California Privacy Notice

Effective Oct. 26, 2026. This notice adds to our Privacy Policy for California residents. The Ark is published by AMMI Publishing Company Inc., 1550 Tiburon Blvd. Ste. D, Tiburon, CA 94920.

Whether the CCPA Applies to Us

The California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, covers businesses with more than $26.625 million in annual revenue (the figure in effect through 2026, adjusted by the state every odd-numbered year), businesses that buy, sell or share the personal information of 100,000 or more California consumers or households a year, or businesses that make half their revenue from selling or sharing personal information. The Ark meets none of these. We nonetheless honor the rights below for any California resident, because we think readers should have them.

What We Collect, and Where It Comes From

In the past 12 months we have collected these categories of personal information, from you directly and from your browser or device when you use our website:

• Identifiers: name, email, phone number, postal address, IP address, and a browser push address if you turn on alerts.
• Customer records: subscription, contribution, public-notice and advertising details, including billing address. Card numbers go directly to our payment processor; we do not store them.
• Commercial information: what you subscribed to, gave or bought from us.
• Internet activity: pages visited on our site, the referring page, browser and device type.
• Approximate location: city or region inferred from your IP address, for visitor statistics.
• What you send us: letters, obituaries, announcements, tips, photos and messages.

We do not collect sensitive personal information to infer characteristics about you. Card data is collected only to process your payment.

We use this information for the purposes in our Privacy Policy: publishing the newspaper, serving subscribers, readers and advertisers, processing payments, security, understanding readership, and legal obligations. We keep each category only as long as described there.

No Sale or Sharing

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not "share" it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as California law defines those terms. We have not done so in the past 12 months, and we do not sell or share the information of anyone under 16. We do not use automated decision-making technology to make significant decisions about you. Because we do not sell or share, we do not need a "Do Not Sell or Share" link; we treat a Global Privacy Control signal from your browser as a request to opt out, and would honor it if our practices ever changed.

We disclose personal information for business purposes only to the service providers listed in our Privacy Policy (hosting, analytics, publishing, e-edition, email, payments, calendar, error reporting), under contracts that limit their use of it to providing their service to us.

Your Rights

• Know what personal information we have collected about you, where it came from, why, and whom we disclosed it to, and get a copy.
• Delete personal information we collected from you, with legal exceptions, such as records we must keep for tax purposes.
• Correct inaccurate personal information.
• Opt out of sale or sharing, and limit use of sensitive personal information, though we do neither.
• Equal treatment: we will not charge you more or treat you differently for using these rights.

To make a request, email editor@thearknewspaper.com or call 415-435-2652. We will verify that the request is yours by matching information we already hold, such as your email address, and respond within 45 days (we may extend that once by 45 days and tell you why). An authorized agent may make a request for you with your signed permission. You may make a request to know up to twice in 12 months at no charge.

News Reporting

The CCPA does not restrict newsgathering or publishing, and these rights do not reach our reporting, our sources, our notes or our published journalism, all of which are protected by the First Amendment and the California Constitution. Requests about published content are handled under our corrections policy.

Other California Laws

Online Privacy Protection Act. Our Privacy Policy lists what we collect, the services we use, how you can review and correct your information, how we respond to Do Not Track signals, and how we tell you about changes.

Shine the Light (Civil Code 1798.83). We do not disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing.

Minors (Business and Professions Code 22581). If you are under 18 and posted content on our website, such as a comment or submission, you may ask us to remove it by emailing editor@thearknewspaper.com. Removal from our site does not guarantee removal everywhere, and does not apply to content someone else posted, to our own journalism, or where the law requires us to keep it.

Contact

Questions about this notice: editor@thearknewspaper.com, 415-435-2652, or The Ark, 1550 Tiburon Blvd. Ste. D, Tiburon, CA 94920.