Privacy Policy

Reading this site takes no account and no name. We do not know who you are, and for the ordinary business of publishing news we have no need to.

Two things account for nearly all of what does get collected: the record any web server keeps when it hands you a page, and the advertising technology that pays the wages here.

What we collect when you only read

Loading a page sends us the usual server record: the address you asked for, the time, your browser and operating system version, the referring page, and your IP address. The content delivery network in front of the site keeps the same record, since it is the thing serving you the file.

Analytics sit on top of that. Our provider counts page views, how far down an article people got, roughly which country a request came from, and whether you arrived from search or a newsletter. We read it to learn which pieces the five-day reader finished. At the level of one individual it is close to useless.

What we collect when you hand it over

The newsletter needs an email address and nothing else. The service that sends it records whether a message was delivered, opened or clicked, which is how we tell a dead list from a live one. The unsubscribe link at the foot works immediately, with no survey in the way.

Comments, where they are open, need a display name and an address, and we keep the IP they came from, because that is how anybody deals with one person returning under six names. Writing to support@thelittlebinger.com means we hold your message while the matter is live, and longer for a factual error, since the corrections log is kept deliberately.

Advertising, cookies and the identifiers behind them

The site is free because advertising pays for it, and this is the part that involves other companies. The programmatic exchanges filling our display inventory set their own cookies and read their own advertising identifiers, working out which buyer will pay most to reach you. They get no name and no email address from us, and there is no reader list to sell.

Consent changes the machinery rather than the existence of the ads. Refuse it and you still see advertising, chosen by little more than the page you are on and the country you are in. Accept it and the exchanges use an identifier to pick something aimed at you. That inventory is worth more, which is the real reason the banner exists.

Cookies have their own page, because the detail runs longer than this one can carry. Categories, lifespans and the difference between a file the site cannot work without and one that exists to sell an impression are all in the cookie policy. The consent manager sits behind a link on every page and switches any non-essential category off, and a Global Privacy Control signal from your browser counts as an opt-out.

The legal reasons we hold any of it

Analytics and advertising identifiers run on consent, asked for through the banner and withdrawable at any moment. Withdrawing it locks you out of nothing. The newsletter runs on consent too, which is why nobody is added who did not type their own address into the box.

Server logs, comment moderation and the security work that stops a bulk scraper flattening the site run on legitimate interest, meaning an operational reason we can state that does not outweigh your privacy. Where a legal notice or a data request arrives, we keep what is needed to answer it.

Who else touches it, and where they sit

This page names categories rather than companies, and not to be evasive. Advertising technology reorganises itself constantly, so a vendor list typed out here would be wrong within a quarter while still reading as authoritative. The live list is in the consent manager, which updates itself.

The categories are the content delivery network serving the pages, our analytics provider, the email service behind the newsletter, the advertising exchanges with their measurement partners, and the back-office software a newsroom runs on. Each gets only what its job needs, nobody pays us for data, and where a court or a regulator compels disclosure we comply and say so unless forbidden.

Those companies are not all in one country, so data about your visit crosses borders in the ordinary course of the site working. Where it leaves the UK or the EU, the transfer rests on standard contractual clauses with each processor and on the adequacy decisions covering some destinations. A vendor who cannot answer that question does not get installed, which occasionally means doing without a tool the rest of the trade uses.

How long we keep each thing

Server logs last about thirty days, long enough to investigate an outage or an attack and no longer. Analytics records are kept for no more than fourteen months in any form that could be tied back to a single visit, after which only aggregate counts survive.

Newsletter addresses stay until you unsubscribe, plus a suppression record so an old import cannot put you back. Comments last as long as the article, and go sooner if you ask. Correspondence is kept for two years, except a correction report, which leaves a log entry recording the article, the date and what was wrong after your details are removed.

Your rights, and how to use them

If the UK or EU rules apply to you, these are rights we are obliged to honour and would honour anyway. They are exercised by email and answered inside a month, which the law lets us extend for a genuinely complicated request as long as we say why.

• Access: a copy of what we hold about you.
• 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 form you can take elsewhere.
• Objection: a stop on anything we justify by legitimate interest.
• Withdrawal of consent, at any time, for anything running on it.

California readers can ask which categories of personal information we hold, where they came from and who received them, and can have them corrected or deleted. We do not sell personal information for money and never have. Serving personalised advertising still counts as sharing for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we are not going to argue about the wording, so the control is offered as Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information in the consent manager.

An authorised agent may make a request for you if we can verify they act for you. Nobody gets a worse site for asking. You can also complain to the data protection authority where you live without coming to us first, though most of what reaches us turns out to be fixable in a day.

Children

This is a general news site written for adults. It is not directed at children, we do not aim advertising at them, and we do not knowingly collect anything from a child under 13, or under 16 where local law draws the line there.

If you are a parent or guardian and think a child has given us an address or posted a comment, write to the inbox below and it comes out with anything attached to it. We ask for no proof of a family relationship first, because the deletion costs nobody anything.

Changes, and how to make us do something

When this policy changes in a way that affects you, the date below changes and the change is described rather than absorbed silently. Anything material also gets a notice on the site and a line in the newsletter.

Requests go to the one address that reaches our editors, which is support@thelittlebinger.com. There are no separate privacy or legal aliases, for the reason set out on our contact page, and the rules covering your use of the site rather than our use of your data are in our terms of service.

Last updated: August 2026.