Privacy policy

Data controller

The data controller is the site publisher, identified on the legal notice page. Any request about your data goes to the contact address published there.

Legal notice

Data processed

Reading the newspaper requires no account. The data below only appears as you use the site.

• Account — email address and password. The password is never kept as you typed it: it is replaced by a computed fingerprint from which nobody can work it back out — ourselves included.
• Profile — the handle shown next to your comments, and your settings (interface language, theme, weekly digest, followed topics).
• What other readers see — your handle, the short bio you write if you write one, and how many friends you have. Together they make up a profile page, reachable by anyone who knows your handle; search engines are asked not to index it. Your friends additionally see the articles you have reacted to, your friend list and the month you joined. Your comments are not on it: they stay under the articles where you wrote them.
• Friendships, blocks and reports — the friend requests you send or receive, the accounts you block, and the reports you send to moderation. A block is visible to you alone: the blocked person is not told, and you remain the only one who can undo it. A report is read only by the newspaper’s moderation; the person reported never learns who reported them.
• Contributions — comments, reactions, bookmarked articles, prediction votes, accepted friend links. Your comments appear under the articles, for everyone to read. Your reactions are counted there without your name on them; only your friends see which of your articles they were for, as the “what other readers see” line above sets out. Your bookmarks and your prediction votes are shown to nobody.
• Notifications — if you turn them on, the technical subscription identifier issued by your browser and its encryption keys. They are deleted as soon as you turn notifications off or the browser revokes them.
• What you read — for signed-in accounts only: articles opened, time spent on them, “less of this”. It is used to order your Flux, and nothing else. A signed-out visitor produces none of these personalisation signals; they are, however, counted by the anonymous audience measurement described below, which knows neither who they are nor what they read yesterday.
• Server logs — the server notes the IP address of requests for as long as security requires: limiting sign-in attempts, stopping abuse. These logs are never matched up with accounts.
• Bug reports — when you report a problem to us, we keep your text, the page it happened on (without the parameters in its address) and what your browser says about it: device type, window and screen size, theme, language, time zone, network quality and the last technical messages from its console. Neither your IP address nor your browser's details go in — only a family, “Firefox · Windows”. If you are signed in, your account is attached to it; the address you leave so we can reply is used for nothing else.

Cookies

Five cookies at most, all set by this site. No advertising cookie, no third-party analytics cookie, no tracker from another domain.

• Session (aube_session) — set when you sign in, keeps you signed in. Strictly necessary to the service; no script on the page can read it, and it only travels over an encrypted connection.
• Engagement (aube_profile) — an anonymous identifier tying your bookmarks and reactions to your browser. It is set only on your first action (a reaction, a bookmark…), never on mere reading, and lasts no more than 13 months.
• Preferences (aube_lang, aube_theme, aube_beta) — the language and theme you picked, and the fact that you dismissed the launch banner. Set only when you make that choice, and they carry no identifier.

There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to: none of these cookies serves advertising or profiling sold to a third party.

Audience measurement

The journal counts its readers itself, with no outside tool. This measurement sets no cookie, writes nothing in your browser and builds no profile: it counts pages and gestures, not people.

• What is recorded: the KIND of page you opened (home, article, section, archive, search) and not its address, the language shown, the device family (phone, tablet, computer), how you arrived (typed address, search engine, social network, shared link) and the name of the site that sent you — never the address of the page it was showing. A few named gestures are added: a share, a reaction, opening the translation picker, and how far down an article you scrolled.
• When you arrive from one of the journal’s posts on Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn or Reddit, or from the link in its Instagram bio, that platform is recorded by name. Never the post itself, never your account: measurement is per network, and nothing makes it possible to link two visits together.
• What ties your pages together, for one day only, is a technical fingerprint: an irreversible calculation made from your IP address and your browser, mixed with a secret that changes every night. Neither the IP address nor the browser is kept — only the result of the calculation. Because the secret changes, tomorrow’s fingerprint bears no resemblance to yesterday’s: nobody, ourselves included, can link two days of reading or recognise you from one visit to the next.
• The detailed records are erased after at most 30 days. All that remains beyond that are daily totals — a number of pages viewed, a number of visits, a number of shares — with nobody left inside them.
• If your browser sends the Do Not Track signal or the Global Privacy Control opt-out signal, nothing is recorded at all. There is nothing to click: the refusal is honoured exactly as it arrives.
• No cookie, no storage in your browser, no identifier that follows you, no tool belonging to another site. This measurement is never matched against accounts or against the reading signals of the Flux: they are two separate worlds, in the database as in the code.

