Privacy
What MADLUL collects, what it does not collect, and what happens to it.
What happens when you simply read the site
Reading MADLUL does not create an account, does not require a sign-in, and does not set a cookie. There is no analytics script on this site, no advertising script, no tag manager and no heat-mapping or session-recording tool. We also do not embed third-party fonts, scripts or media: the typography and images are served from MADLUL itself, so opening a page does not tell another company that you did.
The consequence is that we do not build a behavioural profile of readers. We cannot tell you how many people read a particular story today, because we deliberately do not collect the means to know.
The server layer, stated honestly
Like any hosted website, MADLUL sits behind hosting and content-delivery infrastructure that processes a request in order to return a page. That layer is outside our application, and we do not use it to identify individuals or to build an audience profile. We are stating its existence rather than claiming the site has no infrastructure, because that claim would be false.
The one cookie, and who receives it
MADLUL sets exactly one cookie: `madlul_desk`. It is set only when someone signs in to the newsroom, the internal operations tool used to review and publish stories. It is HttpOnly, so scripts cannot read it; SameSite=Lax; marked Secure in production; and it expires after twelve hours.
An ordinary reader never receives it. This is why MADLUL does not show a cookie-consent banner: there is no non-essential cookie to consent to, and adding a banner to appear compliant would misrepresent what the site does.
What we hold about our own operations
- Source material
- Published material read from approved sources, with attribution and a link to the original.
- Claims and their sources
- A record of what a source said, so a sentence on a page can be traced back to the organisation that said it.
- Editorial decisions
- Approvals, holds and rejections, each recorded with a timestamp and an operator identity — an operator designation, not an individual journalist’s account.
- Corrections
- What was published, what it now says, and why it changed. This record is public.
What we do not collect
- No reader accounts
- There is no public account system, so there is no reader profile, no reader password and no reader email address to protect.
- No advertising identifiers
- We do not run advertising and do not carry advertising identifiers.
- No tracking pixels
- There are none in the pages.
- No fingerprinting
- We do not attempt to identify devices or individuals.
Your requests, and the limits of what we can do
If you believe MADLUL holds something about you and you want to know what it is, or you want it corrected or removed, contact us and say so. Because the publication holds no reader accounts and no reader profiles, in most cases the answer will be that we hold nothing about you — and that is a real answer rather than an evasion.
We are also explicit about a gap, because you should not discover it later: MADLUL does not currently offer self-service account deletion or self-service data export. There is nothing to delete through a settings screen, because there is no settings screen; a request has to be made by contacting us. If a public account system is introduced, this section will be rewritten before it goes live, not after.
We will not delete material that is the record of what was published. A correction history and an editorial audit record are part of the publication’s accountability, and removing them on request would destroy the thing that makes the correction record trustworthy.
Children
MADLUL is a news publication covering conflict, security and regional affairs. It is not directed at children, and no part of it is designed for them.
If a source or rights holder contacts us
Licensing complaints and removal requests from rights holders are treated as defects to be resolved, not as disputes to be managed. Reach us through the contact page and say what the material is and what you are asking for.
Changes to this page
The review date is shown at the top. The date changes only when the text genuinely changes.