Privacy Policy
This page says what we collect when you read FAQ Answers, why we collect it, who else sees it, and how you make us delete it. Last updated: August 2026.
The site is free and paid for by advertising, so we are not going to open by telling you that your privacy matters to us and leave it there. Something is tracked here. What follows separates what we control from what we only rent.
What we collect
Most people read one story and leave. For those visits we hold what the server logs on its own: your IP address, the page you asked for, the time, your browser and operating system, and the page you arrived from. Our analytics provider turns that into pages, sessions and a rough location, at city level and no finer.
Everything else depends on something you chose to do, and there are four of those.
- Newsletter. Your email address, the date you subscribed, and whether our emails are opened and clicked.
- Comment accounts. A display name, an email address, a password stored as a hash we cannot read, and what you type.
- Writing to us. Whatever is in the email, including your address and anything you attach.
- Advertising identifiers. Cookies and identifiers set by the exchanges that serve our display inventory, plus the signals in an ad request.
There is no paywall and no account gate, so for most readers there is nothing here with a name on it. We collect nothing about your health, your politics or your religion. We write about those subjects. Our forms never ask.
Why we process it, and on what basis
Server logs exist so the site stays up and so we can see an attack while it is happening. That is our legitimate interest in running the thing, and we would keep them if nobody advertised here. The same basis covers the abuse checks on comment accounts.
Analytics and advertising run on your consent. Until you choose, no analytics or advertising cookie is set and the ads served are non-personalised. The newsletter runs on consent too, so the only way onto it is typing your address in and confirming. Nobody is added for emailing the desk once. We keep the mail we are answering, and a record of your consent choices so we can show what you were asked and when. None of it feeds an automated decision about you.
Who else sees it
Advertising is where data leaves our hands. Display inventory is sold through programmatic exchanges. An ad request carries your IP address, the page, your device type and, if you consented, an advertising identifier, and the exchange passes that to its bidders. We can read our own ad server and the exchange logs. We cannot see what a bidder does with a request once it is past the exchange, and a publisher who says otherwise is describing a contract, not a capability.
Besides the exchanges the list is short: our analytics provider, the email service that sends the newsletter, the host and content delivery network that serve the pages, and the consent manager that stores your choice. Each is bound by a data processing agreement and used for the job named here.
We do not print a vendor table because ours would be wrong within a month. Partners get added and dropped, and we keep a block list of buyers we refuse. To know who is in the chain on the day you ask, write to support@faq-ans.com and we will send the current list.
Cookies, in short and then in full
Strictly necessary cookies always run. Preference cookies remember things like your consent choice. Analytics and advertising cookies wait until you say yes, and stop when you change your mind.
What is set, in which category, by whom and for how long is on our cookie policy page, which has room for it. The consent manager sits in the footer of every page, and a change there takes effect on the next page you load.
How long we keep it
Raw server logs are held for 30 days and then deleted. What survives is aggregate counts with no IP address in them. Analytics data is kept for 26 months, long enough to compare one August with the last.
Newsletter addresses stay until you unsubscribe, and the record of your consent for 12 months after that. Comment accounts last until you ask us to close one. Email is kept for up to 24 months, and longer where it concerns a correction, because the file of what we got wrong is worth more than the inbox space. Consent records are refreshed every 12 months.
Your rights in the UK and the EU
If the GDPR or the UK GDPR applies to you, you can ask for a copy of what we hold, have it corrected, have it erased, have our use of it restricted while a dispute is open, and receive it in a portable form. You can object to anything we process on the basis of legitimate interest, and withdraw consent at any time without giving a reason.
One email does all of it. Write to support@faq-ans.com with PRIVACY at the front of the subject line. We reply within one month, and if a request is complicated we may take two months longer, saying so before the first month is out. There is no charge. We may check you are who you say you are, and we ask for the least that will do. If we handle it badly, complain to the data protection authority for your country. You do not need our agreement for that.
Your rights in California
Under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA you can ask which categories of personal information we collected and who received them, ask for a copy, ask us to correct or delete it, and tell us to stop sharing it. You can limit what we do with sensitive personal information, although we do not collect any. None of these rights changes the site you are shown.
We do not sell personal information for money. Behavioural advertising still counts as sharing under that law, because identifiers reach our advertising partners for cross-context advertising, so we treat it as sharing. The Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information control is the consent manager linked in our footer, and we honour a Global Privacy Control signal if your browser sends one. An authorised agent can act for you with proof you asked them to.
Children
This is a general news site written for adults. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13, or under 16 where 16 is the age of consent for data processing. Our inventory is not flagged as child-directed to the exchanges, because it is not.
If a child has given us an email address or opened a comment account, write from a parent or guardian address. We will delete the account and everything attached to it, and we will not ask you to prove the relationship.
Data that leaves your country
Some providers above operate in the United States and elsewhere, so data about a UK or EU reader can be processed outside it. Where that happens we rely on an adequacy decision if one covers the country, and on standard contractual clauses with the UK addendum where one does not.
The limit is worth saying out loud. We can hold a direct provider to those terms. We cannot audit every onward transfer an exchange makes downstream. What we can do is refuse a partner that will not sign, and drop one that gets caught. We have done the second.
Changes, and where a privacy request goes
When this page changes in a way that affects you, we change the date, say at the top what changed, and put a line in the newsletter. A wording fix just gets the new date.
Every request under this policy goes to support@faq-ans.com, which the editors read and sort themselves. The contact page explains how the rest of that mail is triaged, and the rules for using the site are in our terms of service.
