Privacy

Maritime Reader aggregates publicly available maritime news. We try to keep the data we collect about you minimal and obvious. Here’s the full picture.

What we store about you

• Anonymous session cookie (mp_session): a randomly-generated identifier set the first time you visit the site. It expires from your browser after 30 days — after that, your next visit gets a brand-new ID. The cookie itself is NOT linked to your name, email, or IP address. We use it only to tell “these N events happened in the same browser”, which lets us improve the recommendations we surface. The events recorded under it (article clicks, landing-source category) remain in our analytics database indefinitely so we can compute long-term trends, but since they were never tied to your identity, they cannot be linked back to you once the cookie has rotated.
• Click events: when you click an article, we log which article and the session cookie above. The User-Agent string your browser sends is stored alongside (truncated). No IP, no location, no fingerprinting.
• Traffic source (where you came from): when you first land on the site, we record the URL of the page you came from (the standard Refererheader) and bucket it into a coarse category — e.g. “Google”, “LinkedIn”, “ChatGPT”, or “direct” if you typed the URL or used a bookmark. This helps us understand which channels bring readers to the site. The full referrer URL never contains your name, login, or session details on a normal visit; we don’t share it with third parties.
• Account data (only if you sign up): your email and display name, plus any comments / fleet / preferences you create. Standard application data.

Third-party services

We may use industry-standard analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics) and advertising platforms to understand which content is useful and to support the site. When such tools are active they will set their own cookies and may receive your IP address and User-Agent — these are processed under each provider’s own terms. We don’t sell or trade your data.

What we don’t do

• We don’t sell your personal data.
• We don’t fingerprint beyond what browsers send by default.

Cookies in detail

First-party: mp_session (described above) and Supabase auth cookies if you log in. Third-party cookies may be set by any analytics or advertising provider we integrate; their names depend on the provider.

Data retention

We don’t automatically delete anonymous analytics events (article clicks, landing-source records, view counts). They stay in our database indefinitely so we can compute long-term trends. Because none of these events were ever tied to your name, email, or IP, they remain effectively anonymous over time. The mp_sessioncookie that links them to a single browser expires after 30 days; after rotation, even we can’t re-associate older events with the same browser.

Account-related data — your email, display name, comments, feedback — is retained for as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, this data is removed too (comments may be replaced with a placeholder “[deleted user]” to preserve thread structure).

Your rights

If you have an account, you can delete it from your profile page — all directly identifying data goes with it. For anonymous analytics events, there’s no identity to delete: the events contain only a randomly-generated cookie ID with no link to you. For any specific concerns or removal requests reach us via the feedback form.

Last updated: 2026-05-09.