Uprise RI (“we,” “us,” or “the publication that cares about your data almost as much as it cares about Rhode Island”) operates the website at upriseri.com. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, why we collect it, how we use it, and what rights you have over it.
We wrote this policy in plain English because nobody — not even lawyers — enjoys reading privacy policies written exclusively in legalese. We did, however, keep it legally comprehensive, because we take your privacy seriously. More seriously, in fact, than we take most things, and we take Rhode Island politics extremely seriously.
1. Information We Collect
1.1 Information You Provide Directly
When you interact with Uprise RI, you may voluntarily provide us with:
- Email address — when you subscribe to our newsletter or contact us. We will guard this with the ferocity of a Rhode Island Red hen protecting her eggs.
- Name— if you choose to provide it when contacting us or submitting a story tip. First name, last name, pen name, nickname bestowed upon you at a Del's Lemonade stand in 1997 — we accept them all.
- Payment information — if you support us financially through our donation system. This is processed entirely by Stripe (see Section 5) and we never see, store, or even momentarily glance at your credit card number.
- Story tips and messages— anything you submit through our contact form. We read every single one, usually within 24 hours, occasionally while eating a breakfast sandwich from a place we won't name because then everyone would go there.
1.2 Information Collected Automatically
When you visit our website, we automatically collect certain technical information through our analytics platform:
- IP address— which, depending on where you are in Rhode Island, might narrow your location down to somewhere between Woonsocket and Westerly. Given that the entire state is roughly 48 miles long and 37 miles wide, this is simultaneously very specific and not specific at all. If you're visiting from out of state, we can generally determine which state, but we promise not to judge (unless you're a lobbyist).
- Browser type and version — we collect this to ensure our site works properly across browsers. We do not use this information to form opinions about you as a person, though we quietly respect anyone still using Opera.
- Device type — mobile, tablet, desktop, or that one person who keeps accessing us from what appears to be a PlayStation 3. You know who you are.
- Pages visited and time spent — this helps us understand which stories resonate with our readers. We can see that you spent 14 minutes on our analysis of the State House budget, and frankly, we find that heartwarming.
- Referring URL— how you found us. Whether it was through a search engine, a social media post, or someone who texted you “you HAVE to read this” — we appreciate every path that leads to informed citizenship.
2. Cookies
Our website uses cookies. Not the kind you get at KNEAD Doughnuts on Westminster Street in Providence (though those are extraordinary, particularly the brown butter chocolate chip variety, which is technically not a cookie but operates in the same spiritual category). No, we're talking about small text files that your browser stores on your device when you visit a website.
To be precise: a cookie is a small piece of data — typically between 4 and 8 kilobytes, though ours tend toward the smaller end — sent from our web server and stored by your web browser on your computer, phone, or tablet. Each cookie contains a name, a value (often an alphanumeric string that means absolutely nothing to a human reader), an expiration date, and the domain it belongs to.
2.1 Cookies We Use
- Essential cookies — these are required for the website to function. They handle things like your theme preference (light or dark mode) and session management. Without them, the site would behave unpredictably, like a seagull at Scarborough Beach.
- Analytics cookies — we use Matomo, a privacy-focused analytics platform (see Section 5.2), which sets cookies to help us understand how visitors use our site. These cookies do not track you across other websites. They stay in their lane, unlike certain merging drivers on Route 95 in that certain section of Providence.
- Authentication cookies — if you log into an account, we use cookies to keep you signed in. These expire when you log out or after a reasonable period of inactivity.
2.2 Managing Cookies
You can control cookies through your browser settings. Most browsers allow you to block or delete cookies, though doing so may affect your experience on our site. We respect your choice either way. Detailed instructions for managing cookies can be found in your browser's help documentation — which, unlike this policy, is probably not very fun to read.
3. How We Use Your Information
We use the information we collect to:
- Deliver our journalism to you, which is, after all, the entire point.
- Send you our newsletter, if you've subscribed, containing our latest reporting and the occasional aside about something happening in Rhode Island that we found interesting.
- Process donations through Stripe so we can continue operating as an independent news organization.
- Analyze site traffic to understand which stories matter to our readers and improve our coverage accordingly.
- Respond to your messages, story tips, and feedback — ideally with the urgency the message deserves, and always with genuine appreciation.
- Maintain the security and proper functioning of our website, which includes monitoring for suspicious activity. (We once detected what appeared to be a bot attempting to subscribe to our newsletter 47,000 times. We declined.)
We do not use your information to:
- Sell it. Ever. To anyone. Full stop.
- Build advertising profiles. We don't run targeted ads and have no plans to start.
