LA Observed does not collect personal information about website visitors or share personally identifiable information.

Total Choice Hosting, which provides professional hosting services to LA Observed, and Google collect the standard statistical information on website visitors such as IP address, type of browser used and which pages are visited. That data is available to LA Observed in raw logs and daily summaries. The summary data is retained by LA Observed for internal use and, from time to time, may be described on the site or shared with advertisers, sponsors and potential business partners.

As far as we know, it is not possible to identify individuals using this data. And we have no interest in identifying the individuals who visit the site.

Visitors who voluntarily entered their names or email addresses in publicly viewable comments on the site should understand that their information, as well as their comments, are readily available to the public. The LA Observed archives are regularly crawled by popular search engines and by NewsBank, a commercial service which licenses the LA Observed archivea for libraries, schools and academic institutions.

From time to time, LA Observed may ask website visitors to participate in surveys. Participation is always voluntary. Personal information provided in survey answers will only be used in summary form and for the uses intended by the survey. Any personal information gathered pursuant to subscriptions or donations to the site will not be shared or used for any purpose other than the direct purprose for which it was collected.

Email sent to LA Observed as well as the correspondent's email address may be retained. On occasion LA Observed may contact email correspondents with news or information regarding the site.

Content of email sent to the site is generally considered confidential unless the editor has a reasonable belief that the correspondent intended it for publication. Confidential email will not be published or disclosed without the correspondent's permission or a legal order. The promise of confidentiality does not apply to personally abusive or offensive email, email that attempts to mislead, email that is part of a campaign to discredit anyone, or any spam email. Such correspondence becomes the property of LA Observed and the contents and name of the email sender may become the subject of a post on the site.

We make a good faith effort to carry out this policy, but cannot be held responsible for inadvertent lapses. This policy may be changed by the publisher at any time.