Privacy Policy

Free Arkansas Media publishes the Free Arkansas podcast, Y’all Hear About This, The Arkansawyers, and this website at www.freearkansas.com. This policy covers that website, our newsletter, and the messages you send us. It does not cover the podcast apps and platforms you might listen on, which run their own policies.

Three things, and nothing else.

• Your email address, if you subscribe. That is the only field on the newsletter form. We send a confirmation email first and do not add you to anything until you click it.
• What you type into the contact form. Your name, your email, an optional subject, and your message. We keep it so we can answer you and follow up.
• Basic traffic data. For each page view we record the page you landed on, the site or link that sent you, your browser’s user-agent string, and whether the screen is phone-sized or desktop-sized. That is the whole record.

We do not store IP addresses with those page views, and we do not use Google Analytics, Meta pixels, ad networks, or any other third-party tracker. The counter is our own, running on our own server.

There are no advertising or tracking cookies on this site. Your browser stores two small flags locally, on your device only, so the site behaves decently: one remembers that you dismissed the newsletter pop-up, and one remembers that you already subscribed so we stop asking. Neither is sent to us or to anyone else, and clearing your browser data erases both.

Our staff-only admin area sets a login cookie. If you are not on the Free Arkansas team, it never applies to you.

• To send you the newsletter you asked for.
• To answer your message, tip, pitch, or correction.
• To see which episodes and pages people actually read, so we make more of what works.
• To find broken links and fix them.

We do not build advertising profiles, we do not score or segment you, and we do not use your message to train anything.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your information. A short list of vendors runs the plumbing on our behalf, and they are contractually limited to that job:

• Railway hosts the website, the API, and the database.
• Resend delivers our email, including newsletter confirmations and contact-form notifications.

The only other case is legal: if a valid court order or law requires it, or if we need to protect someone’s safety or our own rights, we may have to hand something over. If that ever happens we will tell you unless we are legally barred from doing so.

This site includes profile pages for people, organizations, places, and topics that come up on the shows. Those pages are journalism. They are built from what was said on the record in an episode and from publicly available information, and they exist to help listeners follow the story. They are not a database compiled about private individuals, and nothing on them is for sale.

If a profile about you is wrong, out of date, or unfair, tell us at hello@freearkansas.com or through the contact page. We correct real errors, promptly and without argument.

• Unsubscribe any time. Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link at the bottom and it works immediately, no login and no questions.
• Ask us to delete you. Email hello@freearkansas.com and we will remove your address and your messages from our systems.
• Ask what we have. Same address. We will tell you, in plain English.
• Turn off the counter. Any browser setting or extension that blocks scripts stops the page-view beacon. Nothing on the site breaks when you do.

Newsletter addresses stay until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them. Contact messages stay while the conversation is live and for a reasonable period after, so we can keep our promises and our record straight. Page view records are aggregate traffic data and are kept as history.

The site runs over HTTPS, the database is not publicly reachable, and admin access requires a staff login. No system is perfect, so if you spot a security problem please write to hello@freearkansas.com before posting it publicly and we will move fast.

This site is meant for a general audience and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child sent us something, tell us and we will delete it.

If we change what we collect, we will change this page and move the date at the top. Material changes get announced in the newsletter rather than slipped in quietly.

Questions about any of this go to hello@freearkansas.com, or use the contact form. A real person reads it.

See also our Terms of Use.