Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

NewsUSA Inc. ("NewsUSA," "we," "us," or "our") operates the website located at newsusa.ai (the "Site") and provides the NewsUSA AI Authority Audit™ service (the "Service"). We are committed to protecting your personal information and your right to privacy.

This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and what rights you have in relation to it. Please read it carefully before using our Site or Service.

If you have questions or concerns, contact us at:

NewsUSA Inc.
1104 West Broad St. #1024
Falls Church, VA 22046
Email: rsmith@newsusa.com
Phone: +1 (703) 508-8700

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Information You Provide Directly

When you use the Service, you may provide:

Lead capture form data (FREE AI Authority Audit at /schedule):

• First and last name
• Phone number
• Business email address
• Company or organization name
• Website URL for your brand or organization
• Timeline, goals, and qualification responses you select on the form
• Communications consent and investment acknowledgement checkboxes
• SMS/text message opt-in consent, if you check that box separately (see Section 4.4)

Contact form submissions:

• Name, email address, and message content

Account registration (admin users only):

• Email address and password (hashed, never stored in plain text)

2.2 Information Collected Automatically

When you visit our Site, we automatically collect:

Usage data:

• Pages visited, time spent, referring URLs
• Actions taken on the Site (button clicks, form interactions)
• Scroll depth and session duration

Device and technical data:

• IP address (used for rate limiting and fraud prevention)
• Browser type and version
• Operating system
• Screen resolution
• Time zone setting

Cookies and tracking technologies:

See our Cookie Policy for full details. In summary, we use session cookies to maintain your authenticated state, functional cookies to remember your preferences, and analytics cookies to understand Site usage.

2.3 Information Generated by the Service

When we prepare your AI Authority Audit, we may:

• Research publicly available information about your brand, company, and category to build your personalized report
• Store scoring results, dimension breakdowns, gaps, and recommendations associated with your lead record
• Log API requests made to AI model providers on your behalf (prompts and responses)

Audit deliverables and lead data are retained as described in Section 6.

3. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

Deliver the Service:

• Prepare and deliver your personalized AI Authority Audit report
• Schedule and conduct your strategy call walkthrough
• Send follow-up communications you have consented to
• Send text messages to your mobile number, only if you separately checked the SMS consent box (see Section 4.4)

Operate and improve the Site:

• Monitor Site performance and fix technical issues
• Understand how visitors interact with our content
• Develop new features and improve existing ones

Sales and business development:

• Your lead data (name, email, phone, company, goals) is used by our team to follow up with you regarding your audit and NewsUSA media and content campaign services
• We will only contact you if you submitted your information voluntarily through our lead form

Security and fraud prevention:

• Rate limiting API requests by IP address
• Detecting and blocking abusive or automated traffic
• Maintaining the integrity of the Service

Legal compliance:

• Complying with applicable laws and regulations
• Responding to lawful requests from public authorities

4. How We Share Your Information

No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Text messaging originator opt-in data and consent will not be shared with any third parties. Mobile phone numbers collected for texting, and SMS/text messaging opt-in data and consent, are excluded from every category of sharing described in this Section 4, including Sections 4.1 (Service Providers), 4.2 (Business Transfers), and 4.3 (Legal Requirements). See Section 4.4 for the complete SMS/Text Messaging Data terms.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not rent your personal information. We do not share your personal information with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes.

Apart from the SMS/text messaging data described above, we share other information only in the following limited circumstances:

4.1 Service Providers

We use trusted third-party service providers who process data on our behalf:

All service providers are contractually required to use your data only to perform services for us and to maintain appropriate security measures.

4.2 Business Transfers

If NewsUSA is acquired, merges with another company, or sells all or substantially all of its assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you via email and/or a prominent notice on our Site before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy. This does not apply to mobile phone numbers or SMS/text messaging opt-in data and consent, which are never shared with or transferred to any third party, including an acquirer or successor, as described in Section 4.4.

