Privacy

Out in Simcoe is a hobby project that lists community events across Simcoe County. There are no accounts, no ads and no tracking. This page says exactly what is stored, why, and how to get something removed.

Reading the site

You can browse every event, filter the list, open any event page and subscribe to the calendar feed without telling us anything. There is no sign-up, no analytics service and no advertising network. Nothing you search or filter for is recorded.

Two small exceptions, both worth knowing about:

• Your browser remembers a couple of things for you. Whether you chose the light or dark theme is kept in your own browser's local storage. It stays on your device and is never sent to us.
• The site is hosted by Cloudflare, which keeps short-lived operational logs of requests, including IP addresses, to serve pages and block attacks. That is Cloudflare's processing, under their privacy policy. We do not keep our own web-server logs and do not have a record of who read what.

The "Buy Me a Coffee" button at the bottom of the home page loads its image from Buy Me a Coffee's own servers, so displaying it tells them your IP address, as any image from another site would. Following the link takes you to their site, where their policy applies.

Suggesting an event

The suggestion form is the one place the site asks you for anything, and every field on it is optional. What you type is stored in our database so we can act on it:

• The event details — title, link, date, time, description and any comments. If we add the event, these become part of a public listing, exactly as if we had found it on a municipal calendar.
• Your name and email address, if you choose to leave them. They are used to send you a thank-you, to reply if we need to ask something, and to let you know if the event goes up. They are not published, not shared with anyone, and not used for a newsletter or anything else. There is no mailing list to be added to.
• A poster or image, if you attach one. See below.
• A one-way fingerprint of your IP address, never the address itself. It is hashed together with the current date, which lets us count submissions from one sender within an hour to stop floods, and makes it useless for following anyone from one day to the next.

Suggestions are kept so we have a record of where a listing came from and so nobody is thanked twice for the same thing. If you would rather yours were deleted, ask and it will be.

The bot check

The suggestion form is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which decides whether a submission came from a person without setting tracking cookies or asking you to identify traffic lights. It loads a script from Cloudflare and sends them a token to verify. The form does not work without it, deliberately: without a bot check the site's mail would be used to send spam.

Posters and images

An image you attach is checked and cleaned before it is stored. Location, camera and other embedded metadata are stripped out — a phone photo of a poster on a noticeboard usually carries the GPS coordinates of where it was taken, and those never reach our storage. Uploads are kept in a private bucket and are visible only to the site's admin until the event is approved. If the event goes up, the image goes up with it, on the public event page. Please only send images you have the right to share.

The events themselves

Listings are gathered automatically from public calendars published by the county, its municipalities, libraries, local media and ticketing sites, and are de-duplicated into one entry per event. Each event page links back to the source it came from. If you are an organiser and an event about you is wrong, out of date or something you would rather was not here, tell us through the suggestion form and it will be corrected or removed.

Where else events appear

Out in Simcoe posts a few of each day's events to its own Facebook, Instagram and X accounts, linking back to the event page here. Those posts carry only what is already public on the site — an event's title, time, place, cost and link. Anything you do on those platforms, including following, liking or commenting, happens under the platform's own terms and privacy policy, not this one.

What never happens

• Nothing is sold, rented or handed to a data broker.
• There are no advertising or analytics trackers, and no cross-site profiling.
• Your email address is never published, shared or used to market anything.
• Emails from the site never quote what a visitor typed back to a third party — the thank-you for a suggestion deliberately repeats nothing you wrote, so nobody can use the form to send their words to a stranger under our name.

Getting in touch

To correct a listing, remove an event, or ask for a suggestion and anything attached to it to be deleted, use the suggestion form and say what you would like done. It reaches the same person either way, and it keeps the site's address out of the reach of address harvesters. Requests are handled by hand, usually within a few days.

Changes

If what the site does with information changes, this page changes with it, and the date below moves. The site is open source, so the code behind every claim here can be read on GitHub.

Last updated 20 September 2026.