How Does Site Collect, Use, and Protect Your Data?
A plain-language account of what we gather when you read our reporting, why we hold it, and the controls you keep over it.
Last updated: 12 June 2024
Introduction
Site is an independent newsroom covering national affairs, regional developments, security and justice, public health, the economy, and environmental disasters. This page explains how we treat the information that passes through our website.
We wrote it to be read, not skimmed past. No dense legalese where a sentence will do. If something here is unclear, the Contact page reaches a person who can answer.
This policy covers our public-facing website and the forms on it. It does not govern third-party sites we link to in our coverage, which run their own rules.
Purposes of Processing
We process data for three reasons, and we try not to drift beyond them.
The first is keeping the site running. Server logs tell us when a page breaks, when a region can't load images, when traffic spikes after a major story. That maintenance work depends on knowing what happened and when.
The second is performance monitoring. Analytics show us which articles readers actually finish and where they leave. We use that to decide what to cover and how to structure long reads, not to build profiles of individuals.
The third is communication. When you email us a tip or fill in a form, we hold what you send so we can reply and, where relevant, follow up on a story.
External Services
Running a newsroom of this size means leaning on outside infrastructure. We name those services rather than hide them behind "trusted partners."
Analytics platforms measure traffic and load times. We use a standard web analytics provider today, and we may add a second measurement tool as our reporting volume grows.
Advertising networks are a planned integration, not a current one. When ad serving goes live, this section will be updated before any advertising cookie is set, and the consent controls below will cover it.
Hosting and content delivery sit with established providers who cache our pages closer to readers. These services necessarily see the technical request data described in the next section, because that is how a page reaches your browser at all.
Information Collected
Most of what we collect, you generate just by loading a page.
Technical logs record an IP address, browser and device type, and the pages visited along with timestamps. This is the ordinary exhaust of any website, and we use it for security and diagnostics.
Contact submissions are different. When you write to us, we receive whatever you choose to include — your name, email, and the substance of your message. You decide how much that is.
Subscription inputs, where offered, amount to an email address and your stated preferences. Nothing more is required to send you what you asked for.
Worth knowing: we cannot tie technical logs to your name unless you've separately given us your details through a form. The two streams are not joined by default.
Cookies and Tracking
Cookies fall into three buckets here, and they are not equal.
Strictly necessary cookies
These remember your consent choices and hold a session together while you move between pages. The site cannot function properly without them, so they are not subject to opt-in.
Analytics cookies
These record visit patterns and performance metrics — which pages load slowly, how readers navigate a series. They run only with your agreement.
Advertising cookies
Reserved for future use. Should we introduce ad personalization, these cookies would support it, and we would ask for consent first rather than assuming it.
Managing cookies
Your browser is the master switch. Every major browser lets you block, delete, or limit cookies in its settings, and those choices override anything set here. Blocking the necessary cookies may break parts of the site, which is the trade-off to weigh.
Data Subject Rights
You hold rights over the information we keep about you, and exercising them should be straightforward.
- Access: ask what personal data we hold and receive a copy.
- Deletion: request that we erase your data, and we will unless a legal obligation forces us to retain it.
- Opt-out: withdraw consent for analytics or, once active, advertising tracking at any time.
To act on any of these, write to us through the Contact page. We aim to respond within a reasonable window and may ask you to confirm your identity before releasing or deleting anything — a precaution that protects you as much as us.
Storage and Deletion
We keep data only as long as the purpose that justified collecting it survives.
Technical logs cycle out on a rolling basis once their security and diagnostic value has passed. Contact and subscription records stay while the conversation or subscription is live, and are removed when you ask or when they no longer serve a purpose.
Deletion, when requested, runs across our active systems. Cached or backup copies held by our hosting providers age out on their own schedules rather than vanishing instantly, which is an honest limit of how backups work.
Policy Updates
This document changes when our practices do — when the planned ad integration launches, for instance, or when we adopt a new analytics tool.
When that happens, we revise the date at the top of this page and, for material changes, flag them where readers will see them. The current version always lives here at Privacy Policy, and continuing to use the site after an update means the revised terms apply.