Privacy Policy

The Middle Ground ("we", "us") is a news aggregation and analysis platform operated by Connor O’Neill as a sole proprietor during the beta period. This document describes what data we collect, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and the rights you have over it. For all privacy questions and data-subject requests, contact coneill1331@gmail.com.

• Account identity. If you sign in, the identifier and display name from your authentication provider (Supabase Auth), and any profile fields you set.
• Activity. Bias-perception votes on topics and figures, comments you post, and timestamps for those events.
• Device signals. Browser user-agent header used to pick mobile vs. desktop layouts, IP address (visible to our hosts but not stored by our application code), and cookies described below.
• Diagnostic data. If you encounter an error, the error message, stack trace, and a sampled trace of the request are captured for debugging.

• Session. Your authentication session is stored by Supabase Auth in browser storage.
• Consent. Your choice on the analytics consent banner is stored locally as tmg_consent.
• Analytics (optional). Google Analytics cookies are set only after you accept analytics on the consent banner.

The following third parties process data on our behalf:

• Supabase — authentication and database hosting.
• OpenAI — clustering and summarization of upstream news articles. We do not send your account identity or comments to OpenAI; we send article text we fetched from public sources.
• Sentry — error and performance diagnostics.
• Google Analytics — aggregate site traffic metrics, only when you have accepted analytics on the consent banner.
• Vercel — hosting of the web application.

We also read from public or licensed upstream sources to build our news content: NewsAPI, RSS feeds of public news outlets, OpenSecrets, OpenFEC, and Congress.gov. We do not share user data with those sources.

Topic summaries, figure ratings, position extractions, and action consistency judgements are produced by large language models. They may contain factual errors. Each AI-generated section is labeled in the user interface and includes a "Report inaccuracy" link.

Account, vote, and comment data is retained for as long as your account is active. Diagnostic data is retained for approximately 30 days. Article metadata (titles, descriptions, source URLs) is retained indefinitely as part of the public news archive. Full upstream article bodies are not retained.

You may request deletion of your account and associated user data, a copy of your data, or correction of inaccurate profile fields by emailing coneill1331@gmail.com. We aim to respond within 30 days. See our data-deletion runbook for the operational steps we follow on receipt of a request.

The Middle Ground is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect data from children under 13.

We will update this page when our practices change. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision.