How USVI News handles information

Who operates the service

For this Privacy Policy, the service operator is identified as USVI News, USVI News & World Report, LLC, and Info VI News. Those names are used collectively as “USVI News,” “we,” “us,” and “our.” The Ownership and Transparency page provides additional context.

Information the service handles

Accounts and profiles

When a person creates or manages an account, the service handles information such as name, email address, password hash, recovery and session records, community or island selection, profile text, profile visibility, avatar, banner, and account role or status.

Posts, media, and community activity

The service stores posts, comments, reactions, reports, business-profile activity, uploaded images and videos, media descriptions, attribution and rights metadata, and the account identifiers associated with those actions. Content marked public can be viewed, shared, indexed, and retained by people or services outside USVI News.

Imported directory and public-source data

USVI News maintains business listings, directory profiles, government payroll information, court information, and other public-interest records assembled from legacy datasets, public records, government sources, Google business/place information, and other third-party sources. These records can include names, employer or agency, title, compensation, business contact details, addresses, telephone numbers, websites, profile images, and source identifiers, depending on the dataset.

Technical and safety records

The service processes timestamps, request and device information, IP-related security data, cookies or session identifiers, rate-limit records, delivery and error logs, moderation decisions, and records used to investigate abuse, account access, media rights, or service reliability.

Where information comes from

Information can come directly from account holders and contributors; from people who report content or claim a profile; from public agencies and records; from business, directory, news, weather, aviation, and mapping sources; and from technical systems that operate or protect the site.

An imported profile does not mean the person created an account or supplied the original data to USVI News. Claim and correction tools are used to connect eligible records with the appropriate person or business.

How information is used

• Operate accounts, sessions, recovery, profiles, feeds, comments, reactions, search, and publishing features.
• Publish, organize, attribute, describe, store, and deliver news, community posts, media, directories, business profiles, and public-service information.
• Review reports, enforce site terms, limit automated abuse, protect accounts, and preserve records relevant to safety or rights disputes.
• Send service email such as password-reset messages and respond to editorial, privacy, correction, and support requests.
• Generate optional AI-assisted answers, image descriptions, and proofreading when a person invokes those features.
• Monitor errors, capacity, delivery, and performance and maintain the site's infrastructure.

AI-assisted features and OpenAI

Ask Scoops sends a user's question, relevant source excerpts, and feature context to OpenAI to generate an answer. Depending on the feature settings, optional personalization context may also be included. The image-description tool sends the selected image preview and instructions to OpenAI. The proofreading tool sends the text a member asks it to check.

Do not place passwords, recovery codes, government identification numbers, confidential sources, medical records, or other sensitive information into AI prompts or optional AI tools. AI responses may be inaccurate and should be checked against the displayed sources and original records.

Service providers and outside sources

Current production systems use the following services for specific functions:

• Cloudflare for application delivery, security, static assets, databases, storage bindings, image services, and network operations.
• Backblaze for storage and delivery of uploaded and published media.
• OpenAI for Ask Scoops and optional AI-assisted image-description and proofreading features.
• Proton email infrastructure for service email delivery.
• NewsAPI and outside publishers for selected news-source material and attribution.
• Weather.gov and AeroDataBox for weather, alerts, and aviation information.
• Google business/place data and linked mapping services for portions of the business directory and location experience.

These providers and linked sources have their own privacy practices. Normal network information may be shared when the service communicates with a provider or when a reader follows an outside link. Providers may process information outside the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Cookies and browser storage

The site uses session mechanisms to keep people signed in and uses browser session or local storage for interface state and preferences, such as navigation transitions and minimized feed topics. Blocking storage can prevent account or preference features from working as intended.

Retention

USVI News does not apply one fixed retention period to every category. Account, profile, published content, and directory records can remain while an account or public record remains active. Sessions and recovery records can expire sooner. Security, moderation, source, rights, transactional, and operational records can be retained as needed to run the service, investigate misuse, document publication decisions, resolve disputes, or meet technical and legal obligations.

Deleting or changing a public item does not necessarily remove copies from backups, caches, search engines, archives, recipients, or outside publishers. Data that is no longer required may be removed or de-identified when operational, rights, safety, and legal needs permit.

Your choices and requests

Account holders can change available account and profile settings, including profile information and visibility controls. Where a claim or correction workflow is available, an eligible person or business can use it to update or hide an imported profile.

You may contact USVI News to ask about data associated with you, request a correction or deletion, object to a particular use, or raise a privacy concern. A request should identify the relevant account, profile, post, listing, or URL. Identity or authority may need to be verified. A request can be limited by public-record context, another person's rights, source integrity, security needs, technical constraints, or applicable obligations.

Security

The service uses access controls, credential hashing, session controls, rate limits, managed secrets, and infrastructure logging as part of its security design. No online service can guarantee that information will never be lost, misused, or accessed without authorization. Do not share passwords or recovery codes, and report suspected account misuse promptly.

Contact and policy changes

Send privacy questions or requests to editorial@usvinews.com with “Privacy request” in the subject line. Do not send identity documents until USVI News confirms what verification is necessary.

This policy may be revised as the site's features, providers, and data practices change. The date at the top identifies the current published version.