What we keep, and what we do not.

The short version: there is no advertising, no third-party tracking, no recommendation engine, and no analytics that follow you around the internet. The site stores only what is required to deliver the bulletin to the people who have asked for it.

Who is responsible

SmarterArticles.fm is run by Tim Green, operating as a sole trader, who is the data controller for any personal information described here. Questions, requests, and corrections may be sent to contact@smarterarticles.fm; replies are written by hand and may take a fortnight.

What we collect, and why

Two things, and only when there is a reason for them. If you subscribe to the weekly bulletin, your email address is held so that the bulletin can be sent to you, and for nothing else. Subscription is confirmed twice: your address does nothing until you click the link in a confirmation email, so a stranger cannot sign you up against your wishes. The lawful basis is your consent, which you may withdraw at any time.

When the subscribe form is submitted, your IP address is recorded briefly so the form can be rate-limited against abuse — so that one address cannot flood the list, and one recipient cannot be signed up over and over. The lawful basis is our legitimate interest in keeping the service working. It is never used to identify or profile you.

That is the whole of it. We do not ask for your name, we build no profile of you, and we collect nothing about which pages you read or which bulletins you play.

What stays on your device

When you listen, the audio player remembers where you stopped, so that you can pick a bulletin back up. That position is stored only in your own browser, expires after ninety days, and is never sent to us or to anyone else.

Cookies

We set no cookies of our own, and nothing we place on the site tracks you. The audio in each bulletin is streamed from our podcast host, Captivate, and when you press play your browser fetches it from captivate.fm directly. In the course of serving that audio, Captivate sets cookies scoped to its own domain, some of which are analytics cookies it uses to measure how the shows it hosts are listened to. Those cookies are set by Captivate, on its own account; we do not set them, we do not read them, and what they collect is beyond our control. They are governed by Captivate’s own privacy practices, not ours.

Who we share it with

A small number of providers process data on our behalf, each acting only on our instructions, none of which sells it or puts it to its own use:

• Resend delivers the confirmation email and the bulletin itself, and so receives your email address for that purpose.
• Vercel hosts the site and serves its pages.
• Neon provides the database in which subscriber records are kept.
• Captivate hosts and streams the bulletin audio you hear on the site; your browser fetches each episode from it directly. We do not forward your email address — or any other subscriber data — to Captivate. The cookies it sets in the course of serving that audio are described above.

The bulletin is also published as a podcast feed. If you listen through a podcast app of your own choosing, that app is an independent service with its own privacy practices, over which we have no control.

What we do not do

There is no advertising, no third-party tracking, no analytics, no recommendation engine, no profiling, and no selling or sharing of personal data for anyone else’s purposes. This is a deliberate condition of the bulletin, not an oversight awaiting correction.

How long we keep it

Your email address is kept for as long as you are subscribed. Every bulletin carries an unsubscribe link at its foot; clicking it stops the bulletin at once. We retain the record only to remember that you have unsubscribed, so that you are not added again by mistake — if you would prefer the record erased entirely, ask, and it will be. The brief IP records used for rate-limiting are kept only for that purpose.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 you have the right to:

• ask what personal data we hold about you, and receive a copy;
• have inaccurate data corrected;
• have your data erased;
• restrict or object to how it is processed;
• withdraw your consent — the unsubscribe link in every bulletin does this in one click.

To exercise any of these, write to contact@smarterarticles.fm. If you believe we have handled your data improperly, you also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

Changes to this notice

If this notice changes in any material way, the change will be made here and the date below updated. This notice was last updated on 26 May 2026.