Privacy Policy

CIVIC NOTICE: CityofWelland.com is a private, grassroots digital town square built independently by and for the residents of Welland to support faith, family, and community networks. We are not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with the City of Welland municipal government (welland.ca) or any of its subsidiaries." This platform is entirely funded and operated by everyday community neighbors to discuss local life, traditional values, and neighborhood matters.

Who We Are

Our website address is: https://cityofwelland.com. This platform is operated as an independent, private community network for adult residents aged 21 and older residing within Welland, Ontario, Canada.

What Personal Data We Collect and Why We Collect It

Comments & Member Articles

When visitors leave comments or publish Member Articles on the site, we collect the data shown in the comments form, as well as the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to assist in malicious spam detection. An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to verify profile icon display.

Media

If you upload images or videos to the community activity feeds, public groups, or forums, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Other visitors to the platform can technically download and extract location data from images hosted on public web sections.

Contact Forms

When you contact us or join our Advertiser Whitelist, we collect your name, business name, and email address. We retain these inquiries for six (6) months for customer service purposes, but we never share this data with external third-party ad networks.

Cookies & Real-Time Sync

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we set temporary cookies to determine if your browser accepts cookies, alongside secure persistent tokens to save your login details and screen display choices. Furthermore, our platform utilizes technical background utilities to process real-time interactive notifications, private instant messages, and immediate live chat streaming without manual page reloads.

Analytics

We do not use big-tech tracking cookies or invasive cross-site analytics scripts. Our metrics are limited to anonymous server-side indicators to evaluate page speed, platform health, and system resource distribution across Welland network loads.

Who We Share Your Data With

By default, CityofWelland.com does not share, lease, sell, or trade any personal user data or private tracking history to anyone. Secure network transaction tokens are handled internally to manage automated live news feeds via RSS.app and platform notifications.

How Long We Retain Your Data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue. For users that register on our platform (Standard Members, Expert Leaders, or Premium Members), we store the personal information they provide in their user profile indefinitely. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their system username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What Rights You Have Over Your Data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or platform security purposes.

Where Your Data Is Sent

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. All core membership profile frameworks, custom courses, and database entries are securely hosted on Canadian web infrastructure.

Contact Information

For any specific data protection inquiries, privacy questions, or profile erasure requests, please contact our community administration team directly using the **Contact Us** link located in our platform's side navigation menu.

Additional Information

How We Protect Your Data

We take active technical security measures to safeguard our network town square. This includes full site-wide SSL encryption, secure password hashing, strict whitelist registration gating, and active server firewalls to prevent robotic malicious entry logs.

What Data Breach Procedures We Have in Place

In the unlikely event of a security or data threshold issue, CityofWelland.com operates an internal reporting system. Affected members will be explicitly notified via email within 72 hours of breach verification in accordance with Canadian data privacy compliance practices.

Automated Decision Making & Member Protections

Our network does not perform automated algorithmic profiling or credit-based profiling. We provide members with unilateral Block Member parameters to completely cut off unwanted profile visibility, messages, and tags, while our community-driven Report Tool allows users to instantly flag harassment or inappropriate media directly to site moderators for physical evaluation.