Privacy policy

1Who processes the data

The personal data controller is Sofia Beilin, Deputy Mayor of Ashkelon. The data is processed by her office — the staff who handle residents' enquiries.

For questions about personal data, and for access, correction or deletion requests, write to BeilinSofa@gmail.com.

This site belongs to the Deputy Mayor and is not the official website of the Ashkelon Municipality. Enquiries submitted here are handled by her office; some are forwarded to city services, as described below.

2What is collected

The site collects data only where you enter it yourself. There are three such places, and they are not linked to one another:

Enquiry to the Deputy Mayor

First and last name, phone, email (optional), district and address, type of enquiry, its content and the outcome you seek, reply language, and any files you attach — photographs, certificates, bills.

Activity registration form

Completed by the head of a club, studio, foundation or community: their name, phone and email, details of the activity, contact details for residents, and photographs. The office sends the link directly.

The chat assistant

The text of your messages and the language of the conversation. The assistant does not ask for your name, phone or address and asks you not to type them — but a free text field can hold anything, so conversations are kept for a limited time and then deleted.

Each enquiry and assistant message is stored with a technical sender fingerprint — a one-way hash of the network address. It exists to limit automated submissions; the address cannot be recovered from it and no person can be identified by it.

In your browser the site stores only your display preference (light or dark) and the topic and district of your last enquiry, so the status tracker can show them. These stay on your device and are never sent to the server.

3What the site does not do

• Uses no tracking cookies and shows no cookie consent banner — there is nothing to consent to.
• Runs no visitor counters and no external analytics.
• Shows no advertising and passes no data to advertising networks. Video from external platforms loads only when you click — see below.
• Builds no visitor profiles and makes no automated decisions: enquiries are handled by a person.
• Never sells or shares data with third parties for commercial purposes, under any circumstances.

4Why the data is needed

The sole purpose is to consider your enquiry and answer it. Name and phone are needed to reach you; address and district to identify the place in the city and route the matter to the right service; attachments to understand the substance.

The basis for processing is your consent, given by ticking the box in the form before submitting. You may withdraw it by writing to the address above.

A separate, optional tick allows the anonymised story of how your case was resolved to be published. Without it, your enquiry is never published in any form.

5Who sees your enquiry

Within the office, your enquiry is seen by the staff who handle enquiries and by whoever is assigned to your case. Section editors in "City life", who publish news for clubs and studios, have no access to enquiries — that is a separate role with separate permissions.

Checking an enquiry's status by number is public and shows no personal data: only the status, the date received and the response deadline. No name, phone, enquiry text or reply. The number comes with an access code: without it, another person's status cannot be viewed.

6Who the data is passed to

So that an enquiry reaches a staff member and receives a reply, some data passes through external services. They are named below, together with exactly what reaches each of them.

Telegram

A card is sent to the office's closed working chat: name, phone, address and the content of the enquiry. This is how staff see and handle new enquiries. The tracker access code is deliberately never sent to the chat.

Language model provider

The enquiry text is sent to an Anthropic or OpenAI model for two purposes: translation into Russian where the enquiry arrived in Hebrew or English, and drafting a reply. A staff member reads and edits the draft — no letter is sent in the office's name without a human. This means the data leaves Israel.

The office automation server

A server owned by the office, through which model requests and notifications pass. The enquiry text remains in its execution log for as long as needed to investigate failures.

Email provider

Carries the office's mail: notification of a new enquiry, the reply to you, and the activity form with its photographs.

Video platforms (YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram)

Only if you press "Watch the video" under a publication yourself. Until you do, the page contacts the platform neither for the clip nor for its thumbnail, and the platform does not know you opened this page. After you press, the clip loads from their server and their rules apply from then on.

City services

Where a matter falls to a particular service, the enquiry is forwarded there with the data needed to resolve it. The enquiry history records exactly where it went.

The data goes to no one else. There is one exception, outside our control: a lawful demand from a competent authority.

7How long the data is kept

Conversations with the chat assistant are deleted automatically after 90 days. The exception is a conversation you attached to an enquiry yourself: it is kept with the enquiry, because it is part of it.

Enquiries and their attachments are kept while work on them continues, and after closure, so that the matter can be revisited and what was done can be confirmed.

8Your rights

Under the Israeli Protection of Privacy Law you are entitled to:

• learn what data about you is held and receive a copy of it;
• require correction of inaccurate or outdated details;
• require deletion of the data and withdraw your consent to processing.

Send your request to BeilinSofa@gmail.com. To locate your enquiries, include the enquiry number or the phone number it was submitted from.

Deleting the data ends work on the enquiry: without a name and phone there is no one to reply to.

9How the data is protected

• The site runs over a secure connection; form data is transmitted encrypted.
• Files attached to an enquiry are stored apart from the site's public material and released only to a staff member authorised for that enquiry. Their links cannot be opened without signing in.
• Staff permissions are role-based: only the office has access to enquiries, and that access is never bundled with permission to publish section news.
• Every change to an enquiry's status is written to its history: who did what, and when.

10Changes to this policy

If what the site does with data changes, this text changes with it. The date of the last revision appears under the page title.