Privacy Policy
What Reelio collects, what our advertising and analytics partners collect, how to opt out of personalised ads, and how to exercise your rights under US state law, the GDPR and the UK GDPR.
This policy describes what happens to information when you visit itsreelio.com. It covers what we collect ourselves, what third parties collect through the advertising on this site, and what you can do about either.
Reelio is operated by ItsReelio, Fort Worth, Texas, United States. Privacy questions go to hi@itsreelio.com, and we answer within 10 business days.
What Reelio collects
Nothing that identifies you, unless you give it to us. There is no account system, no login for readers and no comment system.
Three things are collected automatically:
| What | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Server request logs (IP address, user agent, requested URL, timestamp) | Serving pages, blocking abuse, diagnosing errors | 14 days |
| Aggregate page view counts, via Cloudflare Web Analytics | Knowing which stories were read | 6 months, aggregated, no per-visitor record |
| Performance measurements (page load and responsiveness timings, browser type, connection type, page path) | Keeping the site fast | 90 days |
The performance beacon is our own code posting to our own server. It samples roughly one visit in ten, it records timings and a page path, and it does not set a cookie or build a profile. We do this instead of running Google Analytics because a tag manager and an analytics script are two of the heaviest things a news site can put on a page, and we would rather spend that budget on the article loading quickly.
We do not run Google Analytics on article pages. We do not use a tag manager. We do not sell or share personal information for money.
Advertising and cookies
No advertising runs on this site today, and no advertising cookie has ever been set by it. We intend to fund Reelio with advertising served by Google AdSense, and the disclosures below describe what will happen when it starts. They are published now rather than later so that nothing about it arrives unannounced. The effective date at the top of this page changes on the day advertising goes live. Advertising is the reason some of the following applies to you, so it is stated in full rather than summarised.
- Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website and to other websites.
- Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to this site and other sites on the internet.
- You may opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings.
- You may opt out of a third-party vendor's use of cookies for personalised advertising by visiting aboutads.info/choices or youronlinechoices.eu in Europe.
- You may also opt out of interest-based advertising through the Network Advertising Initiative at optout.networkadvertising.org.
If you opt out you will still see advertising. It simply will not be selected based on your browsing history.
Vendors serving or measuring advertising on this site:
| Vendor | Role | Status | Their policy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google AdSense | Ad selection and delivery | Not yet live | policies.google.com/technologies/ads |
That table is the whole list. If we add an advertising partner, it changes on the same day, and the effective date at the top of this page changes with it. Any vendor list you find here is the live one, including when the live answer is none.
When advertising does begin, every advertisement on Reelio will sit in a fixed container placed by our own code, and Auto Ads will stay switched off. That is mostly a layout and reader-experience decision, but it also means no third-party script decides on its own where to insert something into a page you are reading.
Cookie categories
| Category | Set by | Purpose | Running today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strictly necessary | Reelio, Cloudflare | Security, bot filtering, load balancing. No profiling. | Yes |
| Advertising | Google and its partners | Ad selection, frequency capping, fraud detection, measurement | No |
| Consent record | Consent management platform | Remembering the choice you made | No |
We set no analytics cookie of our own. Cloudflare Web Analytics is cookieless by design. The only cookies on this site at present are the strictly necessary ones in the first row, and none of them profiles you.
The Topics API
Chrome can build a list of interest topics from the sites you visit and offer it to advertisers, as a replacement for third-party cookies. This site switches that off. Every page is served with a Permissions-Policy header carrying browsing-topics=(), which disables the feature for the page and for anything embedded in it, including advertising frames. You can check it yourself in the response headers.
That will cost us some advertising revenue when advertising starts, because interest-based targeting pays better than the alternative. We would rather not have the site you are reading contribute to a profile that follows you somewhere else. If we ever change our mind, this paragraph changes first.
Reelio does not run a newsletter and collects no email addresses. If you write to hi@itsreelio.com we keep the message for as long as it takes to answer it and to keep a record of the exchange, and we use the address for nothing else.
Your rights in the United States
If you live in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Montana, or another state with a comprehensive privacy law, you have the right to know what personal information is collected about you, to request its deletion, to correct it, and to opt out of its sale or of its sharing for cross-context behavioural advertising.
Reelio does not sell your personal information for money. Serving personalised advertising may still count as "sharing" or as a "sale" under some of these laws, because the definitions are broader than the ordinary meaning of the words. So the opt-out is offered plainly:
Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. There is presently nothing to opt out of: no advertising runs on this site, no advertising cookie is set, and nothing is shared with an advertising vendor. A one-click control here would be a button that does nothing. The two working vendor routes below are listed anyway, because they cover the rest of your browsing, and a real control will appear in the footer on the day the first advertisement does.
Opting out of sale or sharing
Two routes, and either is sufficient:
- Use Google Ads Settings to turn off ad personalisation, and aboutads.info/choices for other participating vendors.
- Send Global Privacy Control from your browser. We honour the GPC signal as a valid opt-out request for the browser that sends it, which is what California requires and what we would do anyway.
To make a rights request directly, email hi@itsreelio.com with the words "privacy request" in the subject line and tell us what you want. We verify the request by replying to the address it came from. We answer within 45 days and can extend once, by another 45 days, if the request is complicated. We will tell you if that happens.
You may use an authorised agent. We will ask for written proof that you authorised them.
We do not discriminate against anyone for exercising these rights. There is no premium tier, so there is nothing to withhold.
The EEA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland
If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland: no consent banner appears at the moment, because nothing on this site currently sets a cookie that would require your consent. Before the first advertisement is served, a Google-certified consent management platform will run for visitors in these regions, asking before any advertising or measurement cookie is set, letting you accept, reject or choose by purpose, and letting you change your answer afterwards from a link that will appear in the footer at the same time. We would rather say that plainly than show you a banner that has nothing to ask about.
Our legal bases are consent for advertising and non-essential measurement, and legitimate interest for security logging and serving the pages you request.
You have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict and port your personal data, and to object to processing. Requests go to hi@itsreelio.com. You also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority, and in the UK to the Information Commissioner's Office.
Data is processed in the United States. Where personal data is transferred out of the EEA or the UK, our processors rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and, where applicable, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.
Children
Reelio is not directed to children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. Our advertising is configured as not directed to children under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
If you believe a child has given us personal information, write to hi@itsreelio.com and we will delete it.
How long we keep things
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Server request logs | 14 days |
| Performance measurements | 90 days |
| Aggregate page views | 6 months |
| Privacy request correspondence | 2 years, which is what proving compliance requires |
Security
Traffic is served over HTTPS with HSTS. There is no database, no reader login and no administrative interface on this site to attack: every page is a static file built in advance from a source repository and served from Cloudflare's edge. Publishing requires access to that repository, which is protected by two-factor authentication.
No system is perfectly secure, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. If you find a vulnerability, write to hi@itsreelio.com and we will respond within 24 hours.
Changes to this policy
When this policy changes materially we update the effective date at the top and publish a note describing what changed. Material changes take effect 14 days after publication, so anyone who objects has time to stop using the site first. We will not apply a material change retroactively to information already collected.
The version history of this page is public, because the page lives in the site's source repository rather than in a database. What we promised on any given date is a matter of record.
Contact
- Privacy and data requests: hi@itsreelio.com
- Security reports: hi@itsreelio.com
- Postal: ItsReelio, 3668 Oak Ave, Fort Worth, TX 76112, United States
This page describes what we do. It is not legal advice, and it is written to be read rather than to be impressive.