- Make automated decisions about you. No algorithms are deciding what you see based on your personal data. Our reporting is largely produced by automated systems (see our Terms of Service), but every reader sees the same journalism — nothing is personalized to you.
4. Email Subscriptions
If you subscribe to our newsletter, we store your email address for the sole purpose of sending you our journalism. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any email. When you unsubscribe, we remove your email from our active mailing list within 24 hours.
We will never subscribe you to our newsletter without your explicit consent. We believe in opt-in, not opt-out. We believe in earning your inbox, not invading it.
5. Third-Party Services
5.1 Stripe (Payment Processing)
When you make a donation to Uprise RI, your payment is processed by Stripe, Inc. We use Stripe because they are a PCI-compliant payment processor with industry-leading security practices — which is not an endorsement, to be clear; we don't endorse Stripe so much as concede they seem to be the best of the worst. Your credit card number, CVV, and billing details are transmitted directly to Stripe and never touch our servers. We receive only a transaction confirmation and enough information to send you a thank-you (your email and donation amount). Stripe's privacy practices are governed by their own privacy policy.
5.2 Matomo (Analytics)
We use Matomo for website analytics. Unlike Google Analytics, Matomo is designed with privacy as a core principle. We chose Matomo specifically because:
- It does not share your data with any third party, including advertising networks.
- We self-host our Matomo instance, meaning your analytics data stays on our servers.
- It supports Do Not Track (DNT) browser signals and IP anonymization, and our instance is configured for data minimization.
5.3 Social Media Platforms
We maintain presences on Bluesky, X (we still call it Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram to share our journalism. When you interact with our content on these platforms, those platforms' privacy policies apply. We do not embed social media tracking pixels on our website.
6. Data Retention
Our guiding principle is simple: we keep your data only as long as we actually need it, and no longer.
- Newsletter email addresses— kept for as long as you remain subscribed. When you unsubscribe, your address is removed from our active mailing list immediately and deleted from our systems promptly thereafter. Not archived. Not “deactivated.” Deleted. Gone. Like a snow sculpture on Benefit Street in March.
- Contact form submissions — retained only as long as needed for journalistic and operational purposes. If your submission contained a story tip that led to published reporting, we may retain the relevant correspondence longer for journalistic record-keeping.
- Donation records — retained for 7 years as required by applicable tax and financial regulations. We wish this could be shorter, but the IRS has opinions about record-keeping, and they are not known for their flexibility.
- Analytics data and server logs — retained only as long as they are operationally useful for understanding readership and keeping the site secure, and reviewed only if we detect unusual activity, such as the aforementioned bot incident.
7. Data Security
We implement reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect your data, including:
- HTTPS encryption on all pages (your connection to our site is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.2 or higher).
- Secure, access-controlled servers hosted within the United States.
- Regular security updates and monitoring.
- Limited access — only personnel who need your data to perform their job functions can access it.
No method of electronic transmission or storage is 100% secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security, but we can guarantee that we treat your data with the seriousness it deserves and respond to any security incident promptly and transparently.
8. Your Rights
Regardless of where you live, we believe you have the following rights regarding your personal data:
- Access — you can request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
- Correction — you can ask us to correct inaccurate data.
- Deletion — you can ask us to delete your personal data. We will comply unless we have a legal obligation to retain it.
- Portability — you can request your data in a common, machine-readable format.
- Objection — you can object to our processing of your data for specific purposes.
To exercise any of these rights, contact us at hey@upriseri.com. We will respond within 30 days, which is both a legal requirement in many jurisdictions and a timeframe we genuinely aim to beat.
8.1 Rhode Island Residents
If you are a resident of Rhode Island, you may have additional rights under applicable state law. We comply with all Rhode Island data privacy regulations and are happy to discuss your specific rights. We are, after all, a Rhode Island publication — you're our people.
8.2 Do Not Track
Our analytics platform (Matomo) supports Do Not Track signals, and we chose it in part for that reason. We aim to honor DNT signals sent by your browser, and we configure our analytics for data minimization either way.
9. Children's Privacy
Uprise RI is a general-audience news publication. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe we have inadvertently collected data from a child under 13, please contact us immediately and we will delete it.
10. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the “Last updated” date at the top of this page. For significant changes, we will provide notice through our website. We will not, however, send you an email about it unless the change materially affects how we handle your data — because nobody needs more email.
11. Contact Us
If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, your data, or anything else related to how we handle information, you can reach us at:
- Contact form: upriseri.com/contact
We mean it about the response time. If you email us about a privacy concern, a real human being will read it, take it seriously, and get back to you. That's not a marketing promise — it's an editorial commitment from a newsroom that believes transparency isn't just something we demand from the institutions we cover.