Privacy & cookie policy

Interestana (interestana.com) is an independent technology news publication. The controller of the personal data described here — the person who decides why and how it is used — is Khaled Samen, an individual based in Doha, Qatar, who publishes Interestana. “We” and “us” in this policy mean Interestana and its publisher.

For any privacy question or request, including the rights in section 10, email [email protected] with “Privacy request” in the subject, or use our contact page. Magazine subscribers can also simply reply to any magazine email, which lets us confirm the request comes from the owner of the address. We have not appointed a data protection officer, as we are not required to; Khaled Samen handles privacy requests personally.

When you read the site, the following is collected automatically:

• Connection data: your IP address, browser and device type (the user-agent string), the page you asked for, the page that referred you, and the time. Our network provider and our server record this for every request. It is needed to deliver the page and to protect the site from attacks, and we also count it in aggregate (for example visits per page, referring sites, and search-engine and AI-crawler traffic) to understand how the site is used. We do not use it to identify or profile individual readers.
• Analytics and advertising data, collected by Google through cookies and similar technologies such as local storage and web beacons: which pages you view, how you arrived, an approximate location derived from your IP address, your device and browser, and how you interact with ads. Sections 3 to 5 explain this and how to control it.

When you give us information:

• The Interestana Magazine. If you sign up at /magazine or with a sign-up box on the site, we store:
  • your email address, to send you a confirmation link and, once you confirm, the issues you asked for. We accept plain (ASCII) addresses only;
  • the interests and frequency (daily or weekly) you choose, to decide which stories go in your issues and when;
  • your feedback on stories, if you give it: when you open “More like this” or “Less like this” under a story in an issue and press the button on the page it opens, we store which story, your choice, the reason if you pick one (“not my kind of story” or “not useful”) and when. We use it only to choose and order the stories in your next issues: stories close to what you asked for more of come first, and after two “less like this” about the same company, person or product we stop sending stories about it. Opening the link alone records nothing;
  • your subscription record: when you signed up, and that it was a magazine sign-up; whether you are waiting to confirm, subscribed or unsubscribed; when we sent you a confirmation link, when you confirmed, when you unsubscribed, when your last issue went out and when we last checked whether there were enough new stories for one; and the random codes in your confirmation, manage, unsubscribe and feedback links;
  • an anti-abuse counter: how many confirmation links went to your mailbox in the past day, grouped under a one-way hash of the address (ignoring “+tags” and, for Gmail, dots), so that nobody can flood an inbox with sign-up emails;
  • a record of the sign-up request that sent your confirmation link: your browser's user-agent string and, where enabled, a keyed one-way hash of your IP address — never the IP address itself. It is our evidence of how and when consent was asked for, and helps us investigate abuse. This is still personal data and we treat it as such.

  To limit how many sign-ups one network can make in an hour and in a day, the sign-up form also holds your IP address in the application's memory; that copy is never written to our database, and it is removed some time after its limit expires, at the latest when the application restarts. If a sign-up form shows an anti-spam check, it is Cloudflare Turnstile: Cloudflare runs it in your browser to tell people from automated sign-ups and receives technical information about your browser and device for that purpose; we receive only whether the check passed. Nothing but the confirmation link is sent until you click it.

  Issues are short snippets with links to the full stories on interestana.com and contain no images. Story links carry tags (utm_source=interestana-magazine, utm_medium=email and your frequency) so we can count visits that came from the magazine; the tags are the same for every reader and do not identify you. The manage and unsubscribe links in each issue contain a code personal to your subscription: anyone who has the link can change your preferences or unsubscribe you, so take care when forwarding an issue. The feedback links carry a separate personal code that can only be used to give feedback on stories in your name; it stops working when you unsubscribe.

