Effective: August 19, 2026
Applies to the Lubbock Lights app for iPhone, published by Lubbock Stories, Inc.

This policy covers the mobile app specifically. The website has its own privacy policy, which describes cookies, comments and embedded content on the site. The app does not use cookies and has no comment system.

The short version

The Lubbock Lights app has no accounts, no logins and no tracking. We do not build a profile of you, we do not sell or share your information, and we do not use any advertising network or third-party analytics service. What the app stores about your reading stays on your phone.

No account, no sign-in

The app requires no account, email address, name or phone number. There is nothing to register and no credentials to lose.

Information stored on your device only

The app saves the following on your iPhone, using Apple’s standard on-device storage. None of it is transmitted to us or to anyone else, and all of it is deleted when you delete the app:

  • Stories you save to read later
  • Which stories you have already been notified about, so you are not notified twice
  • Your notification and reading preferences
  • Your chosen weather location, if you set one manually
  • Cached copies of stories and the daily Ledger, so the app works when your signal drops
  • Counts of how many times sponsor images were displayed or tapped on that device

That last item deserves a plain statement: those counts are a per-device tally that never leaves the phone. We cannot see them, and they are not aggregated anywhere. They are not an analytics service and they are not tied to you.

Location

If you use the Weather tab, the app asks permission to use your location so it can show the forecast and any active alerts for where you actually are rather than only for downtown Lubbock.

  • We ask for your approximate location, not your precise one. The app deliberately requests reduced accuracy, so iOS gives us a general area rather than your street or your address. That is all a weather forecast needs: the National Weather Service works from a grid roughly a mile and a half across, so pinpointing you more exactly would tell us more about you without telling you anything more about the weather. If you would rather share precise location, you can turn it on yourself in iOS Settings — we will not ask you to.
  • Permission is optional. If you decline, the app falls back to Lubbock and everything else works normally. You can also just type a location in Settings and never share any location at all.
  • When you grant permission, that approximate location is sent to the National Weather Service (api.weather.gov), a United States government service, to look up the forecast for your area.
  • We do not store your location on any server. We do not keep a history of where you have been. We do not use your location for advertising.
  • Location is used only while you are using the app. The app does not track you in the background.

You can revoke permission at any time in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Lubbock Lights.

Notifications

If you turn on notifications, the app checks for new stories and posts alerts to your phone. These notifications are generated on your device from our public story feed. We do not operate a push server for the app, we do not hold a device token for you, and we cannot tell whether you opened a notification.

What our servers see

When the app loads stories, images, the daily Ledger or sponsor information, it requests those files from lubbocklights.com the same way a web browser would. Our web host records ordinary server request logs, which include IP addresses, as any web server does. We use those logs for security and to keep the site running, not to identify readers or build profiles.

Advertising and sponsors

Sponsor images in the app are local advertisements we manage ourselves and serve from our own media library. The app contains no advertising network, no ad SDK and no third-party tracking code. Advertisers receive no information about you from the app. They cannot see who saw their ad, and neither can we beyond the on-device counts described above. If you tap a sponsor, you are taken to that business’s own website, which has its own privacy practices.

Links to other news outlets

The Ledger credits and links to the original reporting behind each story, including work by other newsrooms. Those links open the outlet’s own page in Apple’s in-app Safari viewer, so you get their real page. Once you are there, that outlet’s privacy policy applies, not ours. We receive nothing about what you read on their site.

Sending us a news tip or a correction

The tip and correction buttons open a pre-addressed draft in your mail app. Nothing is sent until you choose to send it. If you do email us, we receive whatever you wrote and the email address you sent it from.

Please note honestly: email is not anonymous and not encrypted. We treat tips with discretion, but if your safety depends on technical anonymity, do not use email — contact us another way and we will arrange something appropriate.

Analytics

The app uses no third-party analytics service. There is no Google Analytics, no Firebase, no Mixpanel, no crash-reporting SDK and no advertising identifier (IDFA) in the app. The app does not ask for tracking permission because it does not track.

Apple may provide us with anonymous, aggregate App Store statistics — download counts, crash rates and similar — which we cannot connect to any individual.

Children

The app is a general-audience local news app. It is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect information from them. Since the app collects no personal information from anyone, there is nothing for us to collect from a child.

Selling and sharing

We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it with data brokers, advertisers or anyone else for their own purposes. We have no such information to sell.

Your choices

  • Location: grant, decline or revoke it in iOS Settings at any time.
  • Notifications: turn off in the app’s Settings or in iOS Settings.
  • Everything stored on your device: deleting the app removes all of it.
  • Questions or requests: email us at the address below.

Changes to this policy

If we add a feature that changes what the app collects, we will update this page and change the effective date above before that feature ships.

Contact

Lubbock Stories, Inc.
Email: Incoming@LubbockLights.com
Website: lubbocklights.com