FILED
WHAT HAPPENS IN AN OKLAHOMA COURTROOM SHOULD NOT BE A MYSTERY6:15 PM CTOklahoma’s public education industry has created its own special purgatory, and it has only itself to blame7:58 PM CTBroken Trust: Because Trust Requires Accountability1:50 PM CTPart 1 — From Mainstreaming to Full Inclusion: What Changed?1:49 PM CTWhen Inclusion Became the Goal: What Happened to the Continuum of Special Education?1:48 PM CTWHAT HAPPENS IN AN OKLAHOMA COURTROOM SHOULD NOT BE A MYSTERY6:15 PM CTOklahoma’s public education industry has created its own special purgatory, and it has only itself to blame7:58 PM CTBroken Trust: Because Trust Requires Accountability1:50 PM CTPart 1 — From Mainstreaming to Full Inclusion: What Changed?1:49 PM CTWhen Inclusion Became the Goal: What Happened to the Continuum of Special Education?1:48 PM CT
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2026READER-FUNDED · AD-FREE FOR MEMBERS
The Colony OK masthead

LEGAL · PRIVACY

Privacy Policy

Effective August 2026. The Colony OK is private by design — no behavioral ad tracking, no selling your information.

What We Collect

Your account. Your email address, a display name if you set one, and the county you pick when you create an account (or “Statewide”). If you tick the separate box asking for text messages, the mobile number you give for them. If you sign in with Google we receive the name and email on that Google account. We store a password hash only if you chose a password.

Your membership. Your Stripe customer and subscription identifiers, your plan, your membership status and your billing history. We never see or store your card number — Stripe does.

What you make. Anything you file or post: comments, feed posts, county reports filed at County Reports (including the name you publish under and, if you give one, an email address for an editor to reach you), dispatch videos and their poster frames, story submissions, contributor applications, your profile photo, and — for Charter Colonists — your Wall of Honor name, portrait and message.

What you do here. Watch progress and playback sessions, saved items and watchlists, reactions and upvotes, live chat messages, county follows and newsletter subscriptions. We also keep daily totals per story, episode, dispatch and contributor — page views, plays, completions, comments, upvotes and follows — as aggregate counts only. There is no per-person record of what you read or watched behind those totals.

What we do not collect. The confidential tip line at /tips deliberately records no IP address and no user agent, and tips are never sent to any AI provider. That is a design decision enforced in the database, not a preference.

Tip lines. Every contributor has a tip line at /tip/their-name, and the general line at /tips takes the same form. A tip stores exactly what you typed: the text, the county (or Statewide), and — only if you chose to give them — your name and an email or phone, with whether you said it was fine to contact you. A photo, video, audio or file you attach is kept in private storage that no public link reaches; location data and other camera metadata are removed from photos before they are stored. Videos, audio and other files are stored as sent and may contain the location or the name your device or software recorded — remove that yourself before attaching if it matters. Your contact details are visible only to the contributor whose link you used and to The Colony's editors. No IP address, no browser and no device information is stored with a tip, and a tip is never sent to an AI provider or published anywhere.

Who We Send It To

We do not sell personal data, run behavioral ad networks, or embed advertising pixels. The advertising we carry is counted in daily totals only — how many times each ad was played, skipped or clicked — with nothing that says who. We do rely on the following processors, and your data reaches them:

  • Supabase — our database and authentication. Everything above is stored here.
  • Vercel — hosting, plus Blob storage for uploaded images and video.
  • Stripe — payments, subscriptions and the billing portal. Stripe receives your email and card details directly.
  • Plausible Analytics — page-view counts and a handful of anonymous events (a play, a search, a click on Join, a signup, a completed checkout, a share, a tip sent, a newsletter signup), each tagged only with which kind it was. No cookies, no cross-site tracking, no personal identifiers, and nothing you type — a search, a tip, an address — is sent.
  • Sentry — error monitoring. This includes Session Replay on a sample of sessions, which records page structure and interactions so we can reproduce a crash. Text is masked and media is blocked before it leaves your browser.
  • Resend — transactional email (receipts, alerts, magic links). It also carries messages our staff write to the people who work with us (dispatchers, correspondents, hosts, journalists), or to one account holder an admin picks; each goes to that person alone, with a copy in their My Colony inbox, and is never a promotion.
  • Our own contact records. The Colony keeps its own contact records, in our own database — no outside CRM receives your details. A record carries your name, email, county, membership level, how you found us (a referral code or a contributor’s page), and your separate email and SMS choices, which are off until you tick them. An SMS request is held until your number is confirmed by text, and we send no texts today, so ticking the box does not start any. It is written when you confirm a new account, when a purchase is confirmed, and when you confirm a newsletter opt-in. Two more feeds are being connected and will be listed here when they are live: a contributor application, and a tip only when you tick “OK to contact” and leave an address. Only Colony admins can see it. A tip never subscribes anyone to anything, and deleting your account deletes your contact record with it. The text-message box on the Join the 77 application and on our text-alerts page works the same way as the one at sign-up: we keep the number, the email you gave with it and the exact wording you agreed to on a separate list only Colony admins can see, nothing is texted until the number is confirmed, and deleting your account removes that list’s entries for your email. A phone number on a Join the 77 application is read by the editors who review it.
  • Dropbox — a staff-accessible filing archive and private archive for dispatch media and submission text. Access is restricted to the newsroom team; it is separate from publication on the website.
  • Mux — video hosting and playback for member live events.
  • YouTube and Rumble — embedded players for the 24/7 channel and some episodes. YouTube is embedded in privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com), but loading a player still discloses your IP address to them.
  • Upstash — rate limiting, which processes a hashed request identifier.

How We Use AI

When you submit a county report, a story, or a dispatch video, the text you wrote is sent to OpenAI for an automated pre-review that flags passages carrying editorial or legal risk; when OpenAI cannot be reached, the same text goes to Google instead. When a clip or episode needs a transcript, its audio is sent to OpenAI or Groq for speech-to-text.

Two things about that scan. It decides nothing — flagged and unflagged submissions both wait for a human editor, and a failure in the scan never blocks your filing. And under our agreements with these providers, your submission is not used to train their models.

Tips sent to the confidential tip line are never processed this way.

Your Rights

You can delete your account yourself, at any time, from your account page — on the web or in the mobile app. Deletion is processed in stages: we cancel any active subscription, then remove your profile, saved items, reading history, comments and posts, your Colony contact record and its history, and the files you uploaded — your profile photo, your dispatch videos and their poster frames, and images attached to your posts are deleted from storage, not merely unlinked. If a provider is unavailable, deletion can be partly complete; your request is saved and cleanup retries automatically after you sign out. We allow two hours for pending uploads to finish before removing ownership records, then check storage again. Provider failures may extend processing. A restricted cleanup record containing account and file identifiers remains for retry verification and is removed 30 days after completion. You can check completion using the private status receipt provided when you request deletion. Processor copies and backups may take longer to remove. Contact privacy@thecolonyok.com if deletion cannot finish or you need help with retained records.

A newsletter subscription is separate from your account and is not ended by deleting it. End it with the unsubscribe link in any issue, or by writing to privacy@thecolonyok.com.

Charter Colonists: your certificate number stays in the founding record, because it is issued once and never reissued. Your name is replaced with “Withdrawn” and your portrait and message are deleted from the Wall of Honor.

Published journalism and its existing bylines remain in our editorial archive. Your contributor profile and contact details, unpublished submissions and account-linked chat messages are removed. Donation and payment records may be retained for accounting and legal obligations; these records can still identify you. Playback records may remain with the account reference removed.

If you are in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia or another state with a comprehensive privacy law, you also have the right to know what we hold about you, to correct it, and to opt out of any sale or sharing of it — we do neither. We do not discriminate against anyone for exercising these rights.

For a data export, or for help with anything above, email privacy@thecolonyok.com. We respond within 30 days.

Contact

Questions about this policy: privacy@thecolonyok.com