Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

The Northfield Township Road District is a unit of local government in Cook County, Illinois, organized under the Illinois Highway Code (605 ILCS 5/). We maintain roads in the unincorporated areas of Northfield Township and operate a seasonal recycling center at 237 Melvin Drive, Northbrook, Illinois 60062.

This policy covers ntroad.com and the forms, alert lists and surveys we operate through it. It does not cover Northfield Township, the villages of Northbrook, Glenview or Northfield, Cook County, or any other agency, each of which has its own policies.

2. What we collect

Information you give us

When you sign up for alerts, take a survey or contact us, we may collect:

• Name
• Street address, community and ZIP code
• Email address
• Mobile telephone number
• Which lists you asked to join, and whether you consented to email, text messages, or both
• The date, time, IP address and web page from which you submitted a form, and the version of the consent language shown to you at that moment
• Survey answers you choose to give, including answers about transportation needs, mobility, veteran status and household circumstances
• Anything you write to us in a message, comment or service request

Survey questions are optional. You may skip any question and still submit the survey. Contact details on a survey are optional; if you leave them blank your answers are not linked to you.

Information collected automatically

• Standard web server logs: IP address, browser type, pages requested, date and time, and the referring page
• Analytics data through Google Analytics, described in section 9

Information from service requests

When you report a pothole, a downed limb, flooding or another road condition — by phone, email or in person — we record the location, the nature of the problem and how to reach you, so we can respond and close the request.

What we do not collect

We do not ask for and do not want your Social Security number, driver’s license number, financial account numbers, payment card numbers or medical records. Please do not send them to us. We do not collect biometric information. We do not track your location.

3. How we use it

We use the information above only to:

• Send the alerts and updates you asked for
• Send alerts only to the areas they affect, which is why we ask for your address
• Respond to service requests, questions and complaints
• Understand demand for services and plan operations, staffing and budgets
• Publish anonymous, aggregated summaries — for example, how many residents reported difficulty reaching medical appointments
• Meet our obligations under Illinois law, including records retention and open records requirements

We do not use your information for advertising. We do not build advertising profiles. We do not use automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects.

5. Who we share information with

We do not sell your information

We have never sold, rented or traded personal information and we will not. We are a unit of government funded by property taxes. We have no commercial interest in your data and no advertising business of any kind.

Service providers

We use a small number of vendors to run this website and send messages. They may process your information only to provide that service to us, and may not use it for their own purposes:

• Our website host, which stores the site and its database
• Our email delivery provider, which transmits the emails you subscribe to
• Our text messaging provider, which transmits SMS alerts
• Google Analytics, described in section 9

★EDIT★ Name your actual providers here before publishing. Carriers and residents both find named vendors more credible than generic categories.

Other agencies, only with your permission

If you take our transportation survey and check the box asking us to, we will share your contact information with Northfield Township, the North Shore Senior Center, Pace and the Veterans Assistance Commission of Cook County so they can follow up with you. If you leave that box unchecked, we do not share your contact information with them, and your answers reach them only as part of anonymous totals.

When the law requires it

We may disclose information when required by a court order, a subpoena, or a law that compels disclosure, and when necessary to respond to an emergency involving a risk to someone’s health or safety.

6. Public records and the Freedom of Information Act

We are a public body under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act (5 ILCS 140/). Records we create and receive are generally public records, and any person may request them. This is a meaningful difference between a government agency and a private company, and you should understand it before you write to us.

Illinois law protects the categories of information most people worry about. FOIA defines “private information” to include home and personal telephone numbers, personal email addresses, home addresses, Social Security and driver’s license numbers, personal financial information and medical records. Section 7(1)(b) exempts private information from inspection and copying. In practice, that means your phone number, email address and home address are withheld or redacted when we respond to a FOIA request, unless another law or a court order requires their release.

The substance of what you write to us is more likely to be disclosable than your contact details. If you send us a complaint, a comment on a project or a message about a neighbor, assume the text of that message could be released with your identifying details redacted. If you would rather raise something without creating a written record, call us instead.

Anonymous, aggregated survey results contain no personal information and are freely shareable. We intend to publish them.

