How Rise Local handles data: what we store about visitors (almost nothing), what we fetch from a venue's Instagram, and how removal and deletion work.
Rise Local is a public local paper for San Luis Obispo: a feed of events and stories from local venues. Anyone can read it — there are no visitor accounts, no sign-ups, and no profiles.
Reading Rise Local requires no account. If you follow a venue or save a post, that choice is stored on your own device only — we never receive it, and clearing it from the You page removes it entirely. We collect anonymous usage counts (for example, that a post was viewed or a calendar file was downloaded) tied to the venue or post involved — never to you: the data we receive carries no name, no account, and no identifier for the person behind the tap.
A venue appears on Rise Local only with its owner's explicit consent. Its content arrives one of two ways: the venue connects its Instagram account through Meta's official authorization flow, or — typically while a venue is getting set up — the Rise Local team republishes posts from the venue's own public Instagram by hand, under that same permission. Either way, what we store is the same: recent media (images and video cover frames, captions, timestamps, and links back to the original Instagram posts), re-stored on our own storage so the feed does not depend on Instagram's expiring links. For connected accounts we also fetch account and media insight metrics, and the access token the owner grants is encrypted at rest and is never displayed, logged, or shared.
Fetched Instagram content is only ever published to the venue's own public page and the shared feed, and only after the founder reviews each item — nothing auto-publishes. Insight metrics are stored for the venue's future benefit and are not shown anywhere today.
We do not sell data — anyone's, ever. The only third parties that touch it are the infrastructure providers that host the site and store the media files, acting on our behalf.
If an owner deletes a post on Instagram, our copy is automatically unpublished from every public surface. If an owner disconnects their Instagram — from our side, from Instagram's own account settings, or via Meta's deauthorization or data-deletion request — we delete everything derived from their Instagram account: the fetched posts and media files, the review queue, and the stored insight metrics. Content a venue entered by hand is unaffected. To ask about your data or request deletion, write to privacy [at] weriselocal.com.
If these practices change, this page changes with them. Effective date: August 29, 2026.