Privacy

Updated October 17, 2026: the public pages now show one banner ad (see Advertising).

• Reading: no account, no tracking cookies, no analytics services. The only outside service any page loads is the banner from adengine.us on the public pages, described under Advertising; it also counts one page view per page as a daily total. Official links take you to the agency's own site, which has its own privacy policy.
• My Watchlist: holds the counties and muted alert types you choose. It is opened by a private key kept in a cookie and in your link; the site stores only a scrambled form of that key. Delete it at any time from its page.
• Limits: to stop abuse, the site counts new watchlists per day against a scrambled form of your internet address. Those counts are deleted within 4 days.
• The web server keeps standard access logs (address, page, time) for security, as every web host does.

Advertising

The public pages of Ohio Breaking News (Active now, Counties, the county and alert pages, Recent, 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 alerts. My Watchlist pages, private feeds, this page, the terms and error pages 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.

• No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site. It is never told which counties are on your watchlist.
• 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.