How Lake of the Forest, Inc. collects and uses information on this website, in plain language. We name every vendor we use and never sell your data.
Effective date: August 27, 2026
This Privacy Policy explains what information Lake of the Forest, Inc. (“the Association,” “we,” “us”) collects through lakeoftheforestkansas.com, why we collect it, which outside companies (vendors) help us run the site, and how you can reach us with questions. We've tried to write this the way we'd explain it to a neighbor, not the way a big tech company would.
What this covers
This policy covers the public website, the members' area (sign-in, document access, the resident directory), the small merchandise shop, the contact and clubhouse-inquiry forms, and newsletter sign-up requests. It doesn't cover information the Association collects offline (paper forms, in-person conversations, mail) or the separate privacy practices of outside websites we link to.
The vendors that handle data on our behalf
We don't run our own servers or databases from scratch — like almost every small organization's website, we rely on a handful of specialized outside companies, each doing one job. We name them here on purpose, because “we use trusted third parties” without saying who is exactly the kind of vague language we're trying to avoid:
Information we collect, and why
If you sign in as a member or admin: Clerk stores your email, password (encrypted, never visible to us), and verification status. Separately, our Supabase database keeps a record of whether your account currently has access to the members' area, tied only to your Clerk account ID (not your name or email) — this lets an administrator grant or restore access without us keeping a second copy of your identity. Every time an administrator grants, restores, or revokes someone's access, that action is logged with who did it, who it affected, why, and when — this audit trail is visible to admins at /admin/members/activity, and it exists so access changes are always traceable, not hidden.
If you download a members-only document: we keep a short-lived, single-purpose record (an expiring, hashed access token) noting that a download link was issued, so we can prevent link-sharing and expired-link abuse. This isn't a log of everything you view — just of document download links issued.
If you buy something from the shop: checkout happens entirely on Stripe's own hosted page — we never see or store your card number. After Stripe completes the purchase, Stripe sends us (via a secure webhook) the information needed to fulfill your order: your name, email, phone number, shipping address, what you ordered, the order total, and Stripe's own transaction reference. We store that in our database so we can ship your order, answer questions about it, and keep basic financial records.
If you fill out the contact form, a clubhouse rental inquiry, or a newsletter sign-up: that information (your name, email, and whatever you wrote — plus phone and event details for clubhouse inquiries) is emailed directly to our staff so a person can respond. We do not store these submissions in a database, and a newsletter “sign-up” is not an automated mailing list — it's simply a request that gets forwarded to staff, who add you by hand if appropriate. If you're curious why that matters: it means there's no ongoing list of subscriber data sitting in our systems to protect or eventually delete — the request just becomes an email, the same as if you'd emailed us directly.
Board member contact information: our board members' names, roles, and contact information (email, and phone where provided) are entered by our editors and shown publicly on the board directory page. This is intentional, published officer contact information for reaching the board — not something visitors submit about themselves.
What we do not do
We think it's just as important to say what we don't do as what we do:
We do use Vercel Speed Insights, a performance-monitoring tool that measures page-load speed and Core Web Vitals in aggregate. It isn't behavioral or advertising tracking, and it isn't tied to your name or account.
A note on technical/security logs
Separately from the above, our hosting provider (Vercel) and its security firewall necessarily process some technical information — like IP addresses — briefly, for ordinary operational purposes: delivering pages correctly, and detecting and slowing down abusive traffic. This is standard for any website and isn't the same thing as tracking your activity for marketing. When our own systems log errors, we actively strip out emails, names, and phone numbers before anything gets written to those logs — an extra step we take specifically to limit what ends up in diagnostic records.
Do Not Track
Because we don't track visitors across other websites for advertising, your browser's “Do Not Track” setting doesn't change how this site behaves — there's no cross-site tracking to turn off. Our vendors (Clerk, Stripe, Vercel, etc.) operate under their own privacy policies for the services they provide.
How long we keep information
We keep shop order and customer records for as long as reasonably needed for fulfillment, accounting, and handling any disputes. We keep the access-grant audit trail indefinitely, as part of good governance over who has had access to member information over time. We keep member access-status records only for as long as your account remains relevant to the Association. We don't have an automatic “delete everything after X days” rule for every category, but records outside their working purpose are not something we retain deliberately.
Your choices
You manage your own login information — email, password, profile — directly through Clerk's own account tools, reachable from the account menu when you're signed in. Changing or removing your Clerk account does not automatically delete separate records like past orders or the access audit trail, since we need those for recordkeeping. For anything else — questions about what we have on file, a request to correct or remove information, or anything not covered above — contact us using the information below and we'll respond personally.
Children's privacy
This site is intended for adult residents and the general public, not children. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us information, please contact us and we'll remove it.
Changes to this policy
If we make a meaningful change to this policy, we'll update this page and change the effective date above. We won't apply a policy change retroactively to information already collected under a stricter promise.
Contact us
Questions about this policy or your information? Reach the Association office:
Lake of the Forest, Inc.
100 Lake Forest, Bonner Springs, KS 66012
Email: officemanager@lakeoftheforestkansas.com
Phone: 913-424-6062