• Our earlier newsletter form. Before the magazine, the site had a sign-up box that stored an address with a hashed IP address and the browser's user-agent string, without email confirmation. We have deleted those IP hashes and user-agent strings. The addresses have never been emailed and never will be unless their owner subscribes to the magazine and confirms. To have one deleted, email [email protected].
• Contacting us. If you email us directly at [email protected], your message reaches us as an ordinary email. If you use the contact form, it sends what you enter — your name, email address, the inquiry type you choose and your message — to our server, which emails it to our contact address through Resend, our email delivery service (section 7), with your address set as the one our reply goes to. Our server does not store what you write: no copy is kept in our database, in a file or in our logs, so it exists only as that email (like every request, the sending itself appears in our server logs, without its content). With it we include where you came from: the domain name of the website that sent you to Interestana (for example www.google.com, never the full address of the page) and, if the contact page's address carries one, its utm_source tag (a campaign label such as a newsletter's name). We use all of this only to answer you and to see which sites and campaigns bring us enquiries.

  To limit how many messages one network can send in an hour and in a day, the form holds your IP address in the application's memory; that copy is never written to our database, is not put in the email, and is removed some time after its limit expires, at the latest when the application restarts. If Google Analytics is running in your browser (section 4), it is told that a contact message was sent — never what you wrote or who you are.

• Searching. What you type into the search box becomes part of the search page's address. Our server and network provider see it in the request like any page address; we load no Google ad or analytics scripts on the search page.

We do not ask for, and do not knowingly collect, sensitive data such as health, religion, ethnicity, political opinions or precise location.

Interestana shows ads served by Google AdSense. In line with Google's requirements for publishers:

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites.
• Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to this site and/or other sites on the internet.
• Besides Google, other third-party vendors and ad networks may serve or measure ads on Interestana through AdSense. As a result of serving ads here, they may place and read cookies in your browser, or use web beacons (pixels) and your IP address, to collect information. Google lists the third-party ad vendors it has certified and the ad technology partners it works with. Each one's own website explains its practices and, where it offers one, its opt-out.
• You may opt out of personalised advertising in Google's My Ad Center (also reachable at adssettings.google.com). You can opt out of many other vendors' use of cookies for personalised advertising at once at aboutads.info (US) or youronlinechoices.eu (Europe).
• Google explains how it uses information from sites that show its ads in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.

In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, a consent message from Google's Privacy & messaging tool appears on your first visit. Google certifies this tool as a consent management platform (CMP) for its ads, and it is registered with IAB Europe's Transparency & Consent Framework. It lists each advertising partner and purpose, and offers Consent, Do not consent and Manage options. Until you agree, no cookies are used for personalised ads; you may then see non-personalised or limited ads, which rely on context such as the article you are reading. You can withdraw or change your choice at any time with the Privacy & cookie settings link at the foot of every page.

In US states with privacy laws, the foot of every page shows a Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information link. Using it stops Google from using your data for cross-site personalised advertising on Interestana. See section 11.

Global Privacy Control. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal, we treat it, wherever you are, as a request to opt out of the sale and sharing of your data: we load no Google ad or analytics scripts in that browser at all, and the footer shows “Opt-Out Request Honored”. The signal applies to the browser that sends it, for as long as it is turned on. Because we have no accounts, we cannot apply it to your other browsers or devices.

Pages without ads. Google's ad and analytics scripts never run on our admin pages, our search page, error (“page not found”) pages, or pages whose web address contains a personal code (the magazine's confirm, manage, unsubscribe and feedback pages). If you move to one of these pages from a page that showed ads, we reload it as a fresh page so that no ad script carries over. The magazine pages with a personal code also tell your browser to pass on only our domain name, not their full address, when you leave them.

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how many people read Interestana and which pages they find useful. It sets cookies and receives your IP address, the full address of the pages you view, the page that referred you and information about your device, and, if you send a message with our contact form, the fact that one was sent (an event named generate_lead, with nothing you wrote). Google uses the IP address to estimate your country and city, and Google Analytics 4 does not log or store it. We use the results only in aggregate; we do not use them to identify you.

In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, Google Analytics is not loaded at all until you consent in the consent message, and it stops if you withdraw consent. Elsewhere it loads by default; you can block it on every site with Google's opt-out browser add-on.

Cookies are small files a website stores in your browser. Strictly necessary cookies need no consent. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, analytics and advertising cookies are used only with your consent. Elsewhere they are used by default. Opting out of personalised advertising (with the Do Not Sell or Share link or the Google and industry opt-out pages in section 3) stops Google using cookies to personalise your ads; Google still uses advertising cookies to limit how often you see the same ad, to measure ads and to detect fraud. Global Privacy Control stops Google's ad and analytics scripts loading at all. To stop Google Analytics, use the opt-out add-on in section 4. To stop all cookies, block or delete them in your browser.

