Privacy
Reading this site takes no account and asks for nothing about you. We do measure which pages get read and how they get used, and this page says exactly what that means and how to switch it off.
What we don’t collect
- No account, email or personal detail is required to read this site. Nothing on a story page is gated and nothing asks who you are.
- No advertising cookies and no ad networks. The analytics run with Google Signals and ad personalisation both switched off, so nothing collected here is joined to an advertising profile or used to target you anywhere else.
- Nothing you read is tied to your email address, even if you subscribe. The mailing list and the analytics live in different systems and are never joined.
- We don’t sell, share or upload any of it.
The analytics, precisely
This site runs Google Analytics 4 on every page. It sets cookies in your browser
(_ga and one beginning _ga_) and reports to Google which page you
opened, roughly where you are from your IP address, what sent you here, and your device and
browser. Google discards the full IP address rather than storing it. We also record two
events of our own: clicking through to a publisher’s article, logged with that
outlet’s domain, and a successful newsletter signup.
It also runs Microsoft Clarity, which is more invasive and worth describing plainly: it records how a page is used — which pages you open, where you click, how far you scroll and how the pointer moves — and replays those sessions to us so we can see where the site is confusing. Clarity masks page text in its recordings by default, and what you type is never captured. Microsoft processes this on our behalf.
The reason is narrow and worth stating: this site is one person’s project. Without it there is no way to tell whether anyone reads a story page, whether anyone ever follows a source link — which is the entire premise of the site — or whether a story grouped out of eighty articles is readable at all. None of it is used for advertising and there is no one to sell it to.
Switching it off. Any content blocker, or Firefox’s or Safari’s tracking protection, stops both. Google’s own opt-out add-on stops the analytics, and Microsoft’s privacy statement covers Clarity. The site works identically without either — nothing here is gated on a tag loading.
Google News sign-in
Pages load Google’s Reader Revenue Manager script from
news.google.com, which connects the site to Google News and may offer to let you
sign in or register with your Google account. It is optional and nothing on the site is
locked behind it. The script runs on Google’s servers under
Google’s privacy policy. If you register, Google may share your
name and email address with us; we use it only to know who registered and to send the
digest if you asked for it, and we delete it on request. A content blocker stops the script
entirely.
What happens technically
The site is static files served by a hosting provider, which keeps ordinary server logs (IP address, timestamp, page requested) for operations and security. Story data is read from our database with a public read-only key that can reach only what is already published on the page.
Publisher icons beside each source load from Google’s favicon service, and fonts from Google Fonts, so those requests reach Google too.
The email digest
If you subscribe, we store your email address, the time you subscribed, and a short label for which page you subscribed from (“home”, “story”) so we know what is working. That is the whole record.
- No IP address and no browser details are stored with a signup.
- Submitting the form is the consent — we don’t send a separate confirmation email. Every issue says where and when you signed up, so if it wasn’t you, you can see that immediately and leave in one click.
- One-click unsubscribe in every issue, no questions asked.
- We do not sell, rent, share or trade the list, and we do not upload it to advertising platforms.
- We hold the list in our own database. Kit (kit.com) is our email provider and processes it in order to deliver the digest — they hold your address for that purpose and nothing else. Nothing the website serves you can read the list.
Ask us to delete you and we will, from both places, including the record that you were ever there. Write to hello@aicoverage.org.
Article text
We fetch article text to analyse it and discard it once that is done. It is never published or served to readers — story pages link to the original.