Last updated: 7 October 2026
This Privacy Policy explains what personal data Cybersafe News (“we”, “us”, “our”) collects when you visit cybersafe.news, why we collect it, how long we keep it and the choices and rights you have.
Contents
1. Who we are
Cybersafe News is an independent online publication covering cyber security news, threat intelligence, data breaches, privacy and practical security advice. For the personal data described in this policy, Cybersafe News is the data controller. You can reach us at any time through our contact page.
2. The data we collect
You can read Cybersafe News without creating an account or telling us who you are. We collect personal data only in the situations below.
2.1 Information you give us
- Contact form. When you send us a message we store the details you enter (typically your name, email address, subject and message, plus any other field shown on the form), together with the date and time, the page the form was sent from, your IP address and your browser’s user-agent string. If email notifications are enabled, a copy of your message is emailed to our editorial team.
- Newsletter sign-up. When you subscribe we store your email address, your subscription status, the date you subscribed and the IP address used to subscribe.
- Comments. When you comment on an article we store your name, email address, optional website address, your comment, the date and time, your IP address and your browser’s user-agent string. Your email address is never published. Comments are moderated: they may be held for review, approved, rejected or marked as spam (for example if they contain too many links or blocked words) before they appear. Approved comments show your name, the comment text and the date publicly. Avatars are generated from your initials; we do not use Gravatar or any other external avatar service.
2.2 Information collected automatically
- Server and security logs. Like any website, our servers process your IP address, the requested URL, date and time, referring page and user-agent in order to deliver pages, defend against abuse (rate limiting, spam and attack detection) and diagnose errors. Requests for pages that do not exist may be logged so we can fix broken links.
- First-party analytics. We measure how our journalism is read using our own analytics system – see section 4.
- Preferences stored on your device, such as your cookie choices and light/dark colour mode – see our Cookie Policy.
We do not ask for, and ask you not to send us, special categories of personal data (for example health data, political opinions or religious beliefs). If you are a source sharing sensitive information with our newsroom, please tell us in your first message so we can agree a more secure channel.
3. How and why we use your data
Where data protection laws such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the UK GDPR apply, we rely on the following legal bases:
| Purpose | Data | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Replying to messages, story tips and corrections sent through the contact form | Contact form data | Legitimate interests (running a newsroom and responding to readers); steps at your request |
| Sending our newsletter | Email address, subscription details | Consent – you can withdraw it at any time |
| Publishing and moderating comments | Comment data | Legitimate interests (hosting a constructive discussion and keeping it free of spam and abuse) |
| Keeping the website secure and available (form protection, rate limiting, spam filtering, error diagnosis) | IP address, user-agent, technical logs, security cookie | Legitimate interests (security of our service and our readers) |
| Understanding which articles are read and how readers find us (first-party analytics) | Analytics data described in section 4 | Legitimate interests (improving our journalism and the website), balanced by the safeguards in section 4 |
| Remembering your cookie choices and display preferences | Consent cookie, local storage | Legitimate interests / strictly necessary storage |
| Complying with the law and handling legal claims | Any of the above, where relevant | Legal obligation; legitimate interests |
We do not sell your personal data, we do not use it for profiling with legal or similarly significant effects, and we do not run advertising networks or behavioural advertising on Cybersafe News.
4. Analytics
4.1 First-party analytics
Our own analytics system runs on our servers; the data is not shared with advertising companies. For each visit it may record:
- your IP address and the approximate location derived from it (country and city, determined by an IP-address lookup – never your precise location);
- device type (desktop, tablet or mobile), browser and operating system, derived from your user-agent, and the width of your browser window;
- the pages and articles you view, the time spent on a page (measured by a small script that reports, about every 15 seconds while the page is visible, that the page is still open) and the outbound, social-media, WhatsApp, email, phone and file-download links you click (the link address without its query string);
- the referring website, including whether you arrived from a search engine (such as Google or Bing), social network, email, campaign link or an AI assistant (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot or Perplexity);
- date and time, whether a visit led to a contact-form message, newsletter sign-up or comment, and a pseudonymous visitor/session identifier used to count unique and returning visits. This identifier is calculated on our server from your IP address and user-agent using a secret key; our analytics sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser (no local or session storage).