• FCCDCF

  Strictly necessary · Google (consent tool), on interestana.com

  Remembers the privacy choices you made in the consent message, so it is not shown on every page.

  Lifetime: 13 months

• ia_admin

  Strictly necessary · Interestana

  Keeps the site administrator signed in to the admin console. Never set for readers.

  Lifetime: 12 hours

• ia_owner

  Strictly necessary · Interestana

  Set only on the publisher's own devices, to exclude them from ads and analytics: a browser carrying it loads no Google ad or analytics scripts. Never set for readers.

  Lifetime: 1 year from the last visit

• FCNEC

  Analytics · Google (consent tool), on interestana.com

  Used by Google's consent tool for analytics; Google classifies it as an analytics cookie.

  Lifetime: 1 year

• _ga, _ga_<ID>

  Analytics · Google Analytics, on interestana.com

  Count visits and tell visits apart, so we can see which pages are read.

  Lifetime: Up to 2 years

• __gads, __gpi, __gpi_optout

  Advertising · Google AdSense, on interestana.com

  Limit how often you see the same ad, measure ad performance, and remember an opt-out.

  Lifetime: 13 months

• __eoi

  Advertising (security) · Google AdSense, on interestana.com

  Helps Google detect ad fraud and abuse.

  Lifetime: 6 months

• IDE, id, DSID, test_cookie and similar

  Advertising · Google, on doubleclick.net and other Google domains

  Show ads based on your visits to this and other websites (personalised advertising) and measure them.

  Lifetime: Up to 13 months in the EEA and UK; up to 24 months elsewhere

Google's advertising partners (listed in the consent message in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, and in the vendor lists linked in section 3 for everyone) may set their own cookies, web beacons or similar technologies when they serve an ad. Google lists the cookies it uses and how long each lasts at business.safety.google/adscookies. The site works without any optional cookies.

Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, each use of your data rests on one of the following legal bases:

• Delivering and securing the site, and counting traffic in aggregate (connection data in server logs, strictly necessary cookies): our legitimate interest in running a working, secure website and in knowing, in aggregate, how much it is read and how readers and crawlers reach it.
• Analytics and personalised advertising (cookies, device identifiers): your consent, which you can withdraw at any time without affecting what happened before.
• Non-personalised advertising: our legitimate interest in funding free journalism through ads chosen by context, not by profile. Where storing or reading information on your device is needed for it, we ask for your consent.
• The magazine: your consent, given when you sign up and confirmed from your inbox before any issue is sent; you can withdraw it at any time by unsubscribing. Your feedback on stories also rests on your consent, given each time you press the button; choosing your issues with it is a simple form of profiling, with no legal or similarly significant effect on you. The anti-abuse counter, the IP limits, the anti-spam check and the sign-up record (user agent, keyed IP hash) rest on our legitimate interest in preventing misuse of the sign-up form and in being able to show that you asked to subscribe.
• Replying to you (emails and contact-form messages): our legitimate interest in answering messages sent to us. Recording which website or campaign a contact-form message came from, and the form's per-network limit, rest on our legitimate interest in knowing how people find us and in keeping the form free of abuse.

You do not have to give us any personal data to read Interestana; the site works without optional cookies, without the magazine and without contacting us. We do not use your data for automated decisions that have legal or similarly significant effects on you.

Under Qatar's Personal Data Privacy Protection Law and Brazil's LGPD, we process personal data for the purposes above, with your consent where it is needed, and only for those purposes.