7. How long we keep information

As a unit of local government we are subject to the Local Records Act (50 ILCS 205/). We cannot destroy records on request or on our own schedule. Disposal requires an approved retention schedule and the authorization of the Local Records Commission.

This has a practical consequence worth stating plainly: we cannot promise to delete your information the way a private company can. What we can and will do is stop contacting you immediately, remove you from every distribution list, and correct anything inaccurate. Consent and opt-out records are kept as long as needed to prove we had permission to contact you and to make sure we do not contact you again after you asked us to stop.

8. Your choices

• Stop text messages. Reply STOP to any message, or call us. Takes effect immediately.
• Stop emails. Use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any email, or call us.
• Change your address or phone number. Call or email us and we will update it.
• Ask what we have. Contact us and we will tell you what information we hold about you.
• Correct something wrong. Tell us and we will fix it.
• Withdraw permission to share. If you allowed us to pass your details to another agency, you can withdraw that at any time — though we cannot retrieve what has already been shared.

Leaving one list does not remove you from the others. Text and email are separate, and snow alerts and recycling reminders are separate. Tell us which you want to leave, or say all of them.

9. Cookies and analytics

This site uses Google Analytics to understand which pages residents use and how they find them. It sets cookies that collect your IP address, browser and device type, pages viewed, and the site or search that referred you. We use it to improve the site, not to identify individuals.

We do not use advertising cookies, retargeting pixels, social media tracking pixels or data brokers. We do not sell or share analytics data.

You can block analytics with the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on, or by blocking cookies in your browser settings. The site works normally either way. We honor Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track signals where our tools support them.

Our forms may use a session cookie to prevent duplicate and automated submissions. It expires when you close your browser.

10. Security

The site is served over an encrypted connection. Access to subscriber lists and form entries is limited to Road District staff who need it, protected by individual accounts and multi-factor authentication. Subscriber data is stored on our own systems rather than resold to a marketing platform.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not claim otherwise. If a breach involving personal information occurs, we will notify affected residents as required by the Illinois Personal Information Protection Act (815 ILCS 530/). That Act also requires us to maintain reasonable security measures for records containing personal information (Section 45), and to destroy materials containing personal information so that they cannot be read or reconstructed (Section 40), a requirement that applies expressly to units of local government.

11. Children

This site is intended for adults and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you believe a child has given us information, call us and we will remove it to the extent the Local Records Act permits.

12. Links to other sites

We link to IDOT, Cook County, the villages, Pace, the VA, the Veterans Assistance Commission of Cook County and other agencies because the information is useful. We do not control those sites and this policy does not apply to them. Read their policies before giving them information.

13. Accessibility

We work to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 Level AA. If any part of this site is difficult to use with a screen reader, keyboard, magnification or any other assistive technology, tell us and we will fix it. We will also provide any information on this site in an alternative format, including large print, on request and at no charge. Call 847.724.7055.

14. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the “last updated” date at the top. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will notify subscribers directly. We will never apply a change retroactively to share information you gave us under an earlier version that promised otherwise.

15. How to reach us

16. The laws behind this policy

Two Illinois statutes shape how a unit of local government like ours must handle your information. Both are linked here in full so you can read them yourself rather than take our summary for it.

• Freedom of Information Act, 5 ILCS 140/ — makes our records generally open to the public, and defines the “private information” that is exempt from release. See section 6 above.
• Personal Information Protection Act, 815 ILCS 530/ — sets our obligations for securing personal information, disposing of it safely, and notifying you if it is ever breached. See section 10 above.

How other Illinois public bodies handle this

We are not the only government office that has to answer these questions. If you want to compare our approach against how the State handles the same issues, these are worth reading:

• Office of the Illinois Attorney General — Privacy Policy — the office that houses the Public Access Counselor, which reviews FOIA denials, and that receives breach notifications under the Personal Information Protection Act.
• Illinois Secretary of State — Privacy Policy and Terms of Use — states plainly that personally identifiable information will not be sold for commercial solicitation and may be used only for purposes authorized by law. The same principle governs this Road District.

These links go to websites we do not control. See section 12 above.