Privacy Policy
This page says what we collect, why we hold it, who else gets a copy, and how to make us stop. WORLDHAB is free to read and paid for by advertising, which is the honest reason a page like this runs long. Last updated: August 2026.
What arrives just because you opened a page
Loading an article sends us what a server needs to answer the request: your IP address, an approximate location taken from it, your browser, the page you came from, the addresses you asked for and the time. That sits in logs kept by our host and by our delivery network.
An analytics provider then counts what happened. How many people opened a piece, how long they stayed, roughly which country they were in, which article brought them in. We read it in aggregate to decide what to commission next. Nobody here keeps a file on an individual reader.
What you hand over on purpose
Subscribe to the newsletter and we hold your address and the record of what we sent. Post a comment and we hold the name you chose, the address behind it, and the comment. Write to support@worldhab.com and we hold your message, usually an article link and a sentence we got wrong.
We ask for nothing past that. No phone number, no date of birth, no profile to complete before the fifth article of the month. Advertisers booking directly give billing details for an invoice, card numbers stay with a payment processor, and what is on sale is on our advertising page.
Advertising, and the identifiers that come with it
Display advertising here is served through programmatic exchanges rather than sold slot by slot. Those companies set their own cookies, read advertising identifiers already on your device, cap repeated creatives, screen for fraudulent traffic, and some of them infer interests from where an identifier has been. We are paid on impressions delivered.
They never receive your newsletter address or your comment account. Consent decides which kind of advertising you see rather than whether you see any. Agree and it can be personalised from those identifiers. Refuse and we ask the exchanges for non-personalised ads chosen from the page subject and a rough location, as our cookie policy explains.
Why we are allowed to hold it
Analytics and advertising cookies run on consent wherever the law requires consent, which covers the UK, the European Economic Area and anywhere with the same rule. The newsletter runs on consent too. Consent given in the banner can be withdrawn in the banner, and withdrawing is no harder than agreeing was.
Logs, spam filtering, abuse blocking and keeping the site standing up run on legitimate interest, because a site that cannot tell a reader from a scraper stops working inside a day. Invoices are processed to perform a contract. Where a law or a valid legal notice obliges us to keep something, that obligation is the basis.
Who else holds a copy
Data reaches other companies because a small desk does not build its own mail server. Hosting and the delivery network see traffic, the analytics provider sees page events, the newsletter platform sees subscriber addresses, a spam filter sees comment text, the consent platform records your answer, and the exchanges see advertising identifiers.
We are not printing a vendor table here. The exchange list moves faster than a policy page gets edited, and a list that was true in the spring is worse than an honest category. The live one sits in the consent manager. Reader data is not among the revenue lines on our ownership and funding page.
How long things stay
Logs roll off after a few weeks, long enough to investigate an outage or a scraping run and no longer. Analytics is held as counts and trends for a period measured in months. A newsletter address stays until you unsubscribe, then sits on a suppression list so we do not email you again by accident.
A comment goes when you ask us to remove it. Correspondence is kept while the matter is live and then deleted. The one permanent record is the editorial log of a correction: the article, the date, and what was wrong. Anything we no longer have a reason to hold is deleted rather than archived.
Your rights, and the way to use them
If the GDPR or its UK equivalent applies to you, you can ask for a copy of what we hold, have wrong details corrected, have data erased, have processing restricted while a dispute is open, receive your data in a portable form, object to processing that rests on legitimate interest, object to marketing, and withdraw a consent you gave earlier.
You can also complain to your national data protection authority without coming to us first. To use any of it, write to support@worldhab.com with “privacy” in the subject line and say which right and which address or article. Editors read that inbox. We answer inside a month, usually within days, and charge nothing. Other routes in are on our contact page.
If you are in California
Under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA you can ask what personal information we collected and where it went, ask for deletion or correction, get a portable copy, and opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising. We do not deliberately collect the sensitive categories the statute lists.
Passing an advertising identifier to an exchange counts as sharing, so the opt-out matters here even though no money changes hands for data. The control is the consent manager in the footer, labelled Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, and we honour a Global Privacy Control signal from your browser. An authorised agent can act for you in writing. Saying no does not get you a worse site. There is no article limit and no nag screen for anybody.
Where the data physically goes
The machines behind this page sit in several countries including the United States, because a delivery network works by keeping copies of the site near readers and our readers are everywhere. Our analytics, email and advertising vendors are in the same position.
Data leaving the UK or the European Economic Area does so under the standard contractual clauses or the equivalent terms in each vendor contract. We will not promise a legal regime we do not control. What we do control is how little leaves, so the answer to most transfer questions is that the field was never collected.
Children
This is a general news and lifestyle magazine written for adults. There is no children’s section, and our advertising inventory is not flagged as child-directed because it is not. We do not knowingly collect personal information from a child under 13, or under 16 where local law sets the line there.
If you are a parent or guardian and think a child has subscribed or left a comment, write to the address above and we delete the record. We ask only for what we need to find it, and we do not require proof before acting.
When this page changes
This page changes when the practice changes, and the date at the top moves only when the substance does. A material change, meaning a new category of data, a new purpose or a new kind of recipient, gets a notice on the site and a line in the next newsletter. We do not quietly rewrite a policy page, for the same reason our corrections policy refuses to quietly rewrite an article.
The legal terms covering use of the site are in our terms of service. If something here does not match what you can observe the site doing, it is either a bug or a lie, and both are worth an email. Put “privacy” in the subject line.