Legal basis: the journal’s legitimate interest in knowing its audience, under the consent exemption granted to audience measurement that is strictly limited to that purpose and never shared. You may object to it — see “Your rights” below.

Legal bases

• Performance of the service you asked for: account, sign-in, comments, bookmarks, digest, handle and profile, friendships — without this data, the feature does not exist.
• Legitimate interest: keeping the service secure, rate-limiting intrusion attempts, moderating contributions, handling reports, preventing abuse.
• Consent: push notifications, weekly digest and Flux personalisation — each can be switched on and off from your account at any time.

Retention periods

• Account and profile: for as long as the account exists. When it is deleted, account data is erased.
• What you read: 90 days, then automatic deletion. It only feeds the Flux ordering and is worthless beyond that.
• Comments and reactions: for as long as they are published. A removed comment is removed for good.
• Friendships and blocks: for as long as you keep them; undoing one erases it. Reports: kept after they are dealt with, so that repetition can be recognised.
• Cookies: session for the session, engagement 13 months at most.
• Browser technical errors: at most 90 days after the last time the same error occurred. They contain no identifier — the type of page, the error message and the call stack, stripped of every address parameter.
• Bug reports: kept with no time limit, because an unfixed bug is still true months later. You can ask for yours to be deleted at any time, and it is then removed in full, reply address included.
• Server logs: a few days, until the next ones replace them.

Recipients

Your data is neither sold, rented nor passed to brokers. It leaves the server only in the cases below, all of them necessary to run the newspaper.

• The host and delivery network named in the legal notice, which technically carry and store the data.
• The email delivery provider, for account creation links, password resets and the digest: it receives your email address and the message itself.
• An artificial-intelligence provider, located outside the European Union. What is submitted to it: the text of a comment, for the automated check that precedes publication; that same text, together with the article headline and the opening of the message it replies to, when moderation asks for a pre-analysis of a reported comment; the handle, the bio and the reasons given, when it is a profile that has been reported; the text of a bug report still open, with the page it concerns and what the browser said about it, read once a week by the agent that reviews how the paper runs — without your handle and without the address you left for a reply, neither of which ever leaves the admin screens; and lastly the questions put to the site assistant — whether the visitor has an account or not — along with the handful of exchanges before them. No email address and no account identifier goes with any of this, and nothing asked of the assistant is recorded on our side.
• No ad network, no social network and no third-party analytics tool is called by the pages of this site.

Your rights

European regulation gives you rights over the data concerning you, which you may exercise at any time and without justifying yourself:

• access — obtain a copy of the data kept about you;
• rectification — have inaccurate data corrected;
• erasure — have your account and everything attached to it deleted;
• restriction — have a processing frozen while it is disputed;
• objection — refuse a processing based on legitimate interest;
• portability — receive your data in a reusable format;
• withdrawal of consent — for notifications, the digest and personalisation, at any time and without retroactive effect.

These rights are exercised by writing to the contact address published in the legal notice. You will get an answer within one month. Proof of identity may be requested where there is reasonable doubt about who is asking.

If the answer does not satisfy you, you may lodge a complaint with the French data protection authority (CNIL), 3 place de Fontenoy, 75007 Paris, France — or, if you live in another EU country, with your national supervisory authority.

Security

The site is only reachable over an encrypted connection. Passwords are kept as a fingerprint, never in the clear, and the way they are checked is designed to give nothing away. Sign-in cookies cannot be read by any script and are good for this domain only. The database is open on no public network.

Changes

This page will evolve with the newspaper. The last update date is shown at the top; any change affecting your rights, or what is collected, will be announced on the site.