Privacy

Vestfold.info is run by Terje Nesthus, who is the controller of the personal data the site processes.

Send questions about privacy to terje@nesthus.no.

You need no account to read the news, browse jobs or ask the assistant “Ask Vestfold.info”. If you create an account on Min side, we store:

• your e-mail address and name, and your password as a hash (never in plain text)
• your profile picture, if you upload one
• the language and colour mode you have chosen
• your conversations with “Ask Vestfold.info”, if you have said yes to saving them (see below)

Conversations with “Ask Vestfold.info” are saved only when you are signed in and have chosen Yes to “Save my conversations”. For a new account no choice has been made: the assistant asks you once, before your first question is sent, and nothing is saved until you have answered Yes. You can take the choice back in the assistant and under Profile on Min side. We store your questions, the answers and which items the answers pointed to (job listings, events, news, police log and traffic messages), but not the police’s own text. Accounts created before the question was introduced keep the choice they already had (saving was on by default then) and are not asked again; you see and change the choice under Profile on Min side. A conversation is deleted automatically, normally 30 days after its last message, and you can delete one or all of them at any time under My conversations, or all at once in the assistant.

If you switch the setting off, no new conversations are saved: the conversation is only shown on screen while the page is open. Conversations saved earlier stay until you delete them or until the period, normally 30 days, has passed.

You can delete your account yourself under Profile on Min side. Your account, profile picture and saved conversations are then deleted for good, and you receive a confirmation by e-mail. Events you have added stay on the site without your name. An account with a role in the administration (editor or administrator) must be deleted by an administrator.

E-mail from us, such as the confirmation of your e-mail address, the link to set a new password and the confirmation that your account was deleted, is sent through the e-mail service of one.com.

We only use cookies the site needs to work. None of them is used for tracking or advertising, which is why we do not ask for consent.

• vestfold_lang remembers the language you have chosen. It lasts one year.
• vestfoldinfo-session keeps you signed in and ties together the requests of one visit. It is set when you open Min side, and when you use something that sends a request to the server on your behalf, such as the language choice or “Ask Vestfold.info” (when you send your first question), also without an account. It lasts two hours after the last request.
• XSRF-TOKEN protects sign-in, forms and “Ask Vestfold.info” against forged requests from other websites. It lasts as long as the session.
• remember_web_… is only set if you tick “Remember me” when you sign in, so you do not have to sign in again. It lasts up to 400 days, or until you sign out.

Some choices are stored only in your browser, not with us. You can remove them at any time by deleting the site data for vestfold.info in your browser.

These stay until you delete them (localStorage):

• job listings you have saved with the heart
• searches you have saved
• your last filters on the job list, and whether the filter block is open
• news sources you have hidden
• the colour mode (system, light or dark)
• the map layer you chose on a map of one place («Map» or «Details»)
• whether the side menu on Min side is open
• pusherTransportTLS: how the browser last connected to the live updates (the kind of connection, when, and how long it took), so the next connection is quicker

These disappear when you close the tab (sessionStorage):

• the last job list you looked at, so “All jobs” takes you back there
• how far down you had scrolled, so you come back to the same place
• your conversation with “Ask Vestfold.info” when you are not signed in

A conversation you have without signing in is not stored with us, and it is not moved to your account if you sign in later. So that the assistant understands the context, the latest messages of the conversation are sent along with each new question.

When you open the front page, the news page, the job list or the Arrangements, the tab connects to our own server and keeps the connection open while the tab is open, so the page is told when something new has arrived. The signal only says that something has changed, not what, and the page then fetches the new content the usual way. The connection sets no new cookie, sends nothing about you and goes to no one but us. It is in the web server’s technical log like any other request (see “No analytics tools or third-party tracking”).

“Ask Vestfold.info”, the assistant at the bottom right of every page, uses artificial intelligence (AI) from outside providers. The button is shown on every page, but nothing about you or your questions is sent to any provider until you have opened the assistant and sent a question. You can use it without an account.

The messages of the conversation are first sent to Typesafe AI (TypeSafe AI, Inc., USA) for a safety check that decides whether the question is about content on Vestfold.info, whether it asks about an individual person and whether it contains personal data or instructions to the AI. The same check also reads what the question is about (for example jobs in a particular municipality), so that the answer comes faster. Earlier answers from the assistant are sent along for context, and they can contain the category, place and time from the police log, the text of traffic messages, figures from the weather forecast and what the assistant wrote about events (for example performers, organiser and the address of the venue), so that also goes to Typesafe. If the message passes, it is sent to Google Gemini, which writes the answer.