• Google (Google LLC and Google Ireland Limited) receives analytics and advertising data as described in sections 3 and 4. For personalised ads, Google and its advertising partners (listed in the consent message, and in the vendor lists linked in section 3) act as independent controllers of the data they collect.
• Our email providers: Cloudflare Email Routing receives messages sent to our contact address, including those from our contact form, and forwards them to the mailbox where we read and answer them; that mailbox provider stores your messages and our replies.
• Resend, an email delivery service in the United States, sends every magazine email for us (confirmation links and issues), and delivers each contact-form message to our contact address. For the magazine it receives your email address and the content of each message we send you; for the contact form, everything you enter in it and the source information described in section 2.
• Cloudflare sits in front of interestana.com to deliver it quickly and protect it from attacks, so it carries the traffic of every visit, including your IP address and anything you type into our forms, such as your email address when you subscribe or your message when you use the contact form. Where a sign-up form shows an anti-spam check, Cloudflare runs that too (Turnstile, see section 2).
• Hostinger, the hosting company we rent our server from, stores our database (including magazine subscribers), backups and server logs.
• Authorities, if the law requires us to disclose data, or to protect our rights or the safety of others.

We do not sell your email address, rent out our list or share it with advertisers.

Our server is rented from Hostinger and located in France, inside the EEA, so storing your data there is not a transfer out of Europe. Interestana is run from Qatar, which has no adequacy decision from the European Commission, the UK or Switzerland. When we administer the server or read email from Qatar, your data is accessed there. The GDPR applies to us directly, and we apply its protections to that data.

Google, which provides our analytics and advertising, and Cloudflare, which carries our web traffic and routes our email, process data in the United States and other countries. Both are certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (see dataprivacyframework.gov). Their data processing terms also include the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK Addendum: see Google's processor terms and Cloudflare's DPA. The mailbox provider that stores the emails you send us may also hold them outside the EEA.

Resend, which sends the magazine and delivers contact-form messages to us, is in the United States, so subscribing transfers your email address and the emails we send you there, and using the contact form transfers what you enter in it, with its source information, there.

• Server logs (IP address, user agent, page requested, time): kept for security, troubleshooting and aggregate traffic counts, then deleted automatically as the logs rotate, normally within 14 days. Cloudflare keeps its own network logs under its own policy.
• Google Analytics data: no longer than 14 months, after which Google deletes event-level data.
• Cookies: for the lifetimes listed in section 5, unless you delete them sooner.
• Magazine sign-ups never confirmed are deleted with everything stored for them once the confirmation link expires, seven days after it was sent. The clean-up runs automatically, normally every hour. If the address had unsubscribed before, it goes back to being unsubscribed instead: the new sign-up's interests, IP hash, user-agent string and link codes are deleted, and the address stays on record as unsubscribed.
• Magazine subscribers: what section 2 lists, while you are subscribed; your feedback on a story is deleted automatically 120 days after you gave it, when it no longer affects your issues. When you unsubscribe we immediately delete your interests, your feedback on stories and the code in its links, the IP hash and the user-agent string, and keep your address and its subscription record (including your chosen frequency and the anti-abuse counter) so that we never mail you again by mistake and can show that you opted out. Ask us (section 10) if you want that deleted too.
• Addresses from our earlier newsletter form: until you ask us to delete them. Their IP hashes and user-agent strings have already been deleted.
• Emails you send us, and contact-form messages: as long as needed to handle your message and any follow-up, then deleted from our mailbox. Our server keeps no copy of a contact-form message at all, and the IP address it holds in memory for its limit is removed some time after that limit expires (a day), at the latest when the application restarts. Resend keeps its own records of the emails it delivers for us under its own policy.
• Backups: our database is copied each night and copies are kept for 14 days; our host can also keep server snapshots, which are replaced as new ones are taken. When we delete your data from the live site, it disappears from backups as they expire, within about 14 days. We never use backups for any other purpose, and if a backup is ever restored, data we had deleted is deleted again.

Magazine subscribers can unsubscribe with the link at the bottom of any issue (then press “Unsubscribe” on the page it opens) or with their email app's own Unsubscribe button, and change interests or frequency with the “Manage preferences” link. Both take effect at once.

Wherever you live, you can also ask us to:

• tell you whether we hold data about you and give you a copy (access);
• correct data that is inaccurate (rectification);
• delete your data (erasure) — erased data is removed from our live systems at once and from backups within about 14 days;
• withdraw any consent you gave, at any time, as easily as you gave it.

