Privacy notice
In short: we track nobody across sites, show no advertising, profile nobody and sell nothing. We measure how many pages were opened and roughly where readers came from, with no analytics cookies and without building a profile. The site works without an account, and the only personal data we hold is what you give us.
Who the controller is
This site is operated by Florin Cerchez, acting as an individual. For any question about personal data, write through the contact form at the foot of any page — we answer within one month at the latest.
What we collect and why
Newsletter
If you subscribe we keep your email address, the language you were reading in, and which page you subscribed from. That is all — we ask for no name and store no IP address. The basis is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR), which you can withdraw at any time with a single click on the unsubscribe link in any message. Unsubscribing deletes the record; we do not merely flag it inactive.
Votes on decisions
To count a vote once per visitor we set a cookie called ml_vid holding a random identifier. It contains nothing about you: no name, no email, no IP address. It cannot be read by JavaScript and is used for nothing else. It expires after one year.
Comments
Comments require signing in with Google. If you sign in, we receive your account identifier, display name and profile image URL from Google, and store them with the comment text. We never receive your password. You can delete your own comments; the text is removed and only a placeholder row remains so replies to it do not break.
Theme preference
If you pick the light or dark theme, the choice is saved in localStorage under the key ml-theme. It stays in your browser and never reaches us.
Page counts
We count for ourselves how many times each page was opened, per day. That is all that is stored in our database: the page path, the day, and a number. No cookie is set, no IP address is kept, and there is nothing by which one visit could be linked to another or to a person. The basis is our legitimate interest in knowing what gets read, and the figure is approximate by design.
Audience measurement (Vercel)
Alongside our own counter we use Vercel Web Analytics, the measurement service of the provider that hosts the site. When a page opens it records the page path, the page you arrived from, and general information about the device: whether it is a phone or a computer, the browser, the operating system and the country. It sets no cookie, uses no identifier that follows you between sites, and gives us nobody's name. We use it to know what is read and how people reach us — not to build profiles, because it does not give us the means to. The basis is our legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
The contact form
The form in the footer asks for your email address and a subject, plus a message if you want to write one. The address is needed so we can reply and the subject so we know what it is about; we ask for no name and store no IP address. The basis is your consent, given by sending the form. The message is saved in our database and, if the mail service is configured, forwarded to the operator's address. The anti-robot check is an arithmetic question generated by our own server — we use no reCAPTCHA and nothing is sent to a third party for it.
Cookies
The site uses no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies — which is why you will not see a consent banner. The audience measurement described above works without cookies too. The only cookies are ml_vid (described above) and, if you sign in to comment, the session cookie that sign-in requires. Both are strictly necessary for functions you asked for.
Who else is involved
We use four providers, each strictly for what it does: Vercel (hosting and audience measurement), Neon (the database holding subscriptions, votes, contact messages and comments), Resend (delivering contact messages by email, where configured) and Google (sign-in for comments only, if we enable it). None receives data for its own purposes. We sell and share data with nobody else.
Where the data is stored
Our database is hosted by Neon in the AWS us-east-1 region, which is in the United States. That means the personal data you give us — the email address in a subscription or a contact message, the random identifier behind a vote — is transferred outside the European Union. The transfer relies on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses and the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, to which the providers are subject. We say this plainly because it is exactly the sort of thing usually left unwritten: if you would rather your address never left the EU, do not subscribe and do not use the form — the rest of the site works without us keeping anything about you.
Names in the published documents
The decisions and minutes published by the council contain the names of councillors and institutions. We reproduce them because these are public acts and the people named appear there in an official capacity — the basis is the public's legitimate interest in knowing how its representatives voted. Names of private individuals with no official role are deliberately not extracted: our system identifies only institutions and companies. If you nevertheless appear on a page and believe you should not, write to us and we will look at it.
Register of processing
Everything above in one table: each processing operation, the data it involves, the legal basis it rests on and how long it lasts.
| Processing | Data | Basis (GDPR) | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| Newsletter subscription | Email, language, page of origin | Consent — Art. 6(1)(a) | Until you unsubscribe |
| Contact form | Email, subject, message (optional) | Consent — Art. 6(1)(a) | Until answered; deleted on request |
| Vote on a decision | Random cookie identifier, nothing about the person | Legitimate interest — Art. 6(1)(f): one vote per visitor | Cookie: 1 year. The vote: as long as the page exists |
| Comments | Google identifier, display name, profile image, text | Consent — Art. 6(1)(a) | Until the author deletes it |
| Audience measurement (Vercel) | Page, referrer, device type, browser, country. No cookie, no identifier | Legitimate interest — Art. 6(1)(f) | Per Vercel’s retention; we see aggregate reports only |
| Page counts | Page path, day, a number. No cookie, no IP | Legitimate interest — Art. 6(1)(f). Not personal data | Indefinitely (aggregated) |
| Names in the published acts | Councillor and institution names, as they appear in the acts | Public interest — Art. 6(1)(e) | For as long as the act is public |
How long we keep things
- Newsletter subscription: until you unsubscribe.
- Votes: for as long as the page exists. The cookie identifier expires after one year.
- Comments: until you delete them or ask for your account data to be removed.
- Page counts: aggregated by page and day, with no personal data, kept indefinitely.
Your rights
You have the right to ask for access to your data, its correction or deletion, restriction of processing, portability, and to object to processing. You may withdraw consent at any time, without affecting processing carried out before. Write to the address above; we answer within one month at the latest.
If our answer does not satisfy you, you may complain to the Romanian data protection authority (ANSPDCP), dataprotection.ro.
This page describes the system as it currently works; last updated 2026-08-30. See also the terms of use and the open data. Site: https://mlocal.ro