Privacy Policy

Effective date: September 19, 2026 · Last updated: September 19, 2026

Cloudcast Media (“Cloudcast,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) publishes local podcasts and community content at cloudcastmedia.us. This policy explains what personal information this website collects, why we collect it, who we disclose it to, how long we keep it, and the choices and rights you have. It applies to this website and to the email and telephone enquiries you send us through it.

We have written this policy to meet California’s privacy laws — the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act (the “CCPA”), the California Online Privacy Protection Act (“CalOPPA”), and California Civil Code § 1798.83 (“Shine the Light”) — because Cloudcast Media is a California business and California sets the standard we hold ourselves to. The rights set out in section 12 are the rights California residents have under those laws, and this policy describes how we honor them. We describe our practices here as a matter of policy; doing so is not an admission that any particular statute applies to us.

1. Personal information we collect

The table below lists the statutory categories of personal information set out in California Civil Code § 1798.140(v)(1) and states, for each one, whether this website collects it.

The forms on this site

There are two, and neither is required in order to read anything here.

• The contact form asks for your first name, your email address, a reason for writing chosen from a list, and a message of up to 180 characters. All four fields are sent to us when you submit the form, together with the date and time and the IP address the submission came from. We need your email address to reply to you; the rest is what you choose to tell us.
• The newsletter signup asks for your email address, and nothing else. We also record when and from which page you subscribed, so that we can show that the subscription was genuine if you ever ask.

Some links on the site — “Contact sponsorship,” “Submit an idea,” the addresses and phone numbers we publish — open your own email program or dial your phone instead. Those reach us as ordinary correspondence, and we hold them the way any business holds its mail and voicemail.

Please do not use a form to send us anything sensitive. The contact form is for getting a conversation started, not for account numbers, identification numbers, health information or anything else you would not want sitting in an inbox.

2. Where it comes from

• From you directly: what you enter in the contact form or the newsletter signup, the email you send us, the telephone call or voicemail you leave, and anything you volunteer in any of them.
• Automatically from your device: the request records described in category F above, generated by your browser and logged by our hosting provider, and the date, time and IP address recorded alongside a form submission.
• From our email provider, about our own messages: whether a newsletter we sent you was delivered, opened or clicked. This is about our email, not about your activity anywhere else.

We do not buy personal information, and we do not obtain it from data brokers, advertising networks, social media platforms or other third-party sources.

3. Why we use it

We use personal information only for these business purposes:

• To answer you. Replying to enquiries about sponsorships, partnerships, podcast ideas, guest suggestions, careers and general questions, and following up on a conversation you started.
• To send you the newsletter, if you asked for it — episodes, local stories and news from the network — and to manage your subscription, including acting on an unsubscribe.
• To see whether the newsletter is any good. Delivery, open and click figures tell us which stories people actually read, so we can send fewer and better emails.
• To operate and secure the website. Serving pages, diagnosing errors, and detecting and preventing automated abuse, fraud, spam and attacks on the site and its forms. This is what the server records and the IP address stored with a form submission are for.
• To understand demand at the level of place, not person. Aggregated, de-identified request volumes tell us which cities and shows are being read about. We do not tie this to you.
• To meet legal obligations and to establish, exercise or defend legal claims where that becomes necessary.

We will not use your personal information for a materially different, unrelated or incompatible purpose without first telling you.

4. The newsletter and marketing email

Our newsletter is optional and it is opt-in. We add your email address to the list only when you enter it in the signup yourself. We do not add people who contacted us about something else, we do not buy or rent mailing lists, and we do not add you because you appeared in a podcast, sponsored a show or work for a partner organization.

The newsletter is sent through a specialist email service provider engaged as our service provider. It holds your email address, the date and source of your subscription, and a record of which messages were delivered to you, which you opened and which links you clicked. We use that engagement record to judge whether a story landed and to stop sending to addresses that have gone dead. We do not use it to build a profile about you, to infer characteristics about you, or to target advertising, and we do not combine it with anything else.

Leaving the list

Every message we send carries a working unsubscribe link, and every message identifies Cloudcast Media as the sender with a valid postal address, as the CAN-SPAM Act requires. You can also email or call us using the details at the end of this policy and ask to be removed, and we will do it for you.

We act on an unsubscribe promptly and in any event within 10 business days, which is the outer limit the CAN-SPAM Act allows. We do not charge for it, we do not require you to log in, give a reason, or take any step beyond the unsubscribe link or a message to us, and we will not sell, transfer or otherwise use an address that has unsubscribed to send it further marketing. We keep a record of the unsubscribed address for the sole purpose of making sure we do not email it again.

Unsubscribing from the newsletter does not stop us replying to an enquiry you send us. Those replies are ordinary correspondence, not marketing, and you would not thank us for leaving your question unanswered.

