Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 2026 · Operator: Karin Pierre-Léonard

Short version: AX-NEWS sets no tracking cookies, runs no analytics, and stores no personal data about visitors. Your IP address is processed transiently for security and basic non-identifying metrics only — never stored raw, never shared.

1. Who operates this site

AX-NEWS is a personal, non-commercial tech intelligence aggregator operated by Karin Pierre-Léonard. It is not affiliated with any company. The source code is published at github.com/plkarin/ax-news, which is also the primary contact channel for any privacy-related requests.

2. Visitors — no account required

Reading the feed requires no account, no registration, and no login. Visitors receive no cookies. No client-side storage (localStorage, sessionStorage, IndexedDB) is used. The site loads no advertising scripts, no social-media widgets, and no third-party analytics.

3. IP address processing

Your IP address is processed transiently for exactly two purposes:

Rate limiting / flood protection. Counters keyed on your IP are held in memory to detect and block abusive request patterns. These counters expire within seconds and are never written to disk.
Article view-count deduplication. To count unique views without tracking individuals, your IP is immediately converted to a salted SHA-256 hash. The raw IP address is never stored. The hash is one-way and cannot be reversed to identify you. Hashes are retained for 90 days then purged.

Outside these two cases, your IP address is not processed or stored by the application.

4. Server logs

Standard web-server access logs (IP address, User-Agent string, URL, HTTP status code, timestamp) are written automatically by the server software for security and operational purposes. These logs are auto-rotated and retained for approximately 30 days. They are not used for analytics or profiling.

5. Third-party content loaded by your browser

When you visit the feed, your browser may fetch assets directly from third-party servers. Those providers may see your IP address:

Article thumbnail images — loaded from the original publishers' CDNs or servers, as found in RSS feeds.
Country flag icons — served by flagcdn.com.
Source favicons — fetched from Google's favicon service (t3.gstatic.com) where used.

AX-NEWS has no control over what these providers log or how they process your IP. If you wish to avoid these requests, a browser extension that blocks third-party images will prevent them.

6. Content and attribution

AX-NEWS aggregates article metadata (title, URL, thumbnail, summary) from public RSS feeds. Full article text is never reproduced. All articles remain the property of their respective publishers and are attributed with a link to the original source. AX-NEWS adds machine-generated categorisation, sentiment scoring, and translation for non-English articles.

7. Registered admin account

There is a single administrator account used to manage the site. For that account only, a session cookie (HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Strict) is set after login. The username and a bcrypt-hashed password are stored in the database. No email address is required. Admin session data is retained for as long as the account exists.

8. Your rights (GDPR)

If you are in the EU/EEA, you have rights under the GDPR including access, rectification, erasure, and objection. The legal basis for the limited IP processing described above is legitimate interest — specifically, security (flood protection) and basic non-identifying operational metrics (unique view counts). Because raw IP addresses are never stored, erasure requests for view hashes can be accommodated by purging the hash table on request.

To exercise any right or ask a question about this policy, open an issue or contact at github.com/plkarin/ax-news.

9. Changes to this policy

Any material changes to this policy will be reflected by updating the "Last updated" date above and committing the change to the public repository, where a full history is available.