Legal

Terms & Privacy

Last updated: September 8, 2026

1. Overview

Illuminate Baltimore ("we," "us," "our") is operated by Majestic Light Group, LLC and available at illuminatebaltimore.com (the "Service"). By using the Service you agree to these terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the Service.

2. What the Service is

Illuminate Baltimore is a curation project. The Light Feed collects headlines about positive and problem-solving news from publicly available Baltimore-area outlets and links to them. Share Your Light publishes short video interviews with Baltimoreans. We do not produce news reporting.

• We display headlines, outlet names, categories and publisher-provided thumbnails. We link every story to its original publisher.
• We do not host, reproduce, summarize or republish articles.
• Stories are selected by an automated, AI-assisted process (see section 6) and may be removed at any time.

3. Content ownership & attribution

All news content belongs to its respective publishers. We aggregate publicly available headlines from RSS feeds and public web pages, credit the source on every card, and send all traffic to the publisher. Category labels and relevance scores are generated by us and are our work; Share Your Light videos and the Illuminate Baltimore name and design are the property of Majestic Light Group, LLC.

4. Takedown & opt-out

If you are a publisher or rights holder and want a story, thumbnail or your entire outlet removed from The Light Feed, email team@majesticlight.org. We will act on legitimate requests within two business days. Publishers can also opt out of future inclusion with a single email — no form, no account. Please include:

• The story URL(s) or outlet you want removed
• Your contact information
• A statement that you are the rights holder or authorized to act for them

Our crawler identifies itself as IlluminateBaltimoreBot and respects robots.txt. Details are on our About page.

5. Nominations & privacy

When you nominate someone for Share Your Light we store the fields you submit — your name, email, organization, Instagram handle, website, neighborhood, category and your note about the nominee — along with basic anti-spam metadata (a hashed IP, the time taken to submit and your browser's user-agent string). We never store your raw IP address.

• We use nominations only to reach out about a possible feature. We do not sell or share them.
• Nominations are kept for 12 months, then deleted.
• By submitting a nomination you confirm you have the nominee's permission to share their information with us.
• To see or delete anything you submitted, email team@majesticlight.org.

We use privacy-respecting, cookie-free analytics (Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights) to count page views and measure performance. We do not run advertising trackers.

6. AI disclosure

Stories in The Light Feed are selected and categorized by an automated system that uses an AI model to score headlines for positivity, Baltimore relevance and whether they describe a solution. AI does not write, rewrite or summarize any article on this site. Automated scoring can make mistakes; if a story seems miscategorized or doesn't belong, use the "Report" link on the card or email team@majesticlight.org.

7. Instagram feed (EmbedSocial)

The Share Your Light feed on this site is an Instagram hashtag feed rendered by EmbedSocial. Loading it fetches a script and media from EmbedSocial and Instagram, whose own terms and privacy policies then apply: EmbedSocial Privacy Policy and Instagram's Privacy Policy. Posts belong to their authors.

8. Acceptable use

• Don't use the Service for any unlawful purpose or to submit false, harassing or defamatory nominations.
• Don't scrape, crawl or programmatically access the Service beyond what robots.txt allows.
• Don't interfere with the Service or impersonate any person or organization.

9. Disclaimer & liability

The Service is provided "as is" without warranties of any kind. We don't guarantee that the feed is complete, current or free of errors, and we are not responsible for the content of third-party sites we link to. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Majestic Light Group, LLC is not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential damages arising from your use of the Service.

10. Changes & contact

We may update these terms; changes are posted here with a new "Last updated" date. Questions: team@majesticlight.org.