Privacy Policy

Flames Scout Wire (flamesscoutwire.ca) is an independent, Alberta-based Calgary Flames news and commentary site. This page explains what data we collect from visitors, why, and what your options are. It's written in plain language on purpose.

What we collect

We use two analytics tools to understand overall traffic: which pages get read, roughly how many visitors we get, and which countries and referring sites they come from.

Google Analytics (GA4) is the main one. It does set cookies in your browser, which is how it recognizes a repeat visit from the same device, and it sends data including your IP address to Google, whose servers are outside Canada. Google's handling of that data is covered by its own privacy policy. We have turned off Google Signals and ad-personalization signals, so what we collect is not used to build advertising profiles or to follow you across devices. We look at it in aggregate, to see which stories land. See "Your choices" below if you'd rather not be counted.

If you're visiting from Europe, we ask before setting any analytics cookie: a bar appears at the bottom of the page, and nothing is set unless you accept. If you decline, Google Analytics is never loaded at all. We detect this from your browser's timezone setting, not by looking up your location, so it's approximate.

Cloudflare Web Analytics also runs on the site. It does not use cookies and reports aggregate numbers only.

We do not have user accounts, do not run e-commerce or take payments on this site, and do not maintain an email newsletter or mailing list at this time.

Embedded posts from X

Some articles embed posts from X (formerly Twitter) using X's own embed widget, so you can see the original post in context. When an embedded post loads, your browser connects directly to X's servers, and X's own privacy policy and cookie practices apply to that connection, not ours. We don't control what X collects.

Fonts

This site loads its typefaces from Google Fonts. Your browser requests those font files directly from Google's servers, which, like any web request, shares your IP address with Google for the purpose of delivering the font. We don't receive that data ourselves.

If you email us

If you contact us at hello@flamesscoutwire.ca or editor@flamesscoutwire.ca, we keep that correspondence to respond to you and, where relevant, for our own editorial or business records (for example, if you're a contributor or a source). We don't sell or share your email address with outside companies.

Children

This site is general-audience sports commentary and isn't directed at children. We don't knowingly collect personal information from children through the site itself.

Your choices

If you'd rather not be counted by Google Analytics, any of these work, and none of them break the site:

• Install Google's own opt-out browser add-on.
• Turn on your browser's tracking protection. Firefox strict mode, Brave Shields, and Safari all block it by default or on request.
• Use any ad blocker. Most block Google Analytics automatically.
• Clear or block cookies for this site in your browser settings.

The same tools will block third-party fonts and X embeds if you'd prefer not to load those either.

Changes to this policy

If what we collect changes, for example if we ever add a newsletter, we'll update this page and change the date at the top.

Questions

For anything about this policy or your data, reach us at privacy@flamesscoutwire.ca. This site operates under the laws of Alberta, Canada.