Privacy
Useful information, without an audience file.
No advertising, public comments, subscriber database or third-party analytics script. Reading the site needs no account.
Questions and search
Public Ask Reed is retired. The newspaper’s search uses published information. In the authenticated private development preview, Reed uses published records and current public web research. When admitted, the question, up to two preceding questions and relevant public excerpts are sent to OpenAI and its search service. Contact submissions are never read by Reed. Public page text is cached for up to fifteen minutes; questions are not used as cache keys. Records-only mode makes no OpenAI request. We request disabled response storage; hosting and provider abuse-monitoring/retention policies can still apply. Do not enter private information. Questions use POST bodies, not shareable URLs. A signed, random browser cookie lasts up to 24 hours and separates your Reed allowance from other people on the same network. It is used for abuse prevention, not advertising or an account. Short-lived hashed submission fingerprints prevent duplicate processing; the application does not retain the question text in that guard. The application does not keep conversation history or share a query cache. Its private spending ledger retains request identifiers, salted rate-limit identifiers, reservations and usage/cost receipts, without question or answer text. Ordinary site-search URLs can appear in browser history and hosting logs.
Private Contact submissions
The independent site’s private inbox stores your category, message, optional name and reply email, page/topic, optional source link and separate photo/name permissions. A reference is returned only after storage confirms acceptance. The inbox is available only to an authorized owner. Nothing is automatically published, fetched from your source link, or added to Reed.
Private intake is retained under a 90-day receipt policy, with daily cleanup when hosting is configured. A material approved correction keeps a concise public source/revision note; it does not publish your reply email or private discussion. Hosting backup and operational-log policies are separate. This is a private review workflow, not a promise of legal confidentiality or a response time.
When an authorized sender is configured, owner email alerts contain a private review link, not the Contact message or contributor details. The private inbox remains the receipt of record. Proposed articles stay private until the owner approves the specific source and article version.
Hosting and abuse prevention
The host processes network requests under its own policies. Intake uses a salted network hash and daily submission limits; it does not save the raw IP in the review queue. Short-lived in-memory limits also protect form sessions. No account is required.
Other websites
Service and source links leave this site. Those destinations have their own privacy and payment practices. This site does not process municipal payments.