Institutional

Privacy Policy

What we collect, why we collect it, how long we keep it, and how to have it corrected or deleted.

Adopted 4 Feb 2025 · revised 28 Jul 2026 · 5 revisions

1 What this policy covers

This policy describes what threadlinenews.com actually collects and what happens to it. It is written to be checked against the site's behaviour, not to cover every possibility. When the site's behaviour changes, this policy is revised and the revision date at the top of this page changes.

The short version: the only personal information this site asks for is an email address, and only when you subscribe to a newsletter or follow a storyline. Reading the site requires no account and no personal information.

2 The signup record

When you subscribe to a newsletter or follow a storyline, the site writes one row to its own signup log before anything else happens. This log exists for two reasons: so that an outage at our mailing platform cannot lose your address after you submitted it, and so that we hold proof of your consent if a subscription is ever disputed.

Each row contains:

Your address, trimmed of whitespace and lowercased before it is stored.

list_id

Which newsletter or storyline you were signing up for.

source

Which control you used: the form at the end of an article, the footer bar, the newsletters page, a storyline follow, or an inline form.

path, section, storyline

The page you were on, its section where there is one, and the storyline slug when the signup was a storyline follow.

referrer, utm_*

The referring page and campaign parameters, where present, so we know which signups came from where.

consent_at

The timestamp of your submission.

consent_ip

The IP address the submission came from. Kept as proof of consent.

consent_user_agent

The browser identification string of the submission. Kept as proof of consent.

sync_status

Whether the handoff to the mailing platform succeeded, with the platform's contact identifier once it has.

This log is a capture record, not the mailing list. It has no public interface, it is never used to decide whether you are subscribed, and it is never sold, shared or used for advertising.

3 The mailing platform

Newsletter delivery is handled by a mailing platform acting as our processor. When you sign up, we pass your address, the list you chose, and the consent details above to the platform. The platform owns subscription state: subscribed, unsubscribed, bounced, suppressed. It has to, because one-click unsubscribe and suppression handling are legal and deliverability requirements that cannot live in two places that might disagree.

Every email we send carries a one-click unsubscribe that works without a login. Unsubscribing takes effect at the platform immediately.

4 What we do not do

We do not sell email addresses. We do not share them for cross-context behavioural advertising. We do not run advertising trackers on this site. One third-party script runs on these pages, Google Analytics, described in the clause below and itemised in the Cookie Policy.

Reader preferences that could describe your reading, such as saved articles, a followed storyline list on this device, a pinned ZIP code and your theme choice, are stored in your browser and stay on your device. They are not transmitted to us.

We use Google Analytics to count visits and see which articles are read. It sets its own cookies and receives the pages you open on this site, an approximate location derived from your IP address, and your browser and device type. Google processes that data as our service provider. We have not enabled Google's advertising features, so this data is not used to target advertising to you and is not shared for cross-context behavioural advertising. You can stop it by using Google's browser opt-out, by blocking the script, or by clearing and refusing cookies for this site.

5 Server logs

Like every website, our servers keep standard request logs: IP address, requested page, time, and browser identification. We use them to run the site, to defend it against abuse, and to rate-limit the signup endpoint. They are kept for 90 days and are not used to build reading profiles.

6 Retention

A signup row is kept while the address remains subscribed to the list it names, and for 24 months after the subscription ends, as proof that consent was given. After that it is deleted. A deletion you request under clause 7 does not wait for that schedule.

7 Access, correction and deletion

You can ask what we hold about your address, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. A deletion removes the signup rows for your address from our log and removes your contact from the mailing platform. The working process, including how we verify that a request comes from the address it concerns, is at Data requests.

California residents have specific rights stated at Your Privacy Choices.

8 Cookies and local storage

What this site stores in your browser, item by item, is listed in the Cookie Policy, together with the consent mechanism and how to change your answer later from the footer of any page.

9 Contact

Privacy questions and requests go to the same address with Privacy request in the subject line. We acknowledge within five working days and resolve requests within 45 days. Postal address: Publishing Resources, 98 US Hwy 46, Ste 7 #1057, Budd Lake, NJ 07828.