Safeguards: analytics is not used to identify individual readers; visits from signed-in staff can be excluded; when your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal we honour it where this is enabled in our settings; and when IP anonymisation is enabled in our settings the stored IP address is truncated (the last part of an IPv4 address, or the last 80 bits of an IPv6 address, are removed) before it is saved. Automated browsers and known bots are not recorded. Reports are viewed in aggregate by our editorial team. You may object to this processing at any time (see section 11).
5. Cookies and similar technologies
We use a small number of cookies and browser storage items. Strictly necessary cookies are always active; we do not use third-party analytics or advertising cookies. The full list, with names, purposes and durations, is in our Cookie Policy.
6. Third-party services and embedded content
- Embedded videos and media. Some articles include embedded content such as YouTube videos. We embed YouTube using its privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com), which does not set YouTube cookies until you play the video. When you play embedded content, the provider receives your IP address and information about your device and may set its own cookies, governed by its own privacy policy.
- Fonts. Our pages load web fonts from Google Fonts, which means your browser connects to Google’s servers and Google receives your IP address and user-agent.
- Sharing buttons. Our share buttons are simple links. Nothing is sent to Facebook, X, LinkedIn or WhatsApp unless you click a button, at which point you are taken to that service and its own privacy policy applies.
- Links to other websites. Our articles link to sources, vendors and researchers. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of other websites.
7. Who we share data with
We share personal data only where necessary:
- with service providers who host and operate the website, send email on our behalf (for example newsletter or notification emails) and provide analytics – under contracts that limit their use of the data to providing their service to us;
- with professional advisers, law enforcement, regulators or courts where required by law, to protect our rights, or to protect the safety of our readers or staff;
- with a successor organisation if Cybersafe News is reorganised, merged or sold, subject to this policy.
We never sell or rent personal data and we do not share it with data brokers.
8. International transfers
Our readers are worldwide, and some of our service providers (for example Google) may process data in countries other than your own, including countries that may not offer the same level of data protection. Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, we make sure such transfers are protected by appropriate safeguards, such as adequacy decisions or the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum), or another lawful transfer mechanism.
9. How long we keep data
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Contact form messages | For as long as needed to handle your enquiry and any follow-up, and generally no longer than 24 months, unless the message relates to a correction, complaint or legal matter that requires longer retention. |
| Newsletter subscription | Until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it. We may keep a minimal record that you unsubscribed so that we do not email you again. |
| Comments | Published comments remain while the article is online, unless you ask us to remove them. Rejected and spam comments are deleted periodically. |
| First-party analytics data | Automatically deleted after 395 days (around 13 months); aggregated statistics that cannot identify you may be kept longer. |
| Security and server logs | Kept only as long as needed for security and troubleshooting. |
| Backups | Website backups are kept for a limited period and overwritten on a rolling basis. |
10. How we protect your data
As a cyber security publication we take the protection of your data seriously. Measures include encrypted connections (HTTPS), a strict Content Security Policy, protection against cross-site request forgery on all forms, rate limiting and spam filtering, server-side validation and sanitisation of all submitted content, encryption of sensitive configuration secrets at rest, role-based access for our staff with strong passwords and two-factor authentication, audit logging of administrative actions and regular backups. No system is completely secure, but we work to protect your data and will notify you and the relevant authorities of a personal data breach where the law requires us to.
11. Your rights
Depending on where you live (for example under the GDPR or UK GDPR), you have the right to:
- Access – ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
- Rectification – ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data;
- Erasure – ask us to delete your data (for example a comment or your newsletter subscription);
- Restriction – ask us to limit how we use your data;
- Portability – receive data you gave us in a structured, machine-readable format;
- Objection – object to processing based on our legitimate interests, including first-party analytics;
- Withdraw consent – at any time, for the newsletter or any optional cookies, without affecting processing that took place before withdrawal. Use the “Cookie settings” link in the footer to change your cookie choices;
- Complain – lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority, in particular in the country where you live or work or where an alleged infringement took place (for example the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK or your local EU data protection authority). We would appreciate the chance to address your concerns first.
To exercise your rights, contact us through our contact page. We will respond within one month (extendable where the law allows). We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request, for example by asking you to confirm the email address you used.
12. Children
Cybersafe News is a general-audience news publication and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 16 (or the minimum age of digital consent in your country). If you believe a child has submitted personal data to us, please contact us and we will delete it.
13. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy when our website, services or legal requirements change. The date at the top of this page shows when it was last updated. If the changes are significant, we will highlight them on the website.
14. Contact us
If you have questions about this policy or how we handle personal data, please get in touch through our contact page.
