Privacy

The California Tech is Caltech’s student newspaper. This page explains what its website collects and why. It supplements the Caltech Privacy Notice, which also applies.

Reading the site

You don’t need an account, and there are no ads or tracking cookies. The site sets one cookie, “theme”, which remembers whether you chose the light or dark theme. It lasts a year and contains nothing else. Your browser also keeps that choice in its local storage.

We count visits with Vercel Web Analytics and measure page speed with Vercel Speed Insights. For each page view they record the page’s address, the referring page, your browser, operating system and device type, approximate location (country, region and city), and page-load timings. They use no cookies or browser storage. Vercel tells visits apart using a hash of the request that it discards after 24 hours, and does not link these records to your IP address or follow you across other sites. Private edit links are removed before anything is sent.

Like any website, the servers that deliver these pages (Vercel, and Supabase for articles and images) receive your IP address and browser details with each request, and keep standard logs under their own policies.

Submitting a piece

The submission form asks for your name, your Caltech email address, a title, a category and your text, and lets you add images. We use them to review, edit and possibly publish your piece, and to contact you about it.

• Your submission is stored in Notion, the editors’ workspace, and in Supabase. Your name and email are kept in an internal note for the editors. They are not published, and you are credited as the author only if the piece runs under your name.
• Images are re-encoded when you upload them, which removes location and other camera metadata. They are kept at unlisted addresses until the piece is published.
• You get a confirmation email, and the editors get a notice with your name, email and title, sent from the Tech’s Gmail account.
• Nothing is public until an editor publishes it.
• While you write, your draft is saved only in your browser’s local storage, so it survives a reload. It is not sent anywhere until you press Submit, and it is cleared afterwards.
• To limit spam, the site counts submissions per IP address. The count is held in memory for up to an hour and not stored.

To correct or delete a submission, email tech@caltech.edu.

Embedded content

Some articles embed crossword puzzles from Crosshare, and some pages embed survey forms from Tally. These load from those sites, are covered by their own privacy policies, and may set their own cookies. Anything you type into an embedded form goes to that service.

Services we use

• Vercel: hosts the website and its analytics
• Supabase: stores articles, images and submissions
• Notion: the editors’ workspace, where submissions are reviewed
• Google (Gmail): sends submission confirmations from the Tech’s email account
• Crosshare: crossword puzzles embedded in some articles
• Tally: survey forms embedded on some pages

Questions

Write to the editors at tech@caltech.edu. For Caltech’s own privacy practices, or to contact Caltech’s privacy office, see the Caltech Privacy Notice.