4.3 Legal Requirements

Except for SMS/text messaging opt-in data and consent, which this Section does not cover, we may disclose your information if required to do so by law or in response to valid requests by public authorities (such as a court or government agency), or if we believe disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of NewsUSA, our users, or the public.

4.4 SMS/Text Messaging Data

No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Text messaging originator opt-in data and consent will not be shared with any third parties.

If you check the SMS consent box on our lead form at newsusa.ai/schedule, you give NewsUSA Inc. your prior express written consent, specific to text messages and separate from any other consent on the form, to receive text messages from NewsUSA Inc. at the mobile number you provide. This is single-seller consent: it covers messages from NewsUSA Inc. only. We do not share your phone number, your SMS opt-in status, or your consent with any other business, affiliate, or co-registrant for their own texting programs, and no mobile information is sold or shared with any third party for marketing or promotional purposes.

If we use a third-party messaging platform to technically transmit text messages on our behalf, that provider acts solely as our service provider for message delivery and is contractually prohibited from using your phone number or opt-in consent for its own purposes, for marketing or promotional purposes, or for those of any other party.

You may withdraw SMS consent at any time by replying STOP to any text message you receive from us, or by contacting rsmith@newsusa.com. We will send one final confirmation text with no promotional content and then send no further messages. Reply HELP to any message for assistance. Message frequency may vary, and message and data rates may apply. SMS consent is never a condition of purchasing any NewsUSA service. If you are a Canadian resident, this consent is obtained and honored consistent with Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL): it is specific to SMS, is never inferred from consent to another channel, and does not expire until you withdraw it.

4.5 "Do Not Sell or Share" and Global Privacy Control

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share personal information for cross-context behavioral (targeted) advertising, as those terms are defined under the CCPA/CPRA and similar state laws. Because we do not engage in either practice, there is no sale or share for you to opt out of. If your browser or a browser extension sends a Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal, we detect and honor it as a valid opt-out preference signal for any future change to our data-sharing practices.

5. AI Model Processing

Our Service sends prompts to AI model providers (currently Anthropic Claude, with additional providers planned for future phases). These prompts are derived from your company name, category, and publicly available brand information and are used to assess how AI models respond to queries related to your brand.

What is sent to AI providers:

• Templated prompts containing your brand or company name and general topic queries for your industry
• Your full name, email address, and company name are never sent to AI model providers

AI provider data handling:

• Anthropic processes prompts in accordance with their own privacy policy and API terms of service, available at anthropic.com
• We do not use your prompts to train AI models; our API usage is governed by commercial API terms that restrict such use

6. Data Retention

When retention periods expire, data is permanently and irreversibly deleted from our systems and we instruct our service providers to delete their copies.

7. Your Rights

Depending on your location, you may have the following rights regarding your personal information:

Right to access: You may request a copy of the personal information we hold about you.

Right to correction: You may request that we correct inaccurate or incomplete personal information.

Right to deletion: You may request that we delete your personal information. We will honor deletion requests subject to any legal obligations that require us to retain certain data.

Right to restrict processing: You may request that we limit how we use your personal information in certain circumstances.

Right to data portability: You may request that we provide your personal information in a structured, machine-readable format.

Right to object: You may object to our processing of your personal information for direct marketing purposes at any time.

Right to withdraw consent: Where we rely on your consent to process your personal information, you may withdraw that consent at any time. Withdrawal of consent does not affect the lawfulness of processing before withdrawal.

California residents (CCPA/CPRA): You have the right to know what categories of personal information we collect, the right to delete, the right to correct inaccurate information, the right to opt out of sale, sharing for cross-context behavioral advertising, and profiling (we do not engage in any of these), and the right to non-discrimination for exercising your rights. We honor Global Privacy Control signals as described in Section 4.5. You may designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf.

Residents of Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and other states with comprehensive privacy laws: These laws generally give you the same core rights described above for California residents: access, correction, deletion, data portability, and opt-out of sale, targeted advertising, and profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects. We do not sell personal information, run targeted advertising, or use profiling for such decisions. If we deny a rights request, you may appeal by emailing rsmith@newsusa.com with "Appeal" in the subject line; we will respond to an appeal within 60 days.

