Privacy Policy

What we collect, why we hold it, who else sees it, and how to make us delete it. Where the law wants precision we have kept the precise wording. Everywhere else this is written to be read. Last updated: August 2026.

What we collect, and the parts we never asked for

You can read every article and every glossary page without telling us who you are. No paywall, no registration wall, no account, so most visits leave us a line in a server log and nothing else. We take no payments from readers, so we hold no card details at all, not stored badly, not stored well, not stored.

What we do hold sits in a few piles. Log data: the IP address behind a request, the page asked for, the referring address, the browser string, the time. Analytics data: which pages were read, roughly for how long, on what device, and an approximate location worked out from the IP. Newsletter data: your address, the date, the page you signed up from, whether a send was opened. Comment data: display name, email, the comment, the IP behind it. Advertising data: the identifiers our ad partners set in your browser and the record of what you consented to.

One pile is ours and most sites would not mention it. Every evening the desk reads the on-site searches that returned nothing useful, so those queries are stored, joined to no account, session or address. What we want from that log is the hole in our coverage, not the person who found it.

Why we hold it, and the legal basis for each part

Log data, spam filtering and comment moderation run on legitimate interests, ours in keeping the site standing and yours in not reading a comment section full of casino links. The same basis carries the failed-search log, which survives the balancing test because the identifiers are stripped out of it.

Analytics and advertising run on consent, asked for before the tags fire and recorded so we can prove what you chose. The newsletter runs on consent too, revocable in one click at the foot of every send. Advertiser correspondence rests on contract. Refusing the optional categories costs you nothing: pages load, the ads turn non-personalised, and nothing is withheld as a penalty for the answer.

Who else gets to see it

The companies keeping this site online see traffic data as part of doing that: our hosting provider, the content delivery network, and the spam service screening comments before a human looks. Our analytics provider handles page-level data on our instructions and the email service holds the subscriber list. They are processors under contract, not partners we hand a copy of you to.

Advertising is the honest complication. Part of our display inventory is filled programmatically, and one bid request can reach a long list of companies inside a few hundred milliseconds. We are not printing a vendor table here and letting you believe it is current, because it would be wrong within a month. The full list, named company by company, sits in the consent manager. The rules those partners are held to are on our advertising page. We sell no reader lists, rent no newsletter file, and pass no comment data to advertisers.

Cookies, briefly, because they have a page of their own

Cookies and the things that behave like them do three jobs here: remember a preference such as whether you read us in English or Spanish, count and describe visits, and carry advertising identifiers with the consent string governing them.

The consent manager appears on your first visit and reopens whenever you want to change an answer, including changing it back. Categories, lifespans and browser controls are in the cookie policy, which exists so this page does not turn into a table.

Your rights in the United Kingdom and the European Union

None of these rights depends on having an account, and using one is free. Write to us, say which right you want, and give us something to search on, usually the address you subscribed with or the address of the comment. An inbox holding no name for you needs a handle.

We answer inside one month and say when a request needs the two-month extension the law allows. We ask for only enough identification to be sure we are handing your data to you and not to somebody else. If we refuse we say why, and you can take that refusal to your national supervisory authority.

• Access: a copy of what we hold and where it came from.
• Rectification: correction of anything inaccurate.
• Erasure: deletion, where we have no overriding reason to keep it.
• Restriction: a freeze on processing while a dispute is settled.
• Portability: the data you gave us, in a machine-readable file.
• Objection: a stop on processing that rests on legitimate interests, and an absolute stop on direct marketing.
• Withdrawal of consent, at any time, with no explanation owed.

If you are in California

You can ask what categories of personal information we collected and where they went, get a copy, have them corrected, have them deleted, and tell us to stop sharing them. Asking costs nothing and changes nothing about the site you see.

Programmatic advertising can count as sharing personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, so we treat it that way rather than arguing. Setting the advertising category to off in the consent manager is our Do Not Sell or Share mechanism, and we honour a Global Privacy Control signal automatically instead of waiting to be asked twice. An authorised agent can act for you with written proof.

How long we keep it

Retention is where most privacy policies go vague, so here are the numbers. Log data is kept thirty days and then cut down to counts with no addresses in them. Analytics records last fourteen months. Failed-search queries last ninety days, enough to see a pattern across a news cycle.

Newsletter data is held until you unsubscribe, after which a hashed address stays on a suppression list so we never mail you again by accident. Comments last as long as the article unless you ask for yours to go. Correspondence is kept two years, except mail that led to a published correction, which stays with it as part of the record. Consent records last twelve months.

Children

This is a general news site written for adults and it is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under thirteen, we build no advertising profiles of children, and posting a comment requires you to be sixteen or older.

If you are a parent or guardian and think we hold something about your child, write and we will delete it. We ask for only the detail needed to find the record, and we do not treat the request as a reason to open a file on you.

Data leaving the country you are in

Some of the companies we rely on sit outside the country a reader is reading from, most often in the United States, so data reaches them. We rely on an adequacy decision where one covers the transfer, and on standard contractual clauses with written commitments where it does not.

A clause in a contract does not physically keep data at home, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. The practical answer is holding as little as possible, which is why the failed-search log carries no identifiers and log data ages out in a month.

Changes, and where to write

This page carries the date it last changed. When something that matters moves, a new category of data or a new purpose, we say so on the site and in the next newsletter rather than editing quietly and hoping. A policy that changes without telling you is not a policy.

For anything here, write to support@significadopedia.com with Data request in the subject line and say which right you are using. One inbox serves the whole site and the editors sort it themselves, which our contact page explains. The rules governing your use of the site sit on the terms of service page.