Privacy

MEDUZA is built to be read without giving anything away. This page describes the data that is actually processed when you use meduza.love.

In short

• No reader accounts, comments or newsletter.
• No advertising networks or social media widgets. One analytics service, Yandex Metrica, measures readership; it is described below.
• MEDUZA itself sets no cookies for readers; Yandex Metrica stores its own.
• Fonts, images and our own scripts are served from our own server; the only third-party requests a page view makes are to Yandex Metrica.

Audience measurement: Yandex Metrica

To understand how MEDUZA is read, we use Yandex Metrica, a web analytics service provided by Yandex. When you open a page, a script from Yandex loads in your browser and sends Yandex information about your visit:

• your IP address, browser and device type, screen size and language;
• the addresses of the pages you open, the page you came from and the links you click;
• a recording of how you move through a page — scrolling, pointer movements, clicks and taps (the Session Replay and click map features).

Yandex Metrica stores cookies in your browser to recognise repeat visits. The data is processed by Yandex on its own servers, which may be outside your country, under Yandex’s privacy policy. We see it as statistics and visit recordings, not as a list of named people. Search words are part of a page address, so a search you run on the site is included. What you type into the contact form is excluded from the recordings.

You can stop this at any time: install Yandex’s opt-out browser add-on, block cookies and scripts from mc.yandex.ru in your browser, or use a content blocker. The site works fully without the script.

Server logs

Like any website, our server records each request in a log: IP address, date and time, the address requested, the referring page if your browser sends one, and the browser’s user-agent string. Logs are used to keep the site running and secure — for example, to block repeated failed sign-in attempts — and are deleted after about eight weeks. They are not combined with other data to identify readers.

Search

When you use the site search, the words you type are sent to our server as part of the page address and therefore appear in the server log. Apart from our log and the analytics service described above, they are not stored anywhere else.

Contact form

If you write to us through the contact form, we store what you enter — your email address, your name if you give one, the topic and your message — on our own server so that we can read and answer it. Messages are deleted after twelve months at the latest, or earlier if you ask. The form sets no cookie, and what you type into it is not sent to third parties.

Cookies

MEDUZA itself gives readers no cookies. Yandex Metrica, described above, stores its own analytics cookies in your browser. The only cookies the site sets are the sign-in cookies of its own editors in the administration area.

Advertising

Native placements, when there are any, are plain images and links served from our server without tracking. A link in an advertisement leads to the advertiser’s website, where that company’s own privacy policy applies.

External links

Stories link to sources and photo credits on other websites. We have no control over what those sites collect once you follow a link.

Who is responsible

MEDUZA is an independent, privately run publication. The site runs on a rented virtual server; the hosting provider processes the technical data needed to deliver pages on our behalf.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask what data we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, or to object to its use. As we ourselves hold almost nothing, this usually concerns messages sent through the contact form; for data held by Yandex Metrica, see the section above. Write to us through the contact form and we will answer.

Changes

If we add anything that changes what is described here — an advertising network, for example — this page will be updated before the change takes effect. The date of the last change is shown below.