EEA, UK and Switzerland. You also have the right to restrict our use of your data and to receive data you gave us in a portable format. You may complain to a data protection authority, in particular in the country where you live, work or where the alleged infringement took place (list of EEA authorities). In the UK this is the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint); in Switzerland, the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner. We would appreciate the chance to address your concern first.

Qatar. Under Law No. 13 of 2016 on Personal Data Privacy Protection you may withdraw consent, object to processing, ask for correction or erasure, be told about processing and any disclosure of inaccurate data, and receive a copy of your data. You may complain to the Personal Data Privacy Protection Department (PDPPD) of the National Cyber Security Agency (NCSA) at [email protected] (see the PDPPD's page). NCSA asks that you first raise the issue with us.

Brazil. Under the LGPD you have the right to: confirmation that we process your data; access to it; correction of incomplete, inaccurate or outdated data; anonymisation, blocking or erasure of unnecessary or excessive data; portability; erasure of data processed with your consent; information about the public and private entities we share data with (section 7); information about the possibility of refusing consent and its consequences (the site works fully without optional cookies); revoking consent; and petitioning the national authority, the ANPD.

Elsewhere, including Canada, Australia and the Gulf states, you have the rights your local law gives you, we will honour them, and you may also complain to your local data protection authority.

To make a request, email [email protected] (or use the contact page) with “Privacy request” in the subject, and say which right you want to use. Verifying requests: Interestana has no user accounts, so the only data we can link to you is data tied to an email address you gave us (a magazine subscription, or an email or contact-form message you sent us). To verify a request to access, correct or delete that data, we ask you to send it from that address or confirm it by replying from it. We ask for nothing else, and use that confirmation only to verify you. Data held only in cookies, or by Google, cannot be tied to you by us; for that data use the Privacy & cookie settings or Do Not Sell or Share links in the footer, or Google's own tools. Requests to opt out need no verification. We reply within one month (45 days where US state law applies), telling you if we need longer and why. Requests are free unless they are clearly unfounded or excessive.

This section is our privacy policy and notice at collection for residents of California and the other US states with comprehensive privacy laws (such as Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas and Oregon).

Sale and sharing. Since adding Google's advertising to the site in October 2026, we “share” identifiers (IP address, cookie and device identifiers) and internet activity with Google and its advertising partners (advertising networks) so they can show cross-context behavioural, or targeted, ads. Under state laws that count non-monetary consideration, this may also be a “sale”. We do not sell or share names, email addresses or the content of messages. You can opt out with the Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information link in the footer, or by turning on Global Privacy Control in your browser (see section 3). Once a GPC signal or a Do Not Sell request has been applied, the footer shows “Opt-Out Request Honored”. We have no actual knowledge of selling or sharing the personal information of anyone under 16.

• Purposes: running and securing the site, counting traffic, measuring readership, replying to you, the magazine, and advertising, as described above.
• Sensitive personal information: we do not collect or use it.
• Your rights: to know what personal information we collect, use and disclose, including the categories, their sources, our purposes, the categories of third parties we disclose it to, and the specific pieces of personal information we hold about you; to access it and receive a copy in a portable, readily usable format; to correct and delete it; in Oregon, to get a list of the specific third parties (other than individuals) to which we have disclosed personal data; to opt out of sale, sharing and targeted advertising; and to appeal if we decline a request (reply to our decision and ask for an appeal). We will not treat you differently for using any of these rights.
• How to make a request: email [email protected] as described in section 10, which also explains how we verify requests. You may use an authorised agent: your agent should email us with your written, signed permission. For requests to know, correct or delete, we may also ask you to confirm the request directly from your own email address. An agent can submit an opt-out request without this.

Interestana is a general-audience news site and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13 (or under 16 in the EEA and UK). If you believe a child has given us personal data, contact us and we will delete it.

The whole site is served over HTTPS, access to our server, database and admin console is restricted, and our database never stores the IP address of a magazine sign-up, at most a keyed one-way hash of it (like every request, a sign-up also appears in our server logs; see section 9). Contact-form messages are not stored on our server at all. No system is perfectly secure, but we act promptly on any security issue and will notify affected people and the authorities where the law requires.

If we change what we collect or how we use it, we will update this page and the date at the top before the change takes effect. Where a change needs your consent, we will ask for it.