Overview
Town Briefs is an unofficial, independent reader of municipal public records. This page explains what happens when you browse the site, send a form, or read a brief.
Briefs and the public record
Meeting briefs are derived from documents and recordings that municipalities already publish — agendas, minutes, linked reports, and (when available) closed captions from meeting videos. Those sources are the public record; this site is a readable layer on top. Briefs do not claim access to private or confidential material.
Contact and fact-check forms
The contact form and the fact-check form on meeting pages are hosted with Netlify Forms. Submissions may include your name, email, and message (all optional except the message). They go to the editor and are not published automatically.
Form mail is kept only as long as needed to reply or follow up on a correction — typically a few months — then deleted. Spam and empty submissions may be discarded sooner.
Analytics (PostHog)
When a PostHog project token is configured, the site loads
PostHog
to understand which pages are read. Capture is configured with
person_profiles: identified_only (no person profile is created for
anonymous browsing alone). Analytics are not loaded on localhost.
This project uses PostHog’s EU Cloud hosts
(eu.i.posthog.com / eu.posthog.com). Event data for this site
is processed in the EU region PostHog operates for that product, not on a Canadian host.
Page URLs and technical browser details may be included in events.
Opting out of analytics
You can opt out of PostHog capturing on this site. In your browser’s developer console on any Town Briefs page, run:
posthog.opt_out_capturing()That stores an opt-out preference in your browser so future visits from that browser should not send analytics. To reverse it later:
posthog.opt_in_capturing()You can also block the analytics script with a content blocker or browser privacy settings. If no PostHog token is configured for a deploy, the script is not included at all.
Questions
Privacy questions about this site can go through the contact form.