Privacy

Last updated October 17, 2026.

• No accounts, no email addresses, no names, no tracking cookies and no analytics services. The only outside service any page loads is the banner from adengine.us on the public reading pages, described under Advertising; it also counts one page view per page as a daily total.
• A Flash Sheet stores the cities and watch words you choose and when you last opened it. It is opened by a private key; the site stores only a scrambled (hashed) form of that key. The key is kept in a cookie in your browser and in the link you copy.
• The private feed address carries a separate random code. Anyone with it can read that feed, so treat it like a password; you can make a new address at any time.
• To stop abuse, the site counts new Flash Sheets per hour, searches per 10 minutes and saves per day using a scrambled form of your internet address (hashed with a secret key); the addresses themselves are not stored, and the counts are deleted after 2 days.
• The server keeps normal web logs for security for a short time. A security cookie protects forms.
• A Flash Sheet nobody opens for 400 days, with no running Pass, is deleted. You can delete yours at any time from the sheet.
• When checkout opens, payment is handled by PayPal; the site keeps only PayPal's subscription reference and its status.

Advertising

The public reading pages of Ohio News Flash (home, cities, each city's page, search results, sources, pricing and about) show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company behind this site. For now the ads are for WeldonPC's own services. The banner sits below the page's content, apart from the city posts; it never changes which posts appear or their order. Flash Sheet pages, private feeds, this page and the terms show no ad.

To show an ad, your browser loads a script from adengine.us, asks it for one banner, loads the banner image, and reports once that the page was viewed and once that the banner was shown. Like any website, adengine.us receives your internet address, your browser type and the address of this site with those requests. It does not receive the address of the page you are on, so what you search for never reaches it.

• No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
• How your internet address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your address in a location database kept on its own server (nothing is sent to anyone else), so that ads meant for one area are shown only there. It also uses the address to count each ad view or click only once and to leave out robots and WeldonPC's own office traffic. The address is not stored with the counts; the temporary entries made from it expire within six hours and are cleared from the server within two days.
• What is kept. Daily totals only: page views for this site, and views and clicks for each ad. The adengine.us web server also keeps a standard access log (internet address, time, address requested, referring site, browser) for security; it is deleted on a rolling schedule.
• Clicking an ad passes through adengine.us, which counts the click, and then opens the advertiser's site, which has its own privacy policy.
• Nothing about you is sold or shared.