Analytics

This site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, a cookieless pageview beacon. It counts visits and pages viewed without cookies, without a persistent identifier, and without cross-site tracking — Cloudflare's own description of the product, which is why no cookie-consent banner appears here. We use it to see roughly how many people read a page, nothing more granular than that.

What's stored in your browser

Two localStorage keys, both purely functional, neither used for tracking:

• ns-splash-day — today's date, so the entry animation shows once per day instead of on every page load.
• ns-fs — your chosen text size (A / A+), so it stays set as you move between pages.

Neither leaves your browser. Nothing here reads or writes a cookie.

Email editions

When you subscribe to our email editions, we collect your email address and your chosen cadence (the Sunday weekly brief, or every weekday morning) — nothing else. No name, no phone number, no tracking profile. The subscriber list lives in our own store (a Cloudflare Worker with its database), run by The Norwalk Sound; no third-party list service holds it.

Subscription is explicit, double opt-in: submitting the form sends you a confirmation email, and your address is not on the list until you click the link inside it. Editions are sent through Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) from [email protected]; replies go to [email protected], where a person reads them.

You can unsubscribe at any time, and every email we send gives you two ways to do it: a one-click unsubscribe link of its own, and the standard unsubscribe header your email app shows as its own button. Unsubscribing takes effect immediately — an unsubscribe is honored before the next send, not after it. Once you unsubscribe we stop emailing you; we keep the unsubscribed address itself as a suppression record so we can honor your choice permanently and show the history of your consent. What we store, in total: your email address, your cadence choice, and the timestamps of subscribing, confirming and unsubscribing. Nothing else, and never shared.

Feedback and removal/correction requests

When you use the feedback form or the removal/correction request form, whatever you type — including any contact information you choose to leave — is stored in our own local database. It is read only by a human (Ed) triaging the request. It is never published, never added to any mailing list, and never shared with anyone else.

Business directory

The Shop Local directory is built from two public sources only: the Connecticut Secretary of the State's business registry (data.ct.gov) and OpenStreetMap. We never use Google Places or any other proprietary location data, and every qualifying Norwalk business is listed free — no payment or promotion changes what appears.

A business's street address is shown publicly only once we've verified it as a real storefront. Every other business is listed as its name and category only — no street address, no map pin. When in doubt, we leave the address off. The directory refreshes monthly and makes no third-party network request of its own (see "No map in v1" in the page's own source for why it carries no embedded map).

If you own a business listed here and want it corrected, updated or removed, write to [email protected] — the link is also on the directory page itself. We honor these requests within one publish cycle (the site rebuilds hourly).

What we don't do

• No ads, and no ad network on this site.
• No trackers beyond the cookieless analytics beacon described above.
• We never sell, rent, or share your data with any third party.

Questions

Use the feedback form, or write to us: [email protected].