We place value in your time – here is our privacy policy in a nutshell:
- Our news site does not track you.
- Our news site does not try to identify who you are, or where you came from.
- There is no need to register to read our news.
- We do not drop cookies across our Web pages for typical readers.
- IP addresses of website visitors are not stored.
- IP addresses are automatically sent to our servers to identify known bad actors trying to bring down our site, and these bad actors are automatically blocked. This is an automated process and your IP address is not stored.
- Newsletter subscribers only have their email address stored with Zoho, our privacy-minded newsletter provider.
- Signing up for the newsletter is optional and will not affect the functionality of the site for those who are not signed up.
- We will provide an archive of whenever this policy changes, and make highlights of what is changed in the subsequent version.
- Since visitors are not required to identify themselves, there is no way of contacting past visitors to notify them of changes to our privacy policy. A banner will be put in place on the website when substantial changes are made to the privacy policy.
- Unfortunately, our service is not accessible via an onion site to serve Tor users.
Introduction
Since our inception in 1997, we have always advocated for a free and open Web. In recent years, the Web has become an increasingly creepy place to get information, with the rise of invasive trackers and fingerprinting. We know you’re just trying to read tech news and we won’t get in the way of that. By reading articles on Gadget, you agree the terms outlaid in this privacy policy.
Information and Data
Information not collected
When you views articles on Gadget, we do not know who you are and there is no way to cross-reference where you came from because we do not make use of cookies. Certain older versions of search engines (like ones that come with old feature phones) relay this to us, but we do not store or process this.
Across our site, we do not drop cookies for the typical visitor. When our team logs into the website to publish stories and administrate the website, we drop cookies on their browsers to keep them logged in – if they selected that option. If you are not trying to log into the site, you will not have a cookie dropped on your device.
When you access Gadget (or any site on the Web), your Web browser automatically sends information about your computer (like which browser you are using and your IP address). We do not store IP addresses in our systems because this information could be used to link your interests across articles. This is a very unusual practice for news sites, but we feel it is an important step to protect your privacy and we are willing to forgo this type of information.
Your IP address is automatically indexed across a list of known bad actors, which aim to disrupt the uptime of our site. If these bad actors are identified from this list, they are prevented from accessing the site. Our server-side analytics engine then matches your IP address to your country, and the country is tied to a page visit, so you get lost among the crowd. This is standard practice for many sites in maintaining a sense of where the site is being accessed from, on a coarse level. After this automated step is completed, your IP address is no longer used in processing. At no point is your IP address i.e. the exact city, district, or province, stored.
Our advertising is as barebones as possible – we attach ad exposures to all pages views where the ad is present. When clicking on an ad, additional visitor information will not be stored.
In response to the efforts by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, major news sites have begun adopting the practices of lean tracking, as outlined by the process above, which enables a more private Web experience for Internet users.
Information collected
If you opt-in to our free daily newsletter, you are required to provide your email address. We do not attempt to figure out who are you with this email address, and it is only used for getting the daily newsletter to your inbox. Occasionally, we will send competitions, giveaways or user surveys included in our daily newsletter. These are completely optional – you are not required to interact with these if you do not wish to. Users who do not sign up for the website are not affected by limited functionality.
Our newsletter follows a double opt-in system to ensure you want to receive emails from us. After signing up for our newsletter, you will receive an email with a link to confirm that you want to receive future daily news updates from us.
Your data is stored with Zoho, our newsletter provider. They do not access information and share it with other providers. Your email address is also encrypted and stored behind its ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO 27018 security certifications.
Information shared
If you are a visitor of Gadget, your personally identifiable information is not collected and, therefore, cannot be shared. If you are a subscriber to the Gadget daily newsletter, we do not share your email, whole or in part, with any individual, company, trust, or third party.
Other information
Due to resource constraints, we cannot host an additional onion-version of our site to serve Tor users. This is on our road map, but there is no solidified time frame of when this will be implemented.
If this policy is substantively updated, we will update the text of this page and provide notice via a banner on our website encouraging you to visit this page. We will write ‘Updated’ in red next to the sections that have been updated.
I (Bryan Turner) am a writer for Gadget and personally wrote this privacy policy. If you have any questions or concerns, please submit feedback here.
