Privacy Policy

Caldwell County, Texas provides this website as a public service. This policy explains what information the site collects, what the county does and does not do with it, and the Texas laws that govern information you send to a county office. It applies to caldwellcounty.texas.gov, elections.caldwellcounty.texas.gov and the county’s other web addresses that redirect to them.

It does not apply to other websites the county links to, or to information you give a county office in person, by post or by telephone.

Like any website, this site is delivered by a web server, and a web server necessarily receives the technical details needed to send a page back to you — your Internet Protocol (IP) address, the page you asked for, the date and time, and the type of browser making the request.

What the county does with those details is deliberately limited:

• Abuse prevention. Your IP address is held briefly in the server’s working memory to count requests, so that one source cannot overwhelm the site or attack the search function. These counts are not written to a database, are not linked to you, and disappear when the counting window closes.
• Hosting records. The site runs on Microsoft Azure. Like any hosting platform, Azure keeps its own operational records of traffic to the service for reliability and security purposes, under Microsoft’s terms.
• Security investigation. If the county has reason to believe the site is being attacked or misused, it may examine available records to identify the source.

The county’s own application does not keep a general log of who visited which page. It does not build visitor profiles, and it does not attempt to identify individual members of the public from ordinary browsing.

A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to keep.

For ordinary browsing this website sets no cookies at all. You can read every public page without a cookie being stored on your device.

Two categories of cookie may appear in narrow circumstances:

• Security. The county’s security and delivery provider may set a short-lived cookie to distinguish automated abuse from real visitors. It contains no information about you and is not used for advertising.
• Staff sign-in. County staff who sign in to the content management system receive a session cookie. This does not apply to members of the public reading the site.

The county sets no analytics cookies and no advertising cookies, and nothing on this site is used to track you across other websites.

If you block cookies in your browser, this site will still work normally.

You are not required to give the county any personal information to use this website. The only information the public site asks you to type is a search term, which is used to find matching pages and documents and is not stored against you.

Where a page invites you to contact a county office — to request public information, to report an accessibility barrier, or to reach a department — you do so by email or telephone. Anything you send that way is handled by the office you sent it to, used to answer you, and kept in accordance with the records-retention rules described below.

Please do not send sensitive personal information by email. Ordinary email is not a secure channel. Do not email your Social Security number, driver licence number, financial account numbers or medical information. If a county office needs information of that kind, it will tell you how to provide it safely.

Note that this protects the address. It does not make the content of your message confidential — see the next section.

Caldwell County is a governmental body subject to the Texas Public Information Act (Texas Government Code, Chapter 552). Information written, produced, collected, assembled or maintained by the county in connection with the transaction of official business is public information, and any person may ask for it.

In practice this means a message you send to a county office — and any document you attach to it — may be a public record that the county is required to release if someone requests it. Some categories are excepted from disclosure by law, and some require the county to seek a ruling from the Texas Attorney General before releasing or withholding them. Your email address is protected as described above; the body of your message generally is not.

The county may also be required to disclose information in response to a subpoena, a court order, or another legal obligation.

• The county does not sell, rent, trade or lease personal information to anyone.
• The county does not run advertising on this site and does not permit advertising networks to collect information through it.
• The county does not use third-party analytics on its public pages. The site’s content security policy blocks the browser from loading scripts, styles, fonts or images from outside the county’s own domain, which enforces this technically rather than merely as a promise.
• The county does not knowingly collect information from children. This site is intended for a general audience and does not offer services directed at children under 13.

Some pages embed video of public meetings hosted by outside providers, including YouTube, Vimeo, Swagit and Granicus. Where such a video appears, playing it contacts that provider, and the provider may set its own cookies and receive your IP address under its own privacy policy — not the county’s.

Where the county controls the choice, it prefers privacy-preserving embed options. Even so, if you would rather not be seen by a video provider, do not play the embedded video; the county can supply the meeting record another way on request.

To keep this website available and to protect it from attack, the county routes requests through Cloudflare, a security and content-delivery provider. Cloudflare operates servers close to visitors so pages load quickly and stay reachable during traffic surges and denial-of-service attacks.

This means Cloudflare processes your request on the county’s behalf — including your IP address — before it reaches the county’s own servers. Cloudflare acts as the county’s service provider for this purpose. It is not an advertising network, and the county does not permit it to use your information for advertising or to build a profile of you.

The county uses your IP address only to prevent abuse, as described above.

This site links to websites operated by other governments, by state agencies, by cities and school districts within the county, and by private organisations. This policy stops at the county’s own site. Once you follow a link away from it, you are governed by the privacy practices of the site you have reached, and the county has no control over — and takes no responsibility for — what they collect or how they use it.

The county encourages you to read the privacy policy of any site you visit before giving it information about yourself.

The county takes reasonable measures to protect the information it holds. This site is served only over an encrypted connection (HTTPS), instructs browsers to refuse an unencrypted connection, and applies a restrictive content security policy that prevents the loading of outside code.

No method of transmitting or storing information is perfectly secure, and the county does not guarantee that information sent over the internet is immune from interception. If the county determines that a breach of system security has exposed sensitive personal information, it will notify affected individuals as required by Texas law.

Residents sometimes ask whether the rights they have read about in consumer privacy law apply to a county government. It is worth being plain about this.

The Texas Data Privacy and Security Act (Texas Business and Commerce Code, Chapter 541) creates rights to access, correct, delete and port personal data, and a right to opt out of targeted advertising and sale. By its own terms, that chapter does not apply to a state agency or a political subdivision of this state. Caldwell County is a political subdivision, so those particular statutory rights are not exercisable against the county.

What governs the county instead is public-records and records-retention law — principally the Texas Public Information Act and the Local Government Records Act — together with the confidentiality provisions that protect specific categories of information, such as the email-address provision quoted above.

Separately, Chapter 559 of the Texas Government Code gives individuals a right to have incorrect information about them corrected. That chapter is written for state governmental bodies and does not by its terms bind a county. Caldwell County nonetheless welcomes corrections: if you believe information the county holds about you is wrong, contact the office that holds it, or use the details at the foot of this page, and the county will review it.

County records are retained and disposed of under the Local Government Records Act and the records-retention schedules issued by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. Retention periods are set by the type of record, not by the county’s preference, and a county may not destroy a record before its scheduled retention period has run.

Correspondence you send a county office is retained under the schedule that applies to the subject matter of that correspondence.

The county may revise this policy as its website, the technology behind it, or the governing law changes. The date at the foot of this page shows when it was last revised. Material changes will be described here rather than made silently.

The telephone number above is the County Judge’s office main line, where the Public Information Officer is based.

For a request for public records, use the public information request page. To report a problem using this site with assistive technology, see the accessibility statement.