This page explains what HealthWired collects when you visit, why, and what you can ask us to do about it. It is written plainly and deliberately kept short, because a privacy policy nobody reads protects nobody.
The short version
We do not ask you to create an account, we do not sell anything, and we do not sell or share your data with anyone for their own purposes. We count how often each article is read, we keep messages you send us, and we show advertising supplied by Google. That is the whole of it.
Reading the site
You can read HealthWired without telling us who you are. We do not ask for your name or your email address to read an article.
We count how many times each article is read, and which country the reader was in. The country is worked out from your IP address, but the address itself is never stored: it is converted into an irreversible fingerprint, which we keep for ninety days so the same visitor is not counted twice, and then discard. We cannot turn that fingerprint back into an address, and neither can anyone who obtained a copy of it.
To work out the country, your IP address is sent once to a lookup service, ip-api.com, and the answer is cached so it is not sent again. Nothing else about you is included in that request.
What we end up with is a count: how many people read a given article on a given day, and roughly where they were. It tells us which subjects are worth covering more. It cannot tell us who you are.
Cookies
We set one cookie of our own, to hold your session while you are on the site. It stops the same visit being counted repeatedly, and it is what keeps an administrator signed in. It contains no personal information and expires when you close your browser or shortly after.
Advertising sets its own cookies, described below.
Advertising
HealthWired shows advertising supplied by Google AdSense, which is how the site is paid for.
Google and its partners use cookies to show adverts and to measure whether people interact with them. This may include adverts based on your previous visits to this or other websites. This is Google's processing, not ours: we do not see who you are, and we cannot target an advert at you.
You can turn off personalised advertising in Google's Ads Settings, and you can read how Google uses information from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. Turning personalisation off does not remove advertising; it makes it less specific to you.
Fonts
The site loads its typefaces from Google Fonts. Doing so tells Google your IP address and which page requested the font, because that is how any request to another server works. No cookie is set by it.
If you write to us
Our contact form asks for your name, your email address and your message. We also record the IP address the message came from, which is what lets us block an address that floods the form.
We keep messages so we can reply and so we have a record of corrections that were requested. We do not add you to any mailing list, and we do not use your address for anything except answering you.
What we do not do
- We do not sell or rent your data.
- We do not build a profile of you, or track you across other websites.
- We do not run a newsletter, so we are not holding a list of subscribers.
- We do not accept payment to cover a story, or to leave one out.
How long things are kept
- The IP fingerprint used for counting: ninety days.
- Daily read counts, by article and country: kept, as they hold nothing personal.
- Messages you send us: kept until they are dealt with and no longer useful.
Your rights
We are based in the Netherlands, so the General Data Protection Regulation applies. You may ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted.
In practice the only thing we are likely to hold is a message you sent us, because the reading statistics cannot be traced to a person even by us. If you ask us to delete a message, we will.
Write to lim.eric24@gmail.com, or use the contact form. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you may complain to the Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.
Children
This site is written for a general adult audience. We do not knowingly collect anything from children, and we have nothing on the site that asks a reader's age or invites them to register.
Other websites
We link to the outlet that first reported each story, and to the studies behind it. Once you follow a link you are on someone else's site, under their privacy policy, not ours.
Changes
If we change what we collect, we will change this page and update the date at the top. There is no version history, so if the distinction matters to you, keep a copy of what you read.