Your privacy at Economic News

This policy describes how Economic News Limited collects and handles personal information for the website at economicnews.nz. We comply with the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.

What we collect

• Subscribers: first name, last name, email address, your email subscription preferences, and the timestamps of subscription, confirmation and unsubscribe.
• Push notifications: the browser-issued push subscription endpoint and keys. We do not see your identity unless you also subscribe by email.
• Site measurement: how the site is read, measured by us on our own servers. The details are in the section below.
• Server logs: standard request logs including IP address, user agent, timestamp and URL, retained for security and abuse prevention.

How we measure the site

We run our own measurement so we can see which stories are read and what the newsroom should cover more, without handing that judgement to a third party. A small script on each public page sends us these events:

• Page views — which page was opened, and on the first page of a visit the site you came from (its domain name only) and any campaign tags in our own links.
• Reading — for articles, how many seconds the article was actually visible and in the foreground (capped at 30 minutes, and paused after a minute without any interaction), and how far down the article you reached (a quarter, half, three quarters, nine tenths, the end).
• Story cards — which homepage and section cards were on screen for at least a second, and which were clicked.
• Search — what was searched for (cleaned first: email addresses and long digit sequences are removed and rare terms are not stored), how many results came back, and whether a result was clicked.
• Subscribe and notifications — whether a subscribe form was shown, typed in or submitted, and whether the submission worked (only the outcome, never what you typed), and whether a notification prompt was accepted or declined.
• Links and speed — clicks on the sources cited in an article, and three standard page-speed measurements (largest paint, interaction delay, layout shift) so we can keep the site fast.

Each event carries a temporary session id, the page, the New Zealand calendar day, the type of device (phone, tablet or desktop), the browser family, and whether the visit came from New Zealand or from elsewhere. That is all.

We never store your IP address, your full browser identification string, a fingerprint, a precise location, or anything that links what you read to who you are. There is no persistent identifier: the session id is thrown away after 30 minutes of inactivity, and the only long-lived marker is a date. Browsing by our own staff and by known automated crawlers is set aside and excluded from every figure.

Choosing not to be measured

You can switch our measurement off for this browser at any time. The switch also turns off the two third-party tags described below, and our servers refuse anything that still arrives from an opted-out browser.

Google Analytics 4 and Vercel Web Analytics

The site still carries Google Analytics 4 (Google LLC) and Vercel Web Analytics (Vercel Inc.). Our own figures do not come from them, and we no longer treat their numbers as the record of readership. Both are disabled for a browser that has used the switch above, and both can be blocked at the browser level without affecting the site.

How we use it

• To deliver the email channels you have asked for, and to allow you to change those preferences or unsubscribe at any time.
• To send you breaking-news push notifications if you have explicitly enabled them in your browser.
• To decide what to cover, to see what brings readers back, and to keep the site itself sound — using the aggregate measurement described above.
• To prevent abuse and operate the service securely.

Who we share it with

We share the minimum data required with these processors:

• Postmark (ActiveCampaign, USA) — sends transactional and newsletter email on our behalf, and reports to us when a newsletter is delivered and when a link in it is clicked, so we can see which stories the newsletter sends readers to.
• Vercel (USA) — hosts the public website and provides Vercel Web Analytics.
• Neon (USA / EU regions) — hosts the database, including the measurement described above.
• Google Analytics 4 (Google LLC) — anonymous usage analytics, disabled if you opt out.

We do not sell personal information.

Cookies and browser storage

We use a small number of strictly-necessary cookies (login session for staff, theme preference), and the following for measurement. None of them contains an identifier that persists beyond a visit.

• en-an-session (browser storage) — a random session id that expires after 30 minutes without activity.
• en-an-first-seen (cookie, one year, and a browser-storage copy) — the date we first saw this browser, so we can tell new from returning readers. A date only, never an id.
• en-av-seen (browser storage) — the date of your last visit, so a browser is counted once per day.
• en-an-attr (cookie, 30 minutes, sealed) — which article you were reading and where the visit came from, used only if you subscribe during that visit so we can credit the story that earned the subscription.
• en-an-optout (cookie, one year) — records that you have switched measurement off.
• Google Analytics cookies (_ga and similar), only if you have not opted out. Vercel Web Analytics uses no cookies.

How long we keep it

• Subscriber records are kept while your subscription is active and for up to 24 months after unsubscribe (for audit and re-subscribe deduplication), then deleted.
• The ledger of subscription events (signed up, confirmed, unsubscribed) is kept for the life of the subscriber record.
• If you subscribe, the snapshot of which article and source earned the subscription is cleared from your record 30 days after confirmation (or 30 days after an unconfirmed attempt lapses).
• Raw measurement events are deleted after 30 days; per-session summaries after 90 days; daily aggregate figures, which hold no session ids, after 13 months. An automated job enforces this every night.
• Push subscriptions are deleted when revoked.
• Server logs are retained for 90 days.

Your rights under the Privacy Act 2020

You have the right to:

• Ask what personal information we hold about you;
• Correct any information that is inaccurate;
• Withdraw consent for any email channel at any time via the link in every email or your preferences page;
• Switch site measurement off for your browser using the control above;
• Complain to the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: hello@economicnews.nz.