5. Sensitive personal information

Our city pages include a “Use my location” button. Pressing it asks your browser for your position, and your browser then asks you for permission. Precise geolocation is sensitive personal information under Civil Code § 1798.140(ae)(1)(D), so it is worth being exact about what happens:

• Nothing happens unless you press the button and then grant permission. Your browser, not Cloudcast, controls that prompt, and you can refuse or revoke it at any time in your browser or device settings.
• We request a low-accuracy reading rather than a high-accuracy one.
• Your coordinates are handed to the page running in your browser. Code running on your own device compares them against a list of our cities and sorts that list by distance.
• The coordinates are never transmitted to Cloudcast or to anyone else, are never written to storage, and cease to exist when you close or reload the page.
• You can always type a city name instead and never use the feature at all.

Because we do not receive this information, we cannot and do not use it to infer characteristics about you, and we do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for any purpose other than those permitted by Civil Code § 1798.121(a). Your right to limit the use of sensitive personal information is described in section 12 and we will honor a request, but in practice there is nothing held for us to limit.

6. Who we disclose it to

In the preceding twelve months we have disclosed the following categories of personal information for a business purpose:

The providers listed above are engaged as service providers or contractors under written contracts that, as required by Civil Code § 1798.140(ag) and (j), prohibit them from selling or sharing the information, from retaining, using or disclosing it for any purpose other than performing the services we have engaged them for, and from combining it with personal information they receive from elsewhere except as permitted by the CCPA.

If Cloudcast is ever involved in a merger, acquisition, financing or sale of assets, personal information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will tell you before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

7. Sale and sharing

Cloudcast does not sell personal information, and does not share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising. We have not done either in the twelve months preceding the effective date of this policy. We do not sell or share the personal information of consumers we know to be under 16 years of age. Because we do not sell or share, we are not required to, and do not, offer a “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link. If this ever changes, we will update this policy and provide that link before the change takes effect.

We also do not disclose personal information to third parties for those parties’ own marketing purposes, and we run no advertising, retargeting or audience-measurement technology on this website.

8. How long we keep it

We keep each category of personal information only as long as reasonably necessary for the purpose it was collected for, as Civil Code § 1798.100(a)(3) requires us to state:

Where we are required to keep information longer to comply with a legal obligation, or to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim, we keep it for that period and no longer, and then delete or de-identify it.

9. Cookies and similar technologies

Cloudcast sets no cookies of its own on this website, and uses no local storage, no web beacons or pixels, no fingerprinting, and no session-replay or heat-mapping tools. Cookies set by our hosting provider for security, and by the third-party feed embedded on our city pages, are described in our Cookie Policy, which forms part of this Privacy Policy.

10. Third-party embeds and links

Our city pages embed local news, weather, sports and podcast feeds supplied by myneighborhood.media. An embed is a small window onto another company’s website inside ours. When it loads, your browser connects directly to that company, which means it receives your IP address, your browser and device details, and the address of the Cloudcast page you are on. We load these frames only when needed — a city page loads one feed up front and creates the others only if you open that tab — but once a frame loads, that connection is between you and them. Their handling of your information is governed by their own privacy policy, not this one.

Elsewhere on the site, links to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Spreaker, LinkedIn and X are ordinary links, not embeds. Nothing loads from those companies and they learn nothing about you unless and until you click through, at which point you are on their website under their privacy policy and terms.

We do not control and are not responsible for the privacy practices of any third-party website, platform or service. We encourage you to read their policies.

11. Do Not Track and opt-out preference signals

Do Not Track. Some browsers can send a “Do Not Track” (DNT) signal. There is still no common industry standard for what a website must do in response, so as CalOPPA requires us to disclose, we tell you plainly what we do: this website does not respond differently to a DNT signal, because there is nothing for it to switch off. We do not track you over time or across third-party websites, so tracking is already off for every visitor whether or not the signal is sent.

Third parties. CalOPPA also requires us to tell you whether other parties may collect personally identifiable information about your online activities over time and across different websites when you visit ours. Cloudcast allows no third party to do so on our site. The one qualification is the embedded feed described in section 10: because that frame is served by another company, we cannot make a representation on its behalf about what it does with the connection your browser makes to it.

Global Privacy Control. We recognize the Global Privacy Control (GPC) and equivalent opt-out preference signals as valid requests to opt out of the sale and sharing of personal information. Because we neither sell nor share personal information, such a signal changes nothing about how we treat you — you are already treated as opted out. If we ever begin to sell or share, we will process a GPC signal received from your browser as a valid opt-out request without requiring you to do anything else.

12. Your California privacy rights

If you are a California resident, then subject to the verification process in section 13 and to the exceptions the law allows, you have the following rights.

