Privacy

Privacy policy

Two different things are covered here: data about you as a visitor or customer, and personal data that appears inside the register itself. The second has its own basis and its own objection route.

Effective 3 August 2026

What we collect about you

email: For sign-in links, alerts and dossier delivery. Nothing else.
payment: Handled entirely by WayForPay. We never receive or store card details.
logs: Server logs held by our hosting provider for its own retention period. We do not operate a log pipeline of our own and do not truncate IP addresses ourselves.
analytics: None. There is no analytics script on this site, no cookies beyond the sign-in session, and therefore no visitor profile and no consent banner.
support: Anything you write to us, kept as long as the matter is open.

Legal basis and retention

Contract. Account email and subscription data, for as long as the account exists and then six years where tax law requires it.
Legitimate interest. Security logs kept by our hosting provider, in the minimum form that serves the purpose.
Consent. Marketing email, if we ever send any. Withdrawable at any time in one click.

Your rights

You can request access to your data, correction, deletion, export, or object to processing. Write to privacy@themachinerecord.com and we respond within 30 days. A deletion request for a person named in a case is carried out across the whole record at once: the headline, the summary, the timeline, the page address and the internal log the name was collected into. The source article is not ours and stays with its publisher, so a request about the reporting itself has to go to them.

We do not appoint a Data Protection Officer, as the volume does not require one under Article 37. The named contact above is responsible for these requests.

Personal data inside the register

Cases sometimes involve identifiable people, most often public officials or company spokespeople quoted in the reporting. This processing is carried out in the public interest, on the journalistic and research basis, and is subject to the limits in our editorial policy: names of people harmed are published only where the person spoke publicly themselves or where the name appears in open court documents, and names are stripped from headlines and summaries automatically.

If you are named in a case and object, use the right of reply. That route reaches a person, marks the case publicly on arrival, and is faster than a formal complaint.

Processors

Vercel: Hosting and delivery.
Railway: Database and pipeline, hosted in the Netherlands.
WayForPay: Payments. Not yet connected: card payment is currently unavailable.
Resend: Transactional email.