Privacy
What we record, and what we don’t.
De Krantenkoppen counts two things: how many people read a story, and how many of them go on to the newsroom that reported it. That is the whole of it. No cookie is set, the counting keeps nothing on your device, no advertising network is involved, and nothing we write down is attached to you.
Why there is no cookie banner
Because there is nothing to ask you about. We set no cookies, load no tracking pixel and run no third-party analytics — no Google, no Meta, no advertising network anywhere on these pages. The counting happens on our own server, out of the request you already made.
The law that produces cookie banners is about storing things on your device. The counting stores nothing there: the marker below is worked out again from scratch on every request and never handed back to your browser, so there is nothing to keep. That is the whole difference between this and the cookie a banner exists to ask about — an identifier in a cookie has to be stored to survive your next request, and this one does not.
Three other things are kept in your browser, and none of them is the counting. Your choice of light or dark, so the site comes back the way you left it. Your place in a list, so returning from a story does not drop you at the top — thrown away when you close the tab. And copies of pages you have already opened, so the Back button works without fetching them again — thrown away with the tab as well. Our server reads none of the three, none of them may ever feed the counting, and all three are storage the site needs to do the thing you asked it to do — which is the one case the rule does not ask permission for. So there is nothing here to put a banner in front of, and a banner asking permission for something we do not do would be theatre.
What is written down
Two things a reader does are recorded. This is every field of both — not a summary of them.
| Field | Reading a page | Following a link out |
|---|---|---|
| The page | Reading a page · Its path, with everything after the ? cut off | Following a link out · The /out/ address you clicked, which names the publisher you went to and the story you were on |
| Who linked you here | Reading a page · The site’s name only — reddit.com, never the page on it | Following a link out · The same, which for a click is usually this site |
| Campaign tags | Reading a page · The three utm_ tags, when the link you arrived on carried them. Most links do not. | Following a link out · The same |
| When | Reading a page · The date and time | Following a link out · The date and time |
| A daily marker | Reading a page · The next section is about exactly this | Following a link out · The next section is about exactly this |
There is no sixth row, apart from the number the database gives each record to tell it from the next. What looks like more comes out of the first one: which language a page was in, and which story it was, are both readable from the path, so neither has a column of its own — and which of our own pages you were on before this one has no column anywhere, because it is not kept. Requests that come from a robot, a link checker or your browser guessing ahead are dropped before any of this is written.
The daily marker
To tell one person reading five stories from five people reading one, each request needs a marker. Here is the whole of how one is made.
1 · What goes in
203.0.113.47 → 203.0.113.0
The last part of your address is thrown away first. What is left — a whole neighbourhood of the internet — is joined to the line your browser sends naming itself.
2 · The key
32 random bytes, held in memory
Never written to disk, never logged, never derived from anything that survives a restart. It is replaced every 24 hours and the old one is destroyed.
3 · What is stored
q7Xr2nF9tLa4wZ0kD3vHmC
One short string. This is the only one of the three that is kept — steps 1 and 2 exist for a moment in memory and are gone.
Nothing runs backwards. A marker cannot be turned back into an address — not by us, not by anyone holding the database, not by anyone who takes it. Once the key rotates, yesterday’s markers cannot be lined up against today’s either.
So we can see that one reader opened five stories this afternoon. We cannot see that the same reader came back on Thursday. That is a genuine limit on what we can learn, and we chose it: the alternative is a marker that survives, and a marker that survives is a way of following you.
What we never record
- Your IP address.
It is shortened in the first line of code that touches it, and the original is never written anywhere — not to the database, not to a log file.
- Your name.
There are no accounts on this site and nothing to sign in to, so there is no name for a record to be attached to.
- What you read elsewhere.
Nothing on these pages reports to anyone else, so there is nothing of ours to join up with anything of theirs.
- Where you are.
A shortened address is a region at best, and even that is never stored — it goes into the marker and out of memory.
If you take the daily digest
The one thing on this site attached to a person is an email address, and only because a digest has to be sent somewhere. It is used to send the digest and for nothing else: not sold, not shared, not passed to a mailing list, and never joined to the reading records above. Every digest carries an unsubscribe link, and it works.
How long it is kept
Six months. A job runs every night and deletes every record older than that — the whole record, not a trimmed version of it. Nothing is archived first, because by then there is nothing worth archiving: the key that made those markers was destroyed the day after they were written.
Who else sees it
Nobody. We sell nothing, share nothing and carry no advertising. The records sit in our own database on our own server. We use no analytics company, so there is no analytics company to send them to. Publishers are told how many readers this site sent them, which is a number — it has never been a list of people, and could not be one.
Why we are allowed to do this
Under the GDPR this is legitimate interest — Article 6(1)(f). The interest is measuring our own audience: whether this site is read, and whether the newsrooms it links to get anything back for the work. The records are pseudonymous, the window is six months, and the counting sets no cookie and stores nothing on your device, which is why you were not asked to agree to anything.
The honest half of that: because no record can be traced back to a person, we cannot look up, export or delete your records if you ask. There is nothing to look up, which is the whole point of building it this way — but it does mean the usual offer of a copy of your data is one we cannot make.