Data Policy

The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/policies/data · Effective October 16, 2026

This policy states how The Massachusetts Times handles data as a matter of engineering and conduct. The promises it rests on are enforceable by you in the Data Terms; this page is how we keep them. Every sentence here is kept today.

1. The Doctrine

1.1. Minimization is not our compliance posture; it is our architecture. Data we never collect cannot leak, cannot be stolen, cannot be demanded by anyone, and cannot tempt us — absence is the only perfect security, and we build for absence.

1.2. Where the industry asks "what can we capture," this desk asks "what can we refuse to know," and the systems are built from that question.

2. Nothing Collected Without Need

2.1. Need is defined narrowly and enumerated in the Data Terms' operational minimum: serve the page, complete a purchase a reader chose to make, keep a session a member chose to open, hold correspondence a person chose to send.

2.2. Everything outside that enumeration is not collected — not collected-and-anonymized, not collected-and-discarded, not collected. The distinction matters because only the last one is checkable from outside, and we hold ourselves to the checkable version.

3. The Reading Surfaces

3.1. Reading The Massachusetts Times requires no account and plants nothing, as the Access Terms and the Cookies Policy state.

3.2. Our reading pages make no third-party requests that report you: no trackers, no advertising pixels, no social-media embeds that phone home, no analytics scripts, and no resources fetched from data-hungry hosts as the price of rendering a page. The page you load is served to you by us, and your visit is a matter between you and us.

4. Measurement

4.1. This publication carries no audience-tracking instrumentation. What we know about readership we learn from aggregate, identity-free serving counts on our own infrastructure — how many times a page was served, never who was served it.

4.2. We do not profile readers, build audience segments, or measure individuals, and no measurement of any kind rides inside the reading lane. A publication that cannot tell you apart cannot sell you out, and we built the first so the second stays impossible.

5. What We Hold, and How Long

5.1. Purchase records are held as the Terms of Sale state and as law requires of any merchant. Member session data exists for the life of its purpose. Correspondence you send us is kept as correspondence.

5.2. Each item in the operational minimum is held for its need and no longer, and none of it is enriched, cross-referenced, or grown into a profile. A record of your subscription is a record of a subscription — it never becomes a record of you.

6. Nobody's Inventory

6.1. Nothing is sold, rented, traded, shared for value, or contributed to any broker, exchange, co-op, or "partner" — the word partner appearing nowhere in this sentence is the point of this sentence.

6.2. The vendors that touch our operations — the payment processor at checkout, the infrastructure that carries the pages — act on our instructions, for their narrow function, disclosed at the surfaces where they operate, and are chosen and held to the standard of this page.

7. Demands

7.1. Demands for data are tested, not obeyed by reflex, exactly as the Data Terms promise, and the best answer we can give most demands is the truthful one: the thing demanded was never collected.

7.2. We keep a dated record of demands and our answers, published to the full extent the law allows us to speak, and data concerning sources stands apart from all of this under the Source Terms' higher law.

8. Check Us

8.1. You do not have to take this page's word either. Open your browser's request inspector on any page of ours: every request it shows should be ours, and what you find should match this policy exactly.

8.2. A mismatch — any request on a reading surface that reports you to anyone — is a defect, not a policy change. Report it through the publication's published contact channels; it will be removed and the finding handled under the Correction Terms.

9. The Record of This Policy

9.1. This policy is kept in dated versions at its address, so what your visit cost you in data on any given day — nothing — can always be checked.

This policy is one of the Policies this publication keeps.