Privacy Policy
This page says what we collect when you read The Kissing Punk, why we have it, and who else sees it. Advertising pays for the journalism, so other companies are involved in the pages you load, and we would rather put that in the first paragraph than leave you to find it in a subclause.
Last updated: August 2026.
What we actually collect
Most of it is the ordinary exhaust of a web request. Our servers log the page you asked for, the time, the site that sent you, your browser and operating system, an approximate location from your IP address, and whether the request failed. Nothing here sits behind a registration wall, so for most visits that log line is all of it.
Then there is what you hand over deliberately. Subscribe to the email edition and we hold your address and whether the last one was opened. Write to us and we keep the email, because a tip or a correction report is a working document. Where comments are open under an article, we hold your display name, your email and the text you posted. Advertising adds identifiers stored in your browser by the exchanges that fill our display inventory, which is how the sidebar unit knows it has been in front of you twice today.
Why we process it, and on what basis
Log data exists so the site works and stays up. We read it to find out which pages are slow, why an image failed for readers on one network, and which automated client is taking the archive at four in the morning. That is our legitimate interest in running a publication.
Analytics tells us what was read and for how long, which is one input into what gets commissioned next. Your email address is processed to send the edition you asked for, on the consent you gave, and for nothing else. Advertising identifiers and any profile built on them run on consent, which is why the panel appears before the non-essential tags fire. Refuse, and you still get the article.
Who else sees it
We describe our partners by category rather than by company name, and not out of laziness. A list of vendor names typed onto a page in August is wrong by October, and a stale list is worse than an honest description, because it tells you something precise that has stopped being true. The live list sits in the consent panel and changes when the arrangements do.
By category: the programmatic exchanges and measurement partners that fill our display inventory, our analytics provider, the email service that stores the newsletter list, the hosting and content delivery services, and the error-monitoring tool that tells us when something broke. None may take your data and sell it on for their own account. We have never sold or rented a reader list, and the month we are short of money will not be the month that changes. The money is accounted for on our ownership and funding page.
Cookies, pixels and the consent panel
Cookies, browser storage and tracking pixels do one job by three methods, which is to leave something in your browser so a later request can be tied to an earlier one. Some of it is unavoidable. Remembering that you dismissed the consent panel means storing that you dismissed it.
The categories, their lifespans and the browser controls are set out in our cookie policy. You can change your answer at any time in the panel, and withdrawing consent takes effect from that point rather than retrospectively.
How long we keep each thing
Server and security logs are held for weeks rather than months, long enough to investigate an outage or an attack, then rotated out. Analytics is kept in aggregate, and the raw event data expires on the retention window we hold with our provider, measured in months. Newsletter records last until you unsubscribe, after which we keep only enough to avoid adding you back by accident.
Editorial correspondence is the exception. Where an email underpins something we published, it is kept while the article is live, because a publisher who deletes the evidence behind a contested story cannot defend it later. Comments stay while the article does, and anything held for a legal or accounting reason lasts as long as that reason does.
Your rights if you are in the UK or the EU
These are not favours we grant. They are rights you already have, and the useful thing this page can do is tell you how to use them here without a solicitor. Write and say which one you want. You do not have to cite an article number.
We will ask for enough to be sure the record is yours, which for a subscription usually means writing from the subscribed address. We answer inside a month, and if a request is genuinely complicated we say so rather than let the clock run out in silence. You can also complain to your national data protection authority, and nothing here is meant to talk you out of it.
- Access: a copy of the personal data we hold on you, and where we got it.
- Rectification: correction of anything wrong in your record. Article contents go through our corrections policy instead.
- Erasure: deletion, where we have no overriding reason to keep it.
- Portability: the data you gave us, in a form you can take elsewhere.
- Objection and restriction: an end to processing that runs on legitimate interest, including advertising profiles.
- Withdrawing consent: at any moment, for anything we asked consent for.
If you are reading from California
You have the right to know what we collect and why, to get a copy, to have it corrected or deleted, and not to be penalised for asking. Nothing here is priced differently for readers who exercise a privacy right, because nothing here is priced at all.
On selling and sharing we will be plain. We take no money for reader data. Serving personalised advertising does pass identifiers to the exchanges, and California law treats that as a sale or a share whatever a publisher calls it, so we treat it as one. The Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information link in the footer opens the same control as the consent panel, we honour a Global Privacy Control signal, and an email works as well as the link.
Children
This is a general news site written for adults. We do not aim any part of it at children, we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 13, and we do not build advertising profiles for readers we know to be children.
If you are a parent or guardian and think your child has sent us something or signed up for the edition, write and tell us. We will find the record and delete it, without a form first.
Where the data goes
Some providers keep servers in a different country from the one you are reading in, and a request for an advert is answered by whichever machine is nearest. That is how the web is built, and it means personal data crosses borders routinely.
Where data leaves the UK or the European Economic Area, it moves under the safeguards the law provides: an adequacy decision covering the destination, or the standard contractual clauses with the transfer assessments they require. Ask about a specific category and we will tell you which applies.
Changes, and who reads the requests
When this policy changes in a way that affects what happens to your data, the date at the top moves and a note on the page says what changed. Silent edits to a privacy policy are the same bad habit as silent edits to an article.
Privacy requests go to support@thekissingpunk.com, the single address that reaches this newsroom, with the word privacy at the front of the subject line. Editors read that inbox themselves, as our contact page explains, so a request about your data reaches somebody who can go and look.
