Effective date: July 30, 2026
This policy covers visitors to this website. It explains what information Plainly Now (plainlynow.com) collects when you visit, why, how long we keep it, and what rights you have. Personal data we process about people who appear in the news is a separate matter, described near the end of this page.
The short version
Plainly Now is built to collect as little as possible. There are no reader accounts, no comments, no newsletter, no advertising, and no third-party analytics, cross-site tracking, persistent visitor identifiers, or behavioral profiling. What we have is the ordinary technical log web servers commonly keep in order to serve pages and stay secure; we may derive basic aggregate traffic counts from those logs. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and limited technical information is processed by the service providers that host, secure, and operate the site.
Who is responsible for your data
The data controller is the individual publisher of Plainly Now, established in Latvia. Contact: contact@plainlynow.com.
Plainly Now is operated from Latvia, in the European Union. We process personal data in accordance with applicable EU and Latvian data-protection law, including the GDPR, while writing for a United States audience.
Information we collect
Server logs
When your browser requests a page from this site, our web server automatically records standard technical information about the request. Server logs are the only category we collect automatically; email you choose to send us is described below. A log entry consists of:
- the IP address the request came from;
- the user-agent string your browser sends (for example, browser and operating-system type);
- the date and time of the request;
- the URL requested, and whether the server answered it successfully.
We treat IP addresses and other online identifiers in server logs as personal data.
Information we do not collect
As of the effective date above, Plainly Now does not:
- offer reader accounts, logins, or profiles;
- host comments, forums, or reader submissions on the site;
- operate a newsletter or mailing list;
- display advertising or use ad networks;
- use analytics, measurement, or tracking services, first-party or third-party;
- use tracking pixels, web beacons, fingerprinting, or session-replay tools;
- process payments or collect any financial information;
- knowingly collect sensitive personal information such as health, biometric, precise geolocation, race, religion, or union membership data.
Images shown in articles are hosted on our own servers, and we do not intentionally load third-party resources on article pages. Loading an image produces the same server-log entry as loading any other part of the page.
Email you send us
If you write to contact@plainlynow.com — for a correction, a question, or a legal notice — we receive whatever you put in that message, including your email address. We use it to respond to you and to keep a record of correction requests and legal notices. You do not have to give us your name; we need a return address only in order to reply. Please do not send us sensitive personal information by email.
Unsolicited tips
If you send us a story tip, we keep what you send only as long as we need it to evaluate the story. A tip may contain information about other people; we do not republish that information unless it is independently verified under our Editorial Policy. Sending us a tip does not make it confidential — email to a published address is not a secure or confidential channel, and we cannot treat it as one.
Cookies and similar technologies
Plainly Now does not set advertising, analytics, or tracking cookies. As of the effective date, our own technical check shows that this site sets no cookies for ordinary readers and loads no third-party resources on its pages. If that changes, this policy changes first. Readers are not asked to accept cookies because, as a reader, you are not given any. The underlying publishing software (WordPress) sets cookies only for a signed-in administrator of the site — that is, for the publisher, not for visitors.
Why we collect this information
We use server-log information only for these purposes:
- Operating the site — delivering pages and images, and diagnosing errors when something breaks.
- Security — detecting and blocking abuse such as automated scraping, attempted intrusions, and denial-of-service traffic.
- Basic aggregate traffic understanding — for example, how many requests a page received. We may do this from raw logs, not from a tracking service, and not tied to an identified individual.
- Legal compliance — retaining or producing records where the law requires it.
We do not use this information for advertising, profiling, or automated decisions about you, and we do not use it for any purpose materially different from the ones listed above.
Our legal bases
Under the GDPR, every purpose needs a legal basis. Ours are these, in plain words:
- Server logs — our legitimate interests, Article 6(1)(f): keeping the site secure, preventing abuse, and diagnosing failures when something breaks. This basis requires us to weigh our interest against your privacy, and we have: that balancing is exactly why we keep the data minimal and short-lived, take nothing beyond what a web server records in order to answer a request, and delete it on the short schedule described below — and logging a request is what any visitor reasonably expects a web server to do.
- Email you send us — our legitimate interests, Article 6(1)(f), in answering you and keeping a record of the correspondence, so that we can show what was asked and what we did about it.
- Legal notices and correction records — establishing, exercising, or defending legal claims. Where a message becomes a legal notice or a record of a correction to an article, we keep and use it on that basis.
Where we are required by law to retain or produce a record, we process it to comply with that legal obligation.
Who has access to this information
Server logs are accessible to the publisher of Plainly Now and to the hosting and email providers that run the site’s infrastructure. Those providers are service providers who process this data on our behalf and on our instructions, and not for their own purposes. Where any provider processes personal data outside the European Economic Area, we rely on recognized transfer safeguards — an adequacy decision, such as the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, or standard contractual clauses. The specific production providers will be listed here when the site’s production infrastructure is finalized. We do not give log data to advertisers, data brokers, or analytics companies, because we do not work with any.
Producing an article involves third-party AI model providers, which process research material and article drafts on our behalf during production. They are processors of editorial content, not of reader information: they do not receive reader data. We do not intentionally submit reader email or server-log data to AI model providers.
We may disclose information if we are legally required to — for example, in response to a valid subpoena, court order, or other lawful demand — or where disclosure is necessary to investigate a security incident or to protect the rights and safety of others. We will not volunteer reader information outside those circumstances.
We do not sell or share personal information
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are used in the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act. We do not do so. We do not offer financial incentives in exchange for personal information, and we do not discriminate against anyone for exercising a privacy right.
