The Hidden Circle Gazette is built to respect your privacy by default. Reading the paper sets no cookies, loads no advertising or analytics services, and shows no consent banner — because nothing here needs your consent.
What we don't do
- We set no cookies for readers.
- We load no third-party scripts, fonts, or trackers. Everything the site needs — type, styles, the PDF reader — is served from our own press.
- We run no advertising and share nothing with data brokers.
- We never store your IP address.
Reading statistics
We keep our own first-party statistics so we know which stories get read. When a page is served, your address and browser signature are combined with a secret salt that changes every day and reduced to a short one-way hash. That hash lets us count "one reader, several pages" within a single day; because the salt is discarded, it cannot connect your visits from one day to the next, and it cannot be reversed into an address.
Your address is also used, for the moment it takes to serve the page, to look up an approximate location (country and city) against an offline database on our own server — no lookup service is contacted — and to rate-limit abuse. Then it is discarded. What our ledgers keep: the page you read, the time, a coarse browser and platform name (say, "Safari on macOS"), the site that referred you, that approximate location, and whether you appear to be a bot.
When you use the site search, we also note the query text itself — never who searched for it, not even the daily hash — so the editors can see what readers are looking for and write what is missing. Search entries are kept for 90 days.
Your theme choice
The Daybreak/Nightfall switch stores your preference in your browser's local storage. It stays on your device; it is never transmitted to us.
Embedded players
Some articles embed music or video players from YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, or Mixcloud. These load from the provider as you scroll to them, which tells the provider your address and that you are reading a page that embeds their player; their own privacy policies govern what they do with that. YouTube is embedded in its privacy-enhanced mode, which sets no cookies unless you press play. If you'd rather not meet these providers at all, don't press play — or read our pages with your browser's tracker blocking on, which the site itself will never fight.
Comments
If you leave a comment, we store the name you sign it with (a pseudonym is fine), the comment itself, and — only if you choose to give one — an email address, which is never displayed, never shared, and used solely for moderation. We also keep a salted one-way fingerprint of your address (never the address itself) so we can rate-limit spam and enforce blocks.
New comments are delivered to the editors by email and to a private Discord channel, so your signed name and comment text pass through our mail relay and Discord in transit. You can ask us to delete your comment at any time via our Discord.
Staff sign-in
One session cookie exists on this site, and it is set only when an editor signs in to the Print Shop. Readers never receive it.
Changes
If our practices change, this page changes first, with the date above. For any question about your data, reach us on our Discord — a human answers; we remain, as ever, insufferably real.