What this site knows about you

Not much. But we would rather say it plainly than let you assume.

This site runs Google Analytics, and has since it launched. Since August 8, 2026 it has also measured how far down a page people get, and since the Fan Compact opened it has run two forms that store what you type. This page exists because we ask visitors to trust specific privacy promises elsewhere on the site, so it should say what every part of the site does, checked against the code that runs it.

What analytics collects

• That a page was viewed, and which one.
• Roughly where in the world you are: city level, derived from your IP address. Google receives that address; we never see or store it.
• Your browser and whether you are on a phone or a computer.
• How far down the page you scrolled: 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%, and whether you reached the end of the argument, measured against the article itself rather than the whole document.
• How long you were actively reading, and the reading speed that implies.
• Clicks on share buttons, source PDFs, outbound links, and expandable sections.

We use it for one thing: finding out which pages actually get read to the end. A page nobody finishes is a page we wrote badly, and we would like to know which ones those are. There is no other purpose, and there is no one else it goes to.

What analytics never collects

Signing is different, and this heading is not a promise about it. If you sign the Compact or ask for hearing alerts, you are deliberately handing us what you typed, and we store it. That is the next section. The two systems are separate and the records are never combined, but only one of them is anonymous, and it is not the one with your name in it.

Analytics also never does any of this: advertising, remarketing, audience export, cross-site tracking, fingerprinting, session recording, heat maps, or any third-party ad pixel. Nothing about you is ever sold, to anyone, for any purpose. “No sharing” needs one honest asterisk, which the next section spends.

What signing collects, and where it goes

• The Compact signature form takes your name, email and city. An optional second step adds the team you love and a sentence about why you signed. Your browser sends those, together with the page you signed on and the time, straight to a Google Apps Script web app that writes them into a Google Sheet this campaign controls. The form also contains a hidden field that real visitors never see; it exists to catch bots, and if anything fills it the submission is thrown away. Nothing from that field is stored.
• The hearing-alert form takes an email address and nothing else. It posts to a small function on our host, which checks that the address is plausible, forwards only that address to the same kind of Google Sheet with every other column filled in by the server itself, and never writes the address into its logs.
• The signature counter on the Compact page and the homepage asks that same Apps Script for one number, the count, and displays it. The request carries nothing about you beyond what any web request carries.
• One flag in your browser. After you sign, the Compact page stores a single value (compact_signed) in your browser’s local storage so the floating sign prompt stops appearing on that device. It never leaves your browser and we cannot read it.

Who else touches it. Two companies, in the ordinary way any small campaign’s tools work, and you should know their names. Google stores both lists: the forms post through Google Apps Script into Google Sheets, and because the Compact form talks to Google directly from your browser, Google’s servers receive your IP address with that request, as they would with any web request; we never see it. Vercel hosts the site, runs the hearing-alert function, and keeps short-lived request logs. Both process this data on our instructions and for no purpose of their own. That is what the phrase “no sharing” does not cover, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of false statement this site publishes corrections about.

The delivery. The point of signing is that the list gets delivered to the NBA and its Board of Governors, so the names and cities on it are meant to travel. Your email address is not part of that delivery; it stays with the organizers and is used only to reach you about this campaign. If we quote your comment, it is attributed by first name and city. Ask us and we will quote you anonymously or not at all. Public displays of support on the site show counts, city and team only, never names or emails.

How long we keep it. Signatures are kept until the Compact is delivered and for one year after, because a petition you cannot produce is not evidence of anything. Hearing-alert addresses are kept until you unsubscribe or until the arena decisions are finished, whichever comes first. Neither list is kept on the analytics clock below, and neither is ever merged into it.

Embedded video

Some pages embed clips from YouTube: the homepage media strip, the press page, the work-session page, the Compact page, and the campaign clips in the FAQ. Those players load from Google’s servers and run under Google’s policies, not ours. We use YouTube’s privacy-enhanced domain (youtube-nocookie.com) wherever we control the embed, and in the FAQ the player is created only when you press play. The two Adam Silver clips in the FAQ are plain video files served from this site, with no third party involved.

Cookies, retention, and logs

• One first-party cookie, _ga, set by Google Analytics and expiring after 90 days.
• Analytics data is deleted after 14 months. We keep it that long for one reason: the arena votes run into 2027, and we want to be able to answer questions about this period later.
• Our host, Vercel, keeps short-lived server request logs that include IP addresses. That is independent of analytics and true of essentially every website.
• The Compact page’s compact_signed flag lives in your browser’s local storage, not in a cookie, and is never sent anywhere.

We have switched off every Google setting that would let this data feed advertising, including Google Signals and ads personalization. We do not claim to anonymize your IP: Google Analytics 4 has no such switch, and saying otherwise would be exactly the kind of false statement this site publishes corrections about.

How to turn it off

Questions, or want your data gone

Message @ripcitynotripoff.bsky.social, or use the organizer contacts on the press page. Say which you want:

• Your signature withdrawn. We remove the row, and if the delivery has already gone out we say so plainly rather than pretending it can be recalled.
• Your comment unquoted or anonymized. Done on request, before or after delivery.
• Hearing alerts stopped. The address is deleted, not just muted.
• Analytics. There is nothing here tied to you to delete, which is the point of collecting it the way we do. Turn it off using the section above.

We will delete what can be identified and tell you plainly what cannot.

Last updated September 28, 2026. What changed: this page now describes the Compact and hearing-alert forms exactly as their code works, including the hidden anti-spam field, the timestamp, the browser flag, the signature counter, the Gmail fallback on the email tool, and the embedded video players. If what we collect changes, this page gets a new date and the change gets named, the same rule as our corrections.