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The Basin
Data journalism from the Los Angeles Basin
Privacy

Privacy

This site sets no cookies, runs no advertising, and has no accounts. We do not know who you are, and we have not built anything that could tell us. Below is the specific version, naming every party that receives anything.

Last updated August 26, 2026

What we collect

Nothing you type, unless you type it. There is no account, no login and no reader profile. The only field on this site that asks you for anything is the newsletter form, and the only thing it asks for is an email address.

No cookies. Not on any page, not for any purpose. We set none ourselves and we embed nothing that sets one.

Three settings, kept in your browser. Your theme choice and two notes about which prompts you have already dismissed are stored locally as basin-theme, basin-nextbar and basin-sub. They never leave your device and are never sent to us. Clearing your browser's site data deletes them.

How we count readers

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookieless and does not fingerprint your browser or build a profile that follows you between sites. What it gives us is aggregate: how many people opened a page, roughly where in the world they were, and which link sent them. We cannot single out an individual reader in it, and we do not try to.

Who else receives anything

Four, and the last two only if you do something specific.

  • Cloudflare hosts and serves the site. Like any host, it necessarily receives your IP address and browser user agent to deliver a page to you, and keeps short-lived operational logs.
  • Cloudflare Web Analytics receives a page view, as described above.
  • Buttondown receives your email address, but only if you submit the newsletter form. It runs our mailing list and nothing else.
  • CARTO receives your IP address when basemap tiles load, and only on the pages that draw a zoomable map. Reading an article never contacts it.

Everything else on this site is served from basin.la, including our fonts and our mapping code. Links out to other sites are ordinary links: we do not preload or ping them, but following one is a visit to that site, on their terms rather than ours.

The newsletter

Subscribing is double opt-in, so nothing is sent until you confirm from your inbox. We use your address to send the roundup and to reply if you write back. We do not sell it, rent it, share it, or use it to match you against anything. Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe, and unsubscribing removes the address rather than flagging it.

Your rights

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the CPRA, you may ask what personal information we hold about you, ask us to delete it, and ask us to correct it. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined in that law, and we never have. Because we hold so little, almost every request resolves to one question, whether your address is on the mailing list. Write to data@basin.la and we will answer. We will not charge you for asking and we will not treat you differently for having asked.

People named in our reporting

This section is about our journalism rather than about you as a reader, and the distinction matters. Our articles name people, because public records name people: campaign donors, filers, officeholders, contractors and lobbyists all appear in disclosures that agencies publish by law. That reporting is drawn from those public records, not gathered from anyone's use of this site, and a request under the section above does not reach it.

If you believe we have published a figure or a name in error, that is a correction rather than a privacy request, we take it seriously, and the corrections page explains how it works. We will recompute the figure from the source records and fix it in place with a dated note if we got it wrong.

Retention and security

Mailing list addresses are kept until you unsubscribe. Analytics are aggregate and retained on Cloudflare's schedule. The site is served over HTTPS throughout. No method of transmission is perfectly secure, and we will not claim otherwise.

Children

This site is written for a general audience and is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. If you believe a child has sent us an address, write to data@basin.la and we will remove it.

Changes

If this policy changes we will move the date at the top, and if the change is material, say plainly what changed. If we ever begin serving advertising, this page will be rewritten before the first ad runs, not after.

Contact

Questions about any of this go to data@basin.la.