Privacy Policy
What this page is
RTD JOURNAL is free to read and paid for by advertising, which means data about your visit passes through more hands than we would like. This page says whose hands, what they receive, and how you stop most of it. We have tried to write it in plain language rather than in the dialect these documents usually come in.
You do not have to give us anything to read a story. There is no account to open, no registration wall, and no email demanded before a breaking update. Most of what is collected is not a file about you as a person, it is a record of requests and pages, a distinction that matters rather less to advertising technology than it should.
What we collect
Log data arrives whether anyone asks for it or not. Our host and content delivery network record the IP address making the request, the browser it reports itself as, the page requested, the page you came from, and the time. That is how a web server works, and it is how we tell a genuine surge of readers during a big story from an automated script hammering the site.
On top of that sit analytics, an email address if you take a newsletter, whatever you type into a message to us, and the noisy part, advertising. The ad server and the exchanges bidding on our space set their own identifiers, limit how often a given advertisement reaches you, and, where you have consented, select advertisements from a profile built elsewhere. We do not run device fingerprinting and we never ask for your precise location.
Why we process it, and on what basis
The purposes are short to list. Serve the site and keep it standing when a major story multiplies our traffic in minutes. Count readers, because knowing which stories are actually read is how a small newsroom decides where to spend the next day. Send newsletters people asked for. Moderate any comments, catch abuse and invalid ad traffic, sell and serve advertising, and keep what the law requires us to keep.
Where data-protection law asks for a legal basis, consent covers analytics, advertising, and newsletters, and withdrawing it costs you no articles. Legitimate interest covers server logs, security, and aggregate measurement, because a site that cannot see its own traffic cannot stay up. Legal obligation covers the narrow rest. Nothing here feeds an automated decision about you, because we do not make decisions about people. We publish stories.
Who else receives it, and where it goes
By category, because the specific companies change and a list frozen in prose is stale within a quarter: our host and delivery network, our analytics provider, the ad server and the programmatic exchanges with their downstream partners, the newsletter service, the infrastructure behind any comments, and, rarely, an adviser or an authority acting on a valid legal order.
Real-time bidding fires a request at many companies at once, and we will not pretend we can name every one from memory. The consent manager holds the list that is actually current for your session. Your email address is not sold, swapped, or rented, and our sources are never identified to anybody. The rules that keep advertisers away from the newsroom are on our advertise page.
These providers run servers in several countries, so your data is processed outside the country you are sitting in. Processors are bound in writing to use it only for what we asked. Where data covered by European or UK law moves somewhere without an adequacy finding, the transfer runs on standard contractual clauses or another approved mechanism. No legal instrument turns a foreign server into a local one, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
Cookies, and the banner
Strictly necessary cookies keep the site working and remember the choice you made about the others. Analytics, preferences, and advertising cookies wait for consent where the law requires it, and refusing them breaks nothing you came here to read. The full account, categories, who sets them, how long they last, and how to change your mind, is in our cookie policy.
If you clicked through the banner quickly, the consent manager reopens from the footer link on every page, and your new answer replaces the old one on the next page you load.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct, delete, or restrict it, object to processing we run on legitimate interest, withdraw a consent, and take what you gave us in a portable form. You can complain to your data-protection authority without coming to us first. Write to support@rtdjournal.com with PRIVACY at the front of the subject line, and we will answer within the period the law allows, usually a month.
One limit, stated plainly. Where a request is really an attempt to erase or rewrite published journalism, data-protection law in most places carves out journalism, and we treat the matter as a question of accuracy instead. If a story is wrong about you, that is a correction, and our corrections policy says what happens next.
Readers in California and similar regimes
If your local law gives you the right to opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information for cross-context advertising, you can use it here without penalty. We take no money for handing over anyone’s personal information, but serving behaviourally targeted advertising can still count as sharing under some statutes, so we treat it that way rather than argue about wording. Use the opt-out control in our consent manager, or write with PRIVACY in the subject, and we honour the Global Privacy Control browser signal where it is sent.
How long things are kept, and children
Server and delivery logs are held for about thirty days, then discarded or reduced to counts with no identifier attached. Event-level analytics is capped in the provider’s settings, typically around fourteen months. Aggregate figures of the kind that say a story was read a certain number of times are kept indefinitely, because they contain nothing about any individual. A newsletter address stays until you unsubscribe, after which a minimal record survives so we do not mail you again by accident.
This is a general-news site for adults. It is not directed at children, we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under thirteen, and there are no games or rewards here built to coax a child into handing over an address. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child has given us something, write with PRIVACY in the subject and we will delete it and confirm.
Changes, and where to write
When this policy changes in a way that affects you, the date below moves, a short note sits at the top of the page for a while saying what shifted, and where the law requires fresh consent we ask again rather than treating an old click as permanent. The rules governing your use of the site are separate and live in our terms of service. Everything here routes to support@rtdjournal.com, and other ways to reach us are on our contact page. If a paragraph on this page is vague, ask the specific question and we will either answer it or fix the paragraph.
Last updated: August 2026
