This policy explains what happens to information when you use www.dangiancola.com, the personal and campaign website of Dan Giancola, a candidate for Niagara Falls City Council. It is written to describe what the site actually does, in plain language, rather than to cover every theoretical possibility.
Who is responsible. Dan Giancola, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. For any question or request about privacy, email info@dangiancola.com and put “Privacy” in the subject line.
When you just read the site
Browsing does not require you to give any information, and the site asks for none. Two things happen automatically, and you should know about both.
Hosting logs. The site is hosted by Vercel. Like any web host, its servers record technical request information — your IP address, the page requested, the time, your browser and operating system — so that pages can be delivered and abuse can be blocked. Dan does not use these logs to build any profile of visitors.
Fonts. The site's typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts, which means your browser requests files from fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com, and your IP address is visible to Google in the process. This happens for presentation, before any consent, and cannot currently be declined without breaking the page's appearance. If you would rather avoid it, browser extensions that block third-party requests will stop it, and the site remains readable.
Cookies and analytics
The site sets no cookies on its own. There is no advertising, no tracking pixel, no social media pixel, no session cookie, and no fingerprinting.
The one optional item is Google Analytics 4 (measurement ID G-0JQ9JRTNVV), used only to count visits and see which pages people read. It is not loaded until you accept it in the notice that appears on your first visit. If you decline, or simply never answer, no request is made to Google and no analytics cookie is written.
If you accept, Google Analytics sets cookies named _ga and _ga_<id> that distinguish one visitor from another for up to two years, and it receives your IP address, which Google uses to estimate your general location and then discards rather than storing. Google acts as Dan's service provider for this, and may process the data outside Canada, including in the United States. Google's own explanation of this is in its privacy policy.
Your choice is remembered without a cookie. It is stored in your browser's local storage under the key dg-consent, which never leaves your device and is not readable by anyone else. Clearing your browser data removes it and you will be asked again.
Global Privacy Control is respected. If your browser sends a GPC signal, that is treated as a decline and you are not asked at all. The older Do Not Track header is not used for this, because many browsers send it by default and it would silently decide the question for people who never chose.
You can change your mind at any time using the cookie settings link, which appears in the footer of every page.
When you write to Dan
This is the part that matters most, because of what people tell a council candidate.
How the form works. When you press send, the form posts what you typed — your name, email, message, and the street and topic if you filled them in — to this site's own endpoint at /api/contact, running on Vercel. That endpoint immediately forwards it as an email to Dan and then forgets it. There is no database. Nothing you type is stored on this website, and no copy is kept beyond the email itself.
The forwarding is done by Resend, an email delivery service acting as Dan's processor, which handles the message in transit. Dan's campaign inbox is a Microsoft-hosted mailbox, so Microsoft holds the message at rest, as it would any email. Your email address is set as the reply-to, so that answering you is a single click and does not require it to be copied anywhere else.
If you would rather not use the form at all, write to info@dangiancola.com from your own email account and it reaches the same place.
Spam protection. The form includes one hidden field that people never see and automated scripts tend to fill in. If it is filled, the submission is silently discarded. No CAPTCHA is used, so nothing about you is sent to a third party to prove you are human.
What people actually send. Residents write to candidates about hard things — housing, addiction in their neighbourhood, a parent's health, money, immigration status, disputes with the city, fear about their street. Some of that is sensitive information about you or about someone else, and some of it reveals political opinion. None of it was solicited by a form field, but it arrives all the same.
How it is handled. Messages are read by Dan. They are treated as private correspondence. Specifically:
- Your message is not published, quoted on the site, posted to social media, or used in campaign material.
- You are not added to any mailing list for having written.
- Your information is never sold, rented, traded or shared with other candidates, parties, or commercial third parties.
- If resolving your issue means involving someone else — a City department, a Regional service, a community agency — Dan will ask you first, unless you have already asked him to make that referral.
- Correspondence is kept only as long as it is needed to deal with the matter, and then deleted. If you ask Dan to delete your message sooner, he will.
One honest limit. Email is not a secure or confidential channel, and Dan is a private individual, not a public office with a records department. If your situation is urgent, or genuinely sensitive, please contact the appropriate service directly rather than sending the details by email. For an emergency call 911. For housing, mental health or addiction support in Niagara, Niagara Region and Start Me Up Niagara are the right first calls, and reaching them does not depend on this campaign.
If Dan is elected, correspondence sent to him as a councillor becomes subject to the City of Niagara Falls' own records and access-to-information rules under Ontario's Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which are set by the City and not by this policy. Messages sent to this campaign address before then are not City records.
Volunteering and lawn signs
If you offer to volunteer or ask for a lawn sign, you are sending a name, a way to reach you, and usually a street. That is used to arrange the thing you asked for, and for nothing else. Election-campaign records are subject to retention requirements under Ontario's Municipal Elections Act, 1996; anything not required to be kept is deleted after the campaign.
Children
This site is aimed at voters and is not directed at children. Dan does not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If a child has sent something, write to the address above and it will be deleted.
Links away from here
The site links to the City of Niagara Falls, Niagara Health, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon and Dan's business, BTO Performance. Once you follow a link you are on someone else's site under their privacy policy, not this one. In particular, opening a social media link lets that platform see that you arrived from here.
Your rights
You can ask what Dan holds about you, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, or withdraw a consent you previously gave. Email info@dangiancola.com. There is no charge, and you do not need to give a reason.
If you are not satisfied with the answer, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or, on matters involving municipal records, to the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects you, the date below changes with it. Material changes to how analytics work will reset the cookie notice, so you will be asked again rather than opted in quietly.
Last updated 3 September 2026.Dan Giancola