Gemini is also told about the content that fits the question, taken from our own database:

• job listings: title, job title, employer, place, working hours, type of employment, application deadline and occupational category. The ad text and the contact persons are never sent
• events: title, time, place, municipality, the address of the event page, a short part of the description (normally the first 200 characters) and, for events from ticket sellers, the sources (Ticketmaster and Hoopla), category and genre, performers, organiser, whether the event lasts several days, whether ticket sales are open or the tickets are sold out, the lowest price stated, the other dates when the same show runs several times, and the address of the venue, all without phone numbers and e-mail addresses. An event that is over never appears in a search
• news: title, introduction, the newspaper, time, whether the article is behind a paywall and the address of the article at the newspaper
• the police log: only category, municipality, police district, time, whether the case is ongoing and how many messages it has. The police’s own text and the more detailed place in it are never sent, and messages about missing persons and rescue operations are not sent at all
• traffic messages: type, severity, road, place, municipality, period of validity and the message text from the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (normally the first 300 characters), without phone numbers and e-mail addresses
• the weather: the forecast from MET Norway (Yr) that we have stored for the seven places we show the weather for (Horten, Holmestrand, Tønsberg, Færder, Sandefjord, Larvik and Andebu). For each place Gemini gets its name and code (for example «larvik») and when we fetched the forecast, and for the period the question is about the weather now (time, weather symbol, temperature, feels-like temperature, precipitation in the next hour, wind, gusts and wind direction), hour by hour (time, weather symbol, temperature, precipitation and wind) and day by day (date, weekday, weather symbol, lowest and highest temperature, precipitation and strongest wind). If the question is about a place we do not have, Gemini gets the place name as it was asked for (at most 60 characters) and the list of the seven places with the municipality each lies in. The forecast says nothing about you, and nothing about you or your question is sent to MET when you ask

If you ask from a job or event page, Gemini gets the details of that page in the same way (never the ad text or the contact persons), so “when is the deadline?” can be answered. If the event on the page is over, only its title and the fact that it is over are sent. If you ask from the weather page of one place, Gemini gets the name of the place.

In the cards under an answer we show the police’s own text as it appears in the police log on the news page. That text is not sent to the AI services. Messages about missing persons and rescue operations are never shown in the assistant.

Do not write names, phone numbers or other personal data in your messages. The assistant also does not answer questions about who a particular person is, or about individuals. The safety check refuses such messages and messages that seem to contain personal data; they are then not passed on to Gemini and not saved.

The summaries on the news page are written by Google Gemini from the titles and introductions we have collected from the newspapers’ news feeds. The police log and the traffic messages are not used in the summaries. The short text “Today in Vestfold” on the front page is also written by Google Gemini, at fixed times and never when you open the page, from the same titles and introductions (with the newspaper’s name, publication time and whether the article is behind a paywall) and from the events held today (title, time, place, municipality and category, without phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and without description, price or ticket address). The weather, the police log and the traffic messages are not included, and nothing about you is sent.

Photos of menus, price lists and signs that the editorial team has taken at cafés and restaurants may be sent to Google Gemini, which reads the dishes, prices, opening hours and contact details in the photo. Only the photo itself is sent, together with fixed instructions, never anything else about the business and nothing about you. The editorial team does not upload photos with people in them, so the photos should hold no personal data. What Gemini reads is a suggestion that the editorial team checks and approves before anything is shown on the site, and the photos themselves are never shown publicly.

Typesafe AI states in its privacy policy that it does not train or fine-tune AI models on what is sent to it. Google states in the Gemini API terms that content sent from the EEA is not used to improve Google’s products, but is kept for a limited time to detect abuse. More about Google is in Google’s privacy policy.

To see how much the AI features are used and what they cost, we keep a record of each call to an AI provider (Typesafe AI and Google Gemini). It covers questions to “Ask Vestfold.info”, the news summaries, the “Today in Vestfold” text on the front page and test calls from the administration, and only administrators can see it. For each call we store:

• the time, which feature the call belonged to, the provider and the model
• how many tokens (small pieces of text) were sent and received, and how long the call took
• whether the call succeeded, failed or was interrupted (for a failure only the name of the error type, never the error message)
• what the question was about (for example jobs or traffic) and what the safety check answered
• whether the visitor was signed in or not (only that, not who)

Your question, the answer and the text sent to the provider are not stored in this record. Neither your IP address nor your account (user id) is stored there.

To count how many different visitors use the assistant, we make a visitor mark for each question. The mark is calculated from your IP address (or from your account, if you are signed in) together with a random secret that is made every day. Only the mark is stored, never the IP address or the account.

The secret is kept only in the server’s fast memory, not in the database, and is set to expire an hour after midnight. Once it has expired, the mark itself can no longer be calculated back to an IP address or an account.

The record is still not anonymous. Each call has a time to the second, and as long as both the record and the web server’s technical log (IP address and time, see “No analytics tools or third-party tracking”) exist, a call can in principle be linked to the log by its time. For signed-in users who have said yes to storing conversations, the same goes for the time of the stored conversations. We therefore treat the record as pseudonymous personal data.

The mark is removed from the record once the day it belongs to is more than two days old, so it stays for at most three calendar days and is used only to count different visitors per day.

The individual calls in the record are normally deleted after 90 days (an administrator can change the number of days). After that only daily totals remain: the number of calls, tokens and the estimated price per day, without visitor marks.

The count is rough. The same person on another day gets a new mark and is counted as a new visitor. If the server’s fast memory is emptied in the middle of a day, for example when the site is updated, the same person may be counted twice that day.

The content of Vestfold.info comes from open or publicly available sources. We link to the original and always say where the content comes from.

