Privacy Policy

Overview

Zufron News ("Zufron News", "we", "us", or "our") respects your privacy and is committed to protecting the personal information of visitors, readers, contributors and users of our website.

This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, store and protect information when you visit or use the Zufron News website, services and features, including our commenting functionality.

By using our website, you acknowledge the practices described in this Privacy Policy.

Information We Collect

Depending on how you use our website, we may collect the following information:

Information you provide directly

This may include:

• Your name or username;
• Email address;
• Information provided when contacting us;
• Information submitted when reporting an error or concern;
• Information submitted when subscribing to newsletters or updates;
• Comments and other content you voluntarily submit;
• Any other information you choose to provide to us.

Information about members

If you become a member, we also hold:

• Your account and sign-in details: your email address and a password. The password is stored only in hashed form by our authentication provider, and we cannot read it;
• Your membership: the package, its status and dates, and a history of your payments;
• Billing details handled through Stripe, our payment provider: your card is collected and held by Stripe, as are your billing name and address. We do not store your card number; we can see the card's brand, its last four digits and its expiry date;
• A record of the browsers your account has signed in from, used to tell you about a sign-in from a browser we have not seen before: a one-way hash of a random token kept in a cookie on that browser, a short description of the browser (for example "Chrome on Windows"), the last IP address it was seen at, and the dates it was first and last seen.

Information from other platforms

If you joined an audience of ours on another platform, we may hold your email address, your name, where you joined and the date you joined, taken from that platform's export. We do not keep the other details such an export can contain.

Information collected automatically

When you visit our website, certain technical information may be collected automatically, including:

• IP address;
• Browser type and version;
• Device type;
• Operating system;
• Approximate location derived from technical information;
• Pages visited;
• Referring website;
• Date and time of visits;
• Website usage and interaction information.

We use cookies and similar technologies to operate and secure our website, as described under Cookies and Analytics below.

Comments

If you post a comment on Zufron News, information associated with your comment may be stored and displayed as necessary to operate the commenting service.

We may retain information associated with comments where reasonably necessary for moderation, security, legal compliance, dispute resolution or the protection of our users and organisation.

We encourage users not to post personal, confidential or sensitive information in public comments.

How We Use Information

We may use information we collect to:

• Operate and maintain the website;
• Publish and manage comments;
• Moderate user-generated content;
• Respond to enquiries;
• Investigate reports and complaints;
• Send newsletters or updates where you have requested them;
• Analyse website performance and readership;
• Improve our journalism, website and services;
• Detect spam, abuse, fraud and security threats;
• Protect our rights and the rights of our users;
• Comply with applicable laws and lawful requests.

Messages sent to the newsroom by email, through the contact form or through the members' Ask forms are processed by an AI system, provided by Anthropic, which drafts a reply. To answer, it can look up the membership record held for the address that wrote. A routine reply is sent without a person reading it first; other replies wait for a member of our team. Messages sent through the contact form and the Ask forms are also stored in our database.

Cookies and Analytics

Zufron News uses cookies for essential website functions and security, such as keeping you signed in, recognising a browser your account has signed in from before and completing two-step login. We do not use cookies for analytics or advertising. Third-party services embedded in the site, such as Stripe's payment form and the YouTube and Vimeo video players, may set cookies of their own.

We measure page views and time spent on the site ourselves, without a cookie and without a third-party analytics service. A visitor is counted through a one-way hash of their IP address, their browser and a value that changes every day, so the same person is counted as a different visitor the next day and the hash cannot be turned back into an IP address. With it we record the page visited, the time, and how long the page was in view.

The site also keeps a small amount of information in your browser's local storage rather than in a cookie: which free stories you have read this month, which is never sent to us, whether you chose the full article or the quick summary, and when you last closed or answered the email sign-up pop-up, so it is not shown again too soon.

Where required, we will provide appropriate information and choices concerning cookies and similar technologies.

Third-Party Services

Our website contains links, embedded content, social-media links and other services provided by third parties. It does not carry advertising and uses no third-party analytics tools.

We use the following service providers, which process information for us or as part of providing their services:

• Vercel: website hosting;
• Supabase: our database, file storage and account sign-in;
• Stripe: payments, billing details and payment history;
• Resend: sending our emails;
• Google: the newsroom's mailbox, and the fonts the site loads from Google Fonts;
• Anthropic: the AI systems that write our articles and process messages sent to the newsroom;
• YouTube and Vimeo: the players for videos embedded from those services.

Those third parties may process information according to their own privacy policies and terms. Zufron News is not responsible for the privacy practices of third-party websites or services.

Data Security

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect personal information against unauthorised access, loss, misuse, alteration or disclosure.

However, no online service can be guaranteed to be completely secure.

Data Retention

We retain information only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this policy, including legal, security, operational and record-keeping requirements.

Retention periods may vary depending on the type and purpose of the information.

Your Rights

Subject to applicable law and any applicable conditions or exceptions, you may have rights concerning your personal information, including rights relating to access, correction and other matters concerning the processing of your personal data.

To make a privacy-related request, contact us using the details below.

Children's Privacy

Our website is intended for a general audience. We do not knowingly seek to collect personal information from children in circumstances where such collection is prohibited by applicable law.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time.

The updated version will be published on this page with a revised "Last Updated" date.

Contact Us

For privacy-related questions or requests, please contact:

contact@zufron.com

This Privacy Policy should be read together with our Terms & Conditions and other applicable policies.