North Atlanta Stars pilot privacy notice

This notice explains how the North Atlanta Stars pilot handles recommendation information. Read it with the pilot rules and North Atlanta Star’s site privacy policy.

Information collected

The recommendation form collects your name, email address, selected business, experience date, written recommendation, and stated connection to the business. It also records whether you say evidence is available and whether you allow recommendation text to be shared with the business. The form requires you to confirm that you are 18 or older and that this is your own experience.

The program records submission and confirmation times, review status, editor-approved excerpts, and review decisions. It creates a coded value from your email address to prevent repeat submissions for the same business and cycle. It also uses temporary coded values derived from email addresses and network addresses to limit repeated requests.

The form does not accept receipt or document uploads. Please do not put payment details, health information, or other sensitive personal details in your recommendation.

Program activity counts

NAS also keeps aggregate counts of Recommend-button clicks and recommendation-window opens for each voting cycle to understand how the program is used. These counters do not store your name, email, recommendation text, page URL or a visitor identifier and do not use analytics cookies. To limit repeated requests, the site temporarily stores a salted code derived from the request’s IP address in short-lived rate-limit buckets; expired buckets are removed during scheduled cleanup. Aggregate totals are retained separately from recommendations and are approximate, not counts of unique people.

How information is used

North Atlanta Star uses this information to send email confirmations, administer the pilot, review recommendations, prevent duplicates and abuse, maintain public counts, and keep a record of review decisions. Submitting does not enroll you in a newsletter or marketing list.

Authorized site administrators can review the stored recommendation information in WordPress. If editor email notifications are enabled, the editor receives the business name, submission status, and a link to the authenticated review screen. That notification does not include your identity or private evidence.

What is public or sent to businesses

The public Wall and business counts show the business and its counted recommendations. The program does not publish your name, email address, or submitted recommendation text on the Wall.

Business notifications are currently off for this pilot. If business notifications are enabled later, a business may receive a notice that a reader recommendation was approved and a link to its listing. Your name and email address are not included. Recommendation text is included only if you gave the optional sharing permission and an editor approved an excerpt after checking it for personal and sensitive details. Even an excerpt without your name may describe an experience the business recognizes; keep that in mind when choosing whether to share.

Business notices go to the business contact address in the NAS listing. Their unsubscribe option stops North Atlanta Stars business-recommendation notices to that email address across all listings. It does not remove the listing or change its recommendations.

Retention

The program’s scheduled cleanup is set to clear names, email addresses, experience dates, original recommendation text, approved excerpts, and confirmation-token information from recommendation records beginning 90 days after the pilot closes. Cleanup runs on a scheduled site task, so it is not an exact-time deletion guarantee.

The remaining records include a coded duplicate-prevention value derived from the email address, the business and cycle, relationship category, evidence-availability and sharing choices, status, timestamps, and review audit records. Notification records and coded business-notification opt-out records also remain. This is partial removal of identifying information, not complete anonymization or deletion of all records.

This cleanup applies to the program’s recommendation records. It does not establish a deletion schedule for email already sent, mail-service logs, site backups, or other copies outside those records.

Questions and requests

Contact info@northatlantastar.com to ask about your recommendation information, request an export, or request removal. The site’s privacy tools can export recommendation data and clear identifying fields. The standard clearing process retains the duplicate-prevention value and vote decision. If you want complete ballot removal, say so in your request so NAS can review it separately.