What we collect, and what we do not
Privacy & Cookie Notice
Reading ShaadiNews sets no cookies and creates no account. This notice describes exactly what the site stores, what it sends to third parties, and how to get any of it removed.
Last revised
The short version
- •Reading this site sets no cookies at all. There is no advertising network, no tracking pixel, and no analytics script.
- •A few preferences — your saved stories, your typeface choice, which stories you have liked — are kept in your own browser and never sent to us.
- •We only hold personal data you deliberately give us: an email address if you subscribe, and your details if you submit a wedding story.
- •Article view, like, and share counts are totals for the article. They are not tied to you.
What your browser stores locally
Three small values are written to your browser local storage. They stay on your device, are readable only by this site, and are never transmitted to our servers. Clearing your browser site data removes all three.
- Saved dispatches
- The article IDs you have bookmarked.
- Typeface preference
- Which of the reading themes you last chose.
- Liked stories
- The article IDs you have liked, so the button reflects it on your return.
What you give us deliberately
Two things on this site ask you for personal data. Both are optional and both are described here in full.
- Newsletter
- Your email address, and optionally a name, delivery frequency, topics of interest, and a wedding date. We use these to send The Shaadi Dispatch and to choose which edition to send you. We do not sell, rent, or share this list.
- Story submissions
- Your name and email address, plus whatever you tell us about the wedding: couple names, location, date, and the story itself. We use it to assess the submission and to contact you about it. Submitting a story is not consent to publish it — we will confirm with you first.
What our server records automatically
Every write to this site — liking a story, subscribing, submitting a pitch, using the reader AI tools — is rate limited by IP address so the site cannot be flooded. Those addresses are held in the server memory for the length of the limiting window and are never written to the database. Restarting the server discards them.
View, like, and share counts are stored per article as running totals. There is no per-reader record behind them: the database cannot reconstruct who viewed what, because it never held that.
Our host may keep standard server logs. Those are operational records, kept only as long as needed to run and secure the service.
Third parties who see your request
Loading any web page means your browser contacts whoever serves its assets, and those parties see your IP address and user agent as a consequence. On ShaadiNews that list is short, and none of them are advertising or analytics companies.
- Google Fonts
- Serves the typefaces the site reads in. Google receives your IP address when a font file is fetched.
- Unsplash
- Hosts some editorial photography. Unsplash receives your IP address when an image loads.
- Google Gemini
- Powers the optional summarise and polish tools. If you use one, the article or draft text is sent to Google to generate the response. Do not paste anything into those tools you would not want processed by a third party.
- IndexNow
- When a story is published we notify Bing, Yandex, Seznam, and Naver. Only the page URL is sent. Nothing about any reader is included.
AI crawlers
We permit AI crawlers to read this site, both those that fetch a page to answer a live question and those that collect text for model training. Our robots.txt names them individually and allows them, and we publish clean machine-readable copies of our reporting at /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt so they do not have to guess at the page structure.
This concerns our published journalism only. Nothing a reader gives us — subscriber emails, story submissions, saved bookmarks — appears on those surfaces or is exposed to a crawler.
How long we keep it
- Newsletter subscription
- Until you unsubscribe. Unsubscribing records the date and stops all sending.
- Story submissions
- Kept while we assess them, and afterwards as a record of what we agreed to publish and on what terms.
- Rate-limiting addresses
- Minutes to an hour, in memory only.
- Article counters
- Indefinitely. They are totals and identify nobody.
Your rights
You can ask us what personal data we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. There is no charge and you do not have to give a reason.
Write to [email protected] from the address in question, or tell us which address to look up. We will confirm within a reasonable period. Because we hold so little, most requests amount to finding one subscriber row or one submission and removing it.
To remove what is stored in your browser, clear this site data in your browser settings. That is entirely under your control and needs no request to us.
Changes to this notice
If what we collect changes, this page changes with it and the revision date at the top moves. Material changes to how we handle data you have already given us will be notified to subscribers by email rather than announced only here.
Questions: [email protected].