Privacy Policy, Accessibility & Legal Disclaimers
SaveTheBrowns.org is an independent, non-commercial civic inquiry and academic data project created by a Browns fan. Below is a plain account of what this site stores, how it tries to stay accessible, and the fair use it relies on.
Privacy Policy: What This Site Stores, and What It Sends
There is no advertising here, no commercial tracking, and no account system. The site asks you for nothing and keeps almost nothing. What follows is the specific version rather than the reassuring version, because a site arguing for accuracy should be accurate about itself.
- No advertising cookies or tracking pixels (no Meta Pixel, no Google Ads, no TikTok or commercial trackers).
- No behavioral profiling, device fingerprinting, or sale of data to anyone.
- No passwords, government identification, financial details, email addresses, phone numbers, or postal addresses. There is no signup and no account.
- No name field. The endorsement form never asks who you are.
What is stored in your own browser: When you endorse The Cleveland Standard, this browser's localStorage saves the fan identity you selected, the optional chapter or location you typed, a flag recording that you endorsed, a cached copy of the public counter, and whether you dismissed the analytics notice. That is the complete list. It never leaves your device, it is not readable by the author, and clearing your browser data deletes it permanently.
What leaves your browser: The public endorsement total is kept by a third-party counter service, abacus.jasoncameron.dev. The homepage and the declaration page ask it for the current total when they load, and endorsing sends it a request that adds one to that number. It receives no name, no identity selection, no chapter, and no statement, only the request itself, which necessarily carries your IP address the way any web request does.
Hosting and performance: The site is served through Cloudflare, which keeps standard access logs (IP address, timestamp, requested file) for every request. All JavaScript, styling, icons, charts, and fonts are served from this domain rather than from a third-party CDN.
Analytics: Cloudflare also runs Cloudflare Web Analytics on every page, for every visitor. Cloudflare adds its script to each page as part of hosting; it loads from static.cloudflareinsights.com and reports back to this domain. It records the page visited, the referring site, your country, browser, operating system, and device type, and how long the page took to load. It sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser, and Cloudflare states that it does not track individual visitors across the sites it serves. Browser privacy signals such as Global Privacy Control do not turn it off. It operates under Cloudflare's privacy policy.
Cloudflare and the endorsement counter are the only outside services contacted when a page loads.
About the counter, plainly: It counts endorsement clicks, not verified people. Nothing is verified, and there is no registry, public or private, of who endorsed. Anyone who clears their browser storage can add to it again. It is a rough measure of interest and should be read that way.
Accessibility Statement
This site is built to be readable and usable with a keyboard, on a small screen, and when zoomed. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA are the standard being worked toward. This is a statement of intent and ongoing effort, not the result of an independent accessibility audit or a certification of conformance.
Type and background colors are chosen to aim for a 4.5:1 contrast ratio for body copy and 3.0:1 for large headings.
All interactive buttons, case tabs, and form toggles support full keyboard navigation and clear focus states.
Images contain descriptive alternative text, and icon-only buttons feature explicit ARIA attributes.
Layouts gracefully support browser text magnification up to 200% without loss of content or broken cards.
If you encounter any accessibility barrier or have suggestions for improvement, please open an issue in the open research repository.
Legal Disclaimers, Fair Use & Non-Affiliation
Non-Affiliation Notice: SaveTheBrowns.org is an independent fan initiative and public research project. This website is not authorized, sponsored, endorsed by, or affiliated in any way with the Cleveland Browns, Haslam Sports Group, or the National Football League (NFL).
Nominative Fair Use (15 U.S.C. § 1125): All trademarks, service marks, team names (e.g., Cleveland Browns, Philadelphia Eagles, San Francisco 49ers, New England Patriots), and athletic references mentioned on this website belong to their respective owners. Their use on this site constitutes protected nominative fair use solely for identification, descriptive reporting, statistical evaluation, and public critique.
First Amendment Public Interest Commentary: All statistical evaluations, question categorizations, and editorial commentary represent protected speech and fair comment on matters of public interest under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Scholarly Fair Use (17 U.S.C. § 107): Transcripts quoted on this website originate from official court-stenographer media briefings broadcast to credentialed journalists on the public 1RMG network. Excerpts are reproduced strictly for non-profit educational purposes, academic analysis, and transformative critical commentary.
Civic Standard: Institutional Inquiry, Not Individual Harassment
This project exists to analyze communicative culture and organizational psychology. It does not exist to harass, demean, or dox individual reporters.
We deliberately avoid naming individual journalists on this site to prevent defensive posturing and to ensure the conversation focuses where it belongs: on raising the institutional standard of sports discourse in Cleveland. We urge all fans and Backers who share this work to maintain this standard. Critique the framing, study the data, and demand excellence, but treat all professionals with dignity.
Open Science & Research Licensing (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
In keeping with modern open-science practices, all computational scripts, metric summaries, and monograph documentation are made freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
You are free to share, copy, and adapt the dataset for non-commercial educational and research purposes, provided appropriate attribution is given to the Save The Browns Research Collective.