What we collect, and what we don't

You can read anonymously

Reading TBB.news requires no account, no sign-in and no cookie consent banner — because there is nothing to consent to. We run no advertising network, no analytics product, no tracking pixels, no session recording, and no third-party scripts of any kind on the public site. Nothing follows you off this domain.

The two things you can give us

Newsletter

If you subscribe, we store your email address, the date, and which page the signup came from. That is the whole record. We use it to send the newsletter and nothing else — we do not sell, rent, share or trade it, and we do not use it to build a profile of what you read. Every issue carries an unsubscribe link; you can also write to contact@tbb.news and we will delete the record.

Reactions

The reaction buttons at the foot of an article need to know whether you have already reacted, without knowing who you are. So your browser generates a random identifier, stores it locally, and sends it when you react. Before it touches our database that identifier is hashed with a secret salt, so what we store cannot be reversed back to the value in your browser or matched against anything else. We keep the article, the emoji, and that hash. Clearing your browser storage severs the link permanently.

Stored in your browser, not by us

These never leave your device unless noted above:

• tbb-theme — whether you chose light or dark.
• tbb-visitor — the random reaction identifier described above.

Both are localStorage entries rather than cookies, and both are removed if you clear site data. The only cookies this site sets are session cookies for signed-in editorial staff, which readers never receive.

Server logs

Our hosting provider records ordinary request logs — IP address, timestamp, page requested, user agent — as every web server does. We use them to keep the site running and to stop abuse. We do not mine them to profile readers.

Where an action can be abused (newsletter signups, summary generation) we rate-limit it using a salted hash of the requesting IP address, held in memory for the length of the limit window. The raw address is not written to our database.

Who else processes this

• Vercel — hosting and content delivery.
• Supabase — our database and image storage.
• Google (Gemini) — when a reader presses “Summarise this story”, the text of that article is sent to Google’s Gemini API to produce the summary. No reader data is included in that request — not your identifier, not your address, not what else you have read. The summary is then cached, so the same article is not sent again.

We use no other processors. Adding one is a change to this page, made before the change goes live.

How long we keep things

• Newsletter addresses: until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them.
• Reactions: until the article is deleted.
• Rate-limiting hashes: minutes to an hour, then discarded.

Your rights

Write to contact@tbb.news to ask what we hold about you, to correct it, or to have it deleted. Because we collect so little, the honest answer is usually “an email address, or nothing at all” — and deletion is immediate.

Children

This site is a general news publication and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

Changes

Material changes will be noted by the date at the top of this page. Our editorial commitments — including how we disclose AI — are set out separately in our editorial standards.