We make this statement whether or not those laws currently apply to this site, so that you do not have to guess.
Your rights
Because we are established in the European Union, the GDPR gives you the following rights over personal data we hold about you. In plain words, you can ask us:
- for access — to be told whether we hold personal data about you, and to get a copy of it;
- for rectification — to correct data that is wrong or incomplete;
- for erasure — to delete data we no longer have a good reason to keep;
- for restriction — to pause our use of data while a dispute about it is sorted out;
- to object — because we process server logs and correspondence on the basis of our legitimate interests, you can object to that processing, and we must stop unless we can show compelling grounds that override your rights;
- for portability — where it applies, to receive data you gave us in a machine-readable form.
You also have the right to complain to a data-protection supervisory authority. Ours is Latvia’s Datu valsts inspekcija (dvi.gov.lv); you may also complain to the authority in the country where you live.
Separately, some US state privacy laws give residents rights to know what personal information a business holds about them, to get a copy of it, to correct it, to delete it, and to opt out of sale, sharing, or targeted advertising. We will make reasonable efforts to honor such requests too, to the extent a request is something we can actually act on. Other privacy and consumer-protection laws may still apply to us, and we honor rights required by any law that does.
To make a request, email contact@plainlynow.com with “Privacy request” in the subject line and tell us what you want. Two honest limits apply:
- Because we hold no accounts and no identifiers beyond raw server logs, we usually cannot connect a log entry to a named person. We will not ask you for more personal information than we already have just to try. If we cannot verify that a record relates to you, we will tell you that instead of handing over someone else’s data.
- Server logs age out on the schedule described below, so a deletion request is often satisfied by ordinary retention before we can act on it.
An authorized agent may submit a request on your behalf if they provide proof that you authorized them. Exercising these rights is free. We respond within one month; complex requests can take up to two months longer, and we will tell you if that happens.
Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track
We recognize Global Privacy Control (GPC) signals. Because we do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, receiving a GPC signal does not change our current practices — there is nothing for it to opt you out of. If that ever changes, we will honor GPC as required and update this page first.
We do not respond differently to Do Not Track signals, because we do not engage in cross-site tracking in the first place.
How long we keep information
Our rule is that server logs are not kept longer than 30 days; a specific record may be kept longer for an active security investigation or a legal hold.
Ordinary email you send us is kept for up to 12 months after the correspondence ends, and then deleted.
Correction records and legal notices are kept while the underlying article remains published, or while a dispute or a limitation period is still running — whichever ends later. They are not kept indefinitely as a matter of course.
Story tips are deleted when we decide not to pursue the story, or after publication once we no longer need them.
Children’s privacy
Plainly Now is a general-audience news site. It is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. This is consistent with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). If you believe a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, email contact@plainlynow.com and we will delete any record we can identify as relating to that child; server logs contain no names, so we may be unable to locate a specific visitor’s entries. We also do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16 — we do not do so for anyone, of any age.
Links to other sites
Articles link to sources and other websites. Those sites are run by other people under their own privacy practices. Once you follow a link, this policy no longer covers you. A link is a citation, not an endorsement of the destination’s privacy practices.
Security
We apply software updates on a regular schedule, limit administrative access, and hold as little data as possible — the strongest privacy protection available to a site like this one is simply not collecting things. That said, no website, server, or transmission over the internet can be guaranteed to be completely secure, and we do not claim otherwise. We cannot promise that unauthorized access will never happen.
Where we operate, and where your data goes
As stated at the top of this page, Plainly Now is operated from Latvia, in the European Union, and we apply EU and Latvian data-protection law, including the GDPR, while writing for a United States audience. The same rules apply to you wherever you read from — we do not run a weaker policy for readers outside Europe.
The technical information described above is processed by the publisher and by the hosting and email providers that run the site. Where any of that processing happens outside the European Economic Area, we rely on recognized transfer safeguards — an adequacy decision, such as the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, or standard contractual clauses. A copy of the standard contractual clauses we rely on is available on request from contact@plainlynow.com.
Personal data in our journalism
This policy covers visitors to this website. Separately, the newsroom processes personal data about people in the news — public figures, people named in documents, people who are part of a story — for journalistic purposes. EU and Latvian law treat that processing under specific journalism provisions (GDPR Article 85), which balance data protection against freedom of expression and information. Those provisions exist so that reporting is not switched off by a request to delete an inconvenient fact. In publishing news about identifiable people, we rely on the journalistic-purposes provisions of EU and Latvian data-protection law, and no decision producing legal or similarly significant effects about any person is taken solely by automated means — the editorial rules the automation applies are set and reviewed by the publisher.
If you are named or described in an article and something is wrong, or you want material about you removed, write to contact@plainlynow.com. Corrections and removal requests are handled the way our Editorial Policy describes, and that is the route we ask you to use first.
Changes to this policy
Plainly Now’s data practices are deliberately minimal, and this policy describes them as they actually are today. If that changes — if we ever add analytics, advertising, a newsletter, comments, accounts, or any other feature that collects more than server logs — we will update this policy before the change goes live, not after, and we will change the effective date at the top. Material changes will be noted on this page so a returning reader can see that something moved. Changes apply to use of the site after they are posted; we will not apply them retroactively.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or privacy requests, go to contact@plainlynow.com. Email is our only contact channel; we do not offer telephone support. The data controller — the individual publisher of Plainly Now, established in Latvia — and how to reach them are described above.