• Job listings come from NAV (arbeidsplassen.nav.no). A listing may contain the names and contact details of the employer’s contact persons, as NAV publishes them. We remove a listing once it has expired.
• Coordinates for the addresses of workplaces come from Kartverket, the Norwegian Mapping Authority (© Kartverket, CC BY 4.0). Only the address in the listing is sent there, nothing about you.
• News comes from the local newspapers in Vestfold through their news feeds (RSS). We show the title, introduction and picture and link to the story at the newspaper.
• Some Arrangements are entered by the editorial team. Others come from the ticket sellers Ticketmaster and Hoopla, which we fetch Arrangements from every three hours. We show the title, time, place, description and picture and link to the Arrangement at the ticket seller. The address of the venue is sent to Kartverket, the Norwegian Mapping Authority (© Kartverket, CC BY 4.0), to find the place on the map, nothing about you. Only the Arrangements we fetch from the ticket sellers are deleted automatically, normally 30 days after they are over; the ones the editorial team entered are kept.
• Cafés and restaurants come from the Brønnøysund Register Centre (the Central Coordinating Register for Legal Entities, NLOD 2.0) and from the smiley inspections (smilefjes) of the Norwegian Food Safety Authority (Mattilsynet). Some are sole proprietorships, and then the name of the business can be the name of a person. On the page of a company we show its organisation form, its organisation number and a link to the company’s page in the register. We never do that for a sole proprietorship, nor while we do not yet know whether the business is one. No business is shown on the site before the editorial team has reviewed it. If something in the register data is wrong, it is corrected at the Brønnøysund Register Centre or the Food Safety Authority, and we fetch the correction from there. From Mattilsynet’s smilefjes data we store, for each business, its six latest inspections with the date, the overall result and the result for each of the four themes. We show them as smiley faces, never as words: the latest inspection, each theme and the year of the earlier inspections. This is information about the business, not about visitors. For a sole proprietorship this is information about a person, namely the inspection history of that person’s business. We take it from Mattilsynet’s own publication and show it only once the editorial team has published the business. The address a business has in the register is sent to the Norwegian Mapping Authority (© Kartverket, CC BY 4.0) to find the place on the map. For a sole proprietorship it can be the owner’s home address. Nothing about you is sent there. To link a business to its place on Google, our server sends its name and its address from the register to Google’s place search (Google Places in Google Maps Platform), both when the editorial team searches in the administration and in a weekly search. For a sole proprietorship that can be the owner’s name and address; the weekly search sends them only once the business is published.
• The police log comes from the Norwegian Police. Messages about missing persons and rescue operations are only shown while the case is ongoing, and their text is deleted when the case is closed, or at the latest 48 hours after the last message.
• Traffic messages come from the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (Statens vegvesen).
• The weather forecast comes from MET Norway (Yr), under the CC BY 4.0 licence. Our server fetches the forecast for the seven places we show at regular intervals. Nothing about you is sent to MET, and your browser fetches neither the forecast nor the weather symbols from MET or Yr.

We use no analytics tools from others, no advertising and no tracking of what you do on the site. The only statistics we keep ourselves are about the use of the AI features (see “Statistics on AI use”). Fonts and icons come from our own server, and the bot protection in front of the AI features (ALTCHA) solves a small task in your browser without contacting anyone else.

Some content is still loaded directly from others when you view it, and they then get your IP address: the maps load map images from CARTO and OpenStreetMap, and the news page shows pictures from the newspapers’ own servers, while Arrangements from ticket sellers show pictures from Ticketmaster’s own servers and from TwicPics (hoopla.twic.pics), the image service Hoopla uses. Links to, for example, Google Maps, Apple Maps or Entur (public transport) contact no one until you follow them. If you follow the Entur link, Entur gets the point you are going to and, for an Arrangement that has not started, the time you want to arrive. Entur asks for your position itself, and you decide whether to give it.

Business pages can show opening hours, ratings and reviews from Google. Nothing is fetched from Google until you press «Show opening hours and reviews from Google». Then your browser fetches the content straight from Google Maps Platform, and Google gets your IP address and knows you are on Vestfold.info. Google’s privacy policy applies to that. We store nothing of what Google shows, only Google’s id for the place.

If you use “Use my position” on a map, your position is only used in the browser to move the map. It is not sent to us.

The web server keeps a technical log of requests: IP address, time, the address that was opened, the page you came from and your browser. The log is used for operations, troubleshooting and stopping abuse, not for statistics about visitors, and is deleted after 400 days. Messages to “Ask Vestfold.info” are not in the log, but search words on the job list and the event list are in the address and therefore also in the log.

You have the right to know what data we hold about you, to have errors corrected and to have the data deleted.

You can do much of this yourself: you change your name, e-mail address, language and profile picture under Profile on Min side, where you can also delete your account. You see and delete your conversations with “Ask Vestfold.info” under My conversations. What is only stored in your browser you remove by deleting the site data.

For access to your data, or anything you cannot do yourself, write to terje@nesthus.no. You will get an answer within one month at the latest.

If you think we process personal data in breach of the rules, you can complain to Datatilsynet, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority.

When we change what we store or pass on, we update this page. It was last updated on 9 November 2026.