work — our web host, our email delivery service, our newsletter service, our payment processor, and the AI provider described above — and only as far as each needs to do its job. The services your browser contacts directly are listed above. We also disclose information if we are legally required to.
How Long We Keep It
Submissions, and the record of what was originally submitted, are kept for as long as the item exists. Orders and invoices are kept as our business records. A sign-in record lasts until you sign out or it expires. Newsletter data is kept until you unsubscribe. Analytics data is deleted automatically after 12 months. You can ask us to delete your account or a submission at any time.
Your Choices
You can ask us to correct or delete personal information you have given us, unsubscribe from the newsletter using the link in any email, delete your account, choose whether a story credits you by name, or refuse the app’s camera, photo and calendar permissions. Write to us through our Contact page.
Children
Lincoln Town Square is meant for a general audience and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has given us information, contact us and we will delete it.
Changes
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. Material changes will be noted on the site.
Questions
If you have questions about this policy, please reach out via our Contact page.