Privacy Policy

We are The Polytechnic, RPI's student newspaper. We take seriously both the trust you place in us when you read our work and the responsibility that comes with running our website.

When you visit poly.rpi.edu, we do not store any personally identifying information. We do not retain your IP address. It is used transiently to derive approximate location (city and country) and is not stored after that lookup. We use two functional cookies across our entire site, both expiring after a year. One remembers your dark or light mode preference. Another remembers whether you have seen our homepage dark mode prompt, so we do not show it to you again.

We have no advertising partners and do not share anything with data brokers or marketing platforms. We link to outside sites from time to time but are not responsible for their content. If you are a Polytechnic staff member who logs into the CMS, our publishing platform sets a session cookie to keep you logged in, which expires when you log out — and our analytics system identifies you by name, email, and role for editorial and operational purposes.

Our analytics are session-only. A temporary anonymous identifier is created when you open the site and discarded when you close your tab. We cannot track you across visits, and we have no interest in doing so.

These analytics are run through PostHog to understand how people use the site. That means we collect things like which articles get read, how search gets used, what device and browser you're on, roughly where in the world you are (city and country), which links you click, and how long you spend reading. If you copy text from an article, that text is also captured as an event. Analytics traffic is proxied through our own servers before reaching PostHog Cloud. PostHog does not use any of this for advertising or cross-site profiling, per their privacy policy.

We will disclose information if legally required to do so, and will update this page if our privacy practices change.

Questions? Reach out to us at tech@poly.rpi.edu, or write to us at: