Retention
We keep editorial correspondence for twelve months after the last message in the thread, after which it is archived to cold storage and then deleted. Analytics data is kept in aggregated form for twenty-four months so we can track long-running trends across years; we do not keep raw per-user analytics beyond that window. Email addresses supplied to our newsletter are kept until you unsubscribe, at which point the record is removed from the active list and purged from backups on the next rotation. Press and partner correspondence follows the same twelve-month rule as reader email. If a message turns into a legal matter, retention is extended until the matter closes.
Your rights
If you live in Nigeria, the EU, the United Kingdom or anywhere with equivalent data-protection law, you have the right to ask us what personal data we hold about you, to ask us to correct it if it is wrong, to ask us to delete it where we have no overriding reason to keep it, and to object to processing based on legitimate interest. Write to [email protected] and we will reply within thirty days. If you are not happy with our reply you can complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission. We do not charge a fee for exercising these rights and we do not require you to prove anything beyond that the request is yours.
Third parties
We use a small number of third-party services to run this site: an analytics provider that counts page views without identifying you personally, an email service that handles the newsletter, a tracking network that attributes affiliate clicks and a hosting provider that stores the pages. Each has its own privacy policy and we only share with them the data they need to do their job. We do not sell personal data to any third party and we do not share your email address with the operators we review. Where a third party is based outside Nigeria we rely on contractual safeguards that keep your data protected to the same standard as inside the country.
What we collect
When you visit a page we collect the usual server-log fields: the URL you asked for, the time of the request, your IP address, the browser and operating system you used and the page that referred you. If you subscribe to the newsletter we also collect your email address and the date you subscribed. If you contact us by email we keep the thread and your reply address. We do not use fingerprinting, we do not run session recording and we do not place marketing cookies that follow you to other sites. If a page offers an interactive feature such as a comment form, the only extra data it collects is what you type into the form.
How we use
We use the data above to run the site: to see which pages are read and which are ignored, to serve the newsletter to people who asked for it, to answer email, to attribute affiliate commissions and to defend the site against spam and attacks. We do not use any of this data to build a profile of your political views, your health, your religion or your sexual orientation; those are categories the Nigeria Data Protection Act treats as sensitive and we have no editorial reason to process them. We do not use personal data to train artificial-intelligence models and we do not share data with ad networks for retargeting.