• The right to know. To ask what categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you, where we got it, why we collected it, and the categories of third parties we disclosed it to. You may ask for information collected in the 12 months before your request, or beyond that period where we hold it and producing it would not be impossible or involve disproportionate effort.
• The right to access and portability. To receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you, in a portable and, where technically feasible, readily usable format.
• The right to delete. To ask us to delete personal information we collected from you, and to direct our service providers to do the same. We may decline where an exception in Civil Code § 1798.105(d) applies — for example where we need the information to comply with a legal obligation or to detect security incidents — and if we do, we will tell you which exception and delete everything else.
• The right to correct. To ask us to correct inaccurate personal information we hold about you, taking into account its nature and the purpose we hold it for.
• The right to opt out of sale or sharing. We do not sell or share personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of. The right remains yours if that ever changes.
• The right to limit the use and disclosure of sensitive personal information. As explained in section 5, we do not receive the only sensitive category this site touches, and we make no use of sensitive personal information beyond what Civil Code § 1798.121(a) permits.
• The right to stop marketing email. Separately from the rights above, and whoever you are and wherever you live, you can leave the newsletter at any time using the unsubscribe link in any message or by asking us. See section 4.
• The right to non-discrimination and no retaliation. We will not deny you goods or services, charge you a different price, provide a different level or quality of service, or suggest that we will, because you exercised a privacy right. We operate no financial incentive programs. If you are a job applicant, employee or independent contractor, we will not retaliate against you for exercising these rights.
• The right to be free of dark patterns. We will not design our requests process to subvert or impair your choices. Exercising a right here takes one email or one phone call.

13. How to exercise your rights

Email hello@cloudcastmedia.us with “Privacy request” in the subject line. We read it Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Eastern.

Please tell us which right you wish to exercise and enough detail for us to find your records — ordinarily the email address or phone number you used to contact us, and roughly when.

Verification

The law requires us to verify that a request comes from you before we act on it. Because we hold no accounts and no passwords, our verification is proportionate and minimal: for most requests, we ask you to send the request from the same email address we hold, or to confirm details of the correspondence only its sender would know. For a request for specific pieces of personal information, we apply a higher degree of certainty as the regulations require. We use anything you give us for verification only for verification, and delete it afterwards. If we cannot verify you, we will tell you why, and we will treat a deletion or correction request we cannot verify as an opt-out request where that is possible.

Authorized agents

You may use an authorized agent. We will ask the agent for written permission signed by you, and we will ask you to verify your own identity with us directly and to confirm that you gave the agent permission — unless the agent provides a power of attorney valid under California Probate Code §§ 4000–4465, in which case we will not.

Timing and cost

We confirm receipt within 10 business days and tell you how we will handle the request. We respond substantively within 45 calendar days of receiving it. Where reasonably necessary we may take a further 45 days, up to 90 days in total, and we will tell you within the first 45 days if we need to and why. There is no charge. We may charge a reasonable fee or decline a request that is manifestly unfounded or excessive, particularly because it is repetitive, and if we do we will explain our reasoning and tell you how to appeal.

You may make a verifiable request for access or portability twice in any 12-month period.

14. Shine the Light

California Civil Code § 1798.83 entitles California residents to ask a business once a year for a list of the personal information it disclosed to third parties for those third parties’ own direct marketing purposes in the preceding calendar year. Cloudcast does not disclose personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. To make a Shine the Light request anyway, email hello@cloudcastmedia.us with “Shine the Light” in the subject line. We will respond within 30 days.

15. Children and minors

This website is intended for a general adult audience. It is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has sent us personal information, contact us and we will delete it promptly. Parents and guardians may contact us at any time to ask what we hold about their child and to have it deleted.

We do not sell or share the personal information of consumers under 16 years of age, and we would not do so without the affirmative opt-in that Civil Code § 1798.120(c) requires — from the consumer if they are between 13 and 16, and from a parent or guardian if they are under 13.

California Business and Professions Code § 22581 gives a registered minor under 18 the right to remove content they posted on a site. This website has no facility for posting content, so there is nothing to remove; if you are a minor under 18 in California and you believe something you sent us appears on this site, email us and we will remove or anonymize it.

16. Security

We use reasonable security procedures and practices appropriate to the nature of the information we hold, including serving this entire website over encrypted HTTPS connections, limiting access to correspondence to the people who need it, and deliberately not collecting information we do not need. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. Please do not send us Social Security numbers, financial account details, government identification numbers, health information or passwords — we never need them, and email is not a secure channel.

17. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as our practices or the law change, and we review it at least once every 12 months as California’s regulations require. When we do, we revise the “Last updated” date at the top of this page and post the new version here. If a change is material — for example if we begin using analytics, or ever sell or share personal information — we will say so prominently on this page before or at the time the change takes effect, and we will obtain your consent where the law requires it. Please check this page periodically. Your continued use of the site after an update means you accept the revised policy.

Contact us

Cloudcast Media
Email: hello@cloudcastmedia.us (Monday–Friday, 9:00 AM–5:00 PM ET)

If you need this notice in an alternative format because of a disability, email us using the details above and we will provide one at no charge.