Privacy & Cookies Policy

The Consulo ("we", "us", "our") publishes independent analysis of geopolitics, security and energy at theconsulo.com. This page explains what data we collect when you visit or subscribe, why, and what control you have over it.

1. What we collect

If you just read the site. We record lightweight, privacy-safe usage events: which pages were viewed, the referring site, any campaign parameters in the link you followed (UTM tags), a coarse device category (phone, tablet or computer) and browser name parsed from your browser's own User-Agent string, and your approximate country. The country is resolved from your IP address by a third-party lookup service at the moment of your visit — we only ever receive and store the country name, never the IP address itself, and we do not fingerprint your device. Each browser tab is assigned a random, temporary session identifier (see "Cookies & local storage" below) so we can tell separate visits apart — it carries no personal information and is not linked to your identity.

If you sign up for free email notifications about the Brief. We store the email address you provide, the date you signed up, and — if present — the campaign link that brought you to the signup form. This only lets us email you when a new issue is out; reading the Brief itself needs a paid membership (see below).

If you create an account or become a paying member. We store your email address and the minimum account data needed to run the account (login timestamps, membership tier, subscription status). Payment itself is handled entirely by Stripe, our payment processor — we never see or store your card number. Stripe operates under its own privacy policy.

If you contact us. We keep whatever you send us (e.g. by email) for as long as reasonably needed to handle the conversation.

2. Why we collect it

• To operate the site and your account (sign-in, membership access, the Brief archive).
• To understand, in aggregate, which stories and sections are read, so we can decide what to cover.
• To send the Brief to people who asked for it, and nothing else — we do not sell or rent your email address to anyone.
• To process payments for paid membership tiers, via Stripe.

3. Cookies & local storage

The Consulo does not use third-party advertising or tracking cookies. What the site does use, in your browser only:

• Session storage (cleared when you close the tab): a random id used to group your page views into one visit for our own aggregate analytics.
• Local storage (persists until you clear it): keeps you signed in between visits if you have an account, remembers small preferences (e.g. list vs. grid view on the News page), stores a single yes/no flag for whether we've seen this browser before so our aggregate analytics can report new vs. returning visits, and — only if you (or whoever uses this browser) visits a link with ?notrack=1 — a flag that opts this browser out of analytics entirely. None of this carries personal information.
• Stripe checkout: if you start a paid subscription, Stripe's own checkout page may set cookies under its domain, governed by Stripe's privacy policy, not ours.

None of this is used to track you across other websites.

4. Who we share data with

We use a small number of service providers to run the site, each acting only on our instructions:

• Supabase — database, authentication and file storage.
• Stripe — payment processing for paid memberships.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers.

5. How long we keep it

Account and subscriber data is kept for as long as your account or subscription is active, plus a reasonable period afterwards for accounting and abuse-prevention purposes. Aggregate analytics events are retained to track long-term readership trends and are not personally identifiable.

6. Your rights

Wherever you're located, you can ask us to:

• tell you what data we hold about you;
• correct it, if it's wrong;
• delete your account and associated personal data;
• unsubscribe from the Brief at any time — every issue includes an unsubscribe link, or just email us.

If you're in the EU/EEA or UK, these are your rights under GDPR; we'll honour equivalent requests from anywhere.

7. Children

The Consulo is a general-audience news publication and is not directed at children. We don't knowingly collect data from anyone under 16.

8. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes materially, we'll update the date at the top of this page.

9. Contact

Questions about your data or this policy: theconsulo@proton.me.