Privacy Policy
The short version
Siftwire is a reading site, not a service. It has no accounts, no forms, no newsletter, and no logins — so there is nothing of yours to lose. Two standard analytics tools count visits so we can see which pages earn their place. We do not run ads, do not sell or share data, and do not follow you around the rest of the internet.
What collects data
Two tools, both counting visits in the aggregate:
Google Analytics 4
The industry-standard counter. It records the pages you open, the site or link that brought
you here, your browser and device type, and an approximate location — country and city —
derived from your IP address. To tell a returning visitor from a first-timer, it sets a
first-party cookie (_ga) in your browser. How Google’s own documentation describes those cookies.
Inside the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, that cookie starts in a denied state: GA4 runs cookieless until you accept the banner at the bottom of the page, and it goes back to cookieless the moment you reject or withdraw. Everywhere else the counter runs as described above — and you can still say no: “Cookie settings” in the footer reopens the banner from any page.
Cloudflare Web Analytics
This site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and we use Cloudflare’s built-in analytics alongside GA4. In Cloudflare’s words, it “does not use any client-side state, such as cookies or localStorage, to collect usage metrics,” and it does not fingerprint visitors. It reports page views, referrers, countries, browsers, and device types — counts only. One detail worth knowing: per its FAQ, it does not log query strings, the part of a URL that could carry a search term or a token.
What is collected — and what isn’t
| Collected | What it means |
|---|---|
| Pages you view | Which siftwire.net URLs you open |
| Referrer | The site, search engine, or link that brought you here |
| Device & browser | Device type, operating system, browser, language |
| Approximate location | Country and city, derived from your IP address |
| Timing | When the visit happened |
| Your consent choice |
Whether you accepted or rejected the analytics banner — kept only in your browser
(localStorage, key sw_consent); it never leaves your device
|
What is never collected: your name, your email address, anything you type into a form (there are no forms), payment information (nothing here is for sale), or a profile that follows you to other websites. Nothing on this site can identify you, because nothing on this site asks who you are.
Why we look at it
One purpose: deciding what to write next. Analytics tells us a page gets read to the end while another is abandoned three sentences in, and that is how the next question gets prioritized. The data is never used for advertising, never sold, never shared with ad networks, and never combined with anything from other sites to profile you. “Which page helped” is the only question it answers.
How long it is kept
- Google Analytics 4: event-level data expires automatically under Google’s retention settings — 14 months at the most on a standard property like ours. Aggregated totals in standard reports outlive that clock, but nothing in them identifies a visitor. Google’s retention settings, in Google’s words. We do not export analytics data anywhere else.
- Cloudflare Web Analytics: per its FAQ, unsampled beacon data is kept for seven days, after which it is aggregated — and the dashboard itself can show no more than the previous six months.
- The hosting layer: pages are served by Cloudflare Pages. As with any web host, Cloudflare processes requests to deliver the site, under its privacy policy.
- Us: we run no separate server, database, or log of our own — this is a static site, so there is nothing else to retain.
How to opt out
- Use the on-site switch. Reject the banner when it appears, or reopen it from any page via “Cookie settings” in the footer — that turns off the GA4 cookie on this site, in this browser, immediately.
- Block it in your browser. Safari and Firefox block known trackers by
default, and any content-blocking extension stops the GA4 script. Since GA4 depends on its
_gacookie, blocking cookies outright works too. - Use Google’s official opt-out. The Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on (available for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge) tells Google Analytics not to record your visits — on this site and any other site that uses it.
- Cloudflare Web Analytics needs no opt-out. It sets no cookie and reports only aggregate counts, so there is nothing tied to you to withdraw. If you block third-party scripts entirely, that covers it too.
Contact & changes
Siftwire is an independent site — no company we write about owns or operates it, and this page exists so you can hold us to that. Questions, corrections, or complaints about privacy: [email protected]. A person reads every message.
If this policy ever changes, the date at the top of this page moves with it. What you see here is the whole story — there is no longer version of it living anywhere else.