European and UK residents (GDPR/UK GDPR): Our legal bases for processing are: (a) performance of a contract when delivering the Service; (b) legitimate interests in operating and improving our business; and (c) your consent where explicitly obtained, such as the SMS and email opt-in checkboxes described in Section 4.4. Personal information is stored and processed in the United States; by using the Site or Service, you understand your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, which may not have data protection laws as comprehensive as those in your jurisdiction. Our processing of EU, EEA, and UK visitors' data through the Site is occasional and incidental to a service that is not specifically directed at or marketed to those regions, which is why we have not appointed an Article 27 representative; we will revisit this if that changes. You have the right to lodge a complaint with your national supervisory authority.

Canadian residents (CASL/PIPEDA): See Section 4.4 for how we obtain and honor SMS-specific consent under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation. Under PIPEDA, you may access and request correction of the personal information we hold about you using the contact details below.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at rsmith@newsusa.com. We will respond within 30 days (or as required by applicable law), with one 45-day extension available for complex requests where local law allows it. We may need to verify your identity before processing your request. See Section 12 for how to stop marketing communications specifically.

8. Data Security

We implement appropriate technical and organizational security measures to protect your personal information, including:

• All data transmitted between your browser and our servers is encrypted using TLS 1.2 or higher
• Our database runs in a private AWS RDS instance, accessible only to our application services, with no public endpoints
• Admin access requires authentication with hashed passwords and JWT tokens
• API keys and secrets are stored as environment variables, never in source code
• PDF reports are stored in a private AWS S3 bucket with access controlled via time-limited signed URLs
• Rate limiting prevents automated abuse of our scoring API

No method of transmission over the internet or electronic storage is 100% secure. While we strive to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee absolute security. In the event of a data breach that affects your rights and freedoms, we will notify you and relevant authorities as required by applicable law.

9. Children's Privacy

Our Service is not directed to individuals under the age of 16. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 16. If you become aware that a child has provided us with personal information without parental consent, please contact us at rsmith@newsusa.com and we will take steps to delete that information.

10. Third-Party Links

Our Site may contain links to third-party websites, products, or services. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of those third parties and encourage you to read their privacy policies. This Privacy Policy applies solely to information collected by newsusa.ai.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make material changes, we will notify you by updating the "Last Updated" date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, by sending an email notification to the address associated with your account or lead record. Your continued use of the Site or Service after any changes constitutes your acceptance of the updated policy.

12. How to Stop Communications or Delete Your Data

We want opting out to be simple. Here is exactly what to do, depending on what you want to stop:

Text messages (SMS):

Reply STOP to any text message you receive from us, from the same phone number, at any time. We process opt-outs immediately, and normal variations like "stop," "Stop," or "STOP!" all count. You will get one final confirmation text with no promotional content, then no further messages. Reply HELP for assistance, or opt out before ever receiving a text by emailing rsmith@newsusa.com with "Stop Texts" in the subject line.

Marketing emails:

Click "unsubscribe" at the bottom of any marketing email, or email rsmith@newsusa.com with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line. We honor opt-out requests within 10 business days, consistent with the CAN-SPAM Act.

Transactional and service communications:

Messages directly tied to a report or call you requested, such as delivering your report or confirming your strategy call, are not marketing and are not affected by an email or SMS marketing opt-out, because we still need to reach you about the request you made. To stop these too, delete your lead record entirely using the option below.

Delete your data entirely:

Email rsmith@newsusa.com with "Delete My Data" in the subject line, or use the rights described in Section 7. We will confirm deletion within 30 days, subject to any legal obligation to retain specific records.

Do Not Sell or Share my personal information:

See Section 4.5. We do not sell or share personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of, but we still honor Global Privacy Control signals as a matter of practice.

13. Contact Us

If you have questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or your personal information, please contact:

Rick D. Smith, Founder
NewsUSA Inc.
1104 West Broad St. #1024
Falls Church, VA 22046
Email: rsmith@newsusa.com
Phone: +1 (703) 508-8700