Privacy Policy
This privacy policy is common across Podnews, Podjobs, New Podcasts, and our *.podnews.network servers. The Podcast Business Journal has a separate privacy statement (which is even simpler!)
Emails
We collect email addresses for our newsletters using our own newsletter server. Our email list is not available to any third party. We will not use your email address for any purpose other than to send you the newsletter that you have subscribed to.
When subscribing using the website we require double opt-in, to ensure that the email address is yours. During the subscription process, we passively collect and store your country (from Amazon CloudFront’s data), and during the subscription process, we check other ephemeral information about your visit to ensure you’re a person and not a robot. (Email us to ask more if you’d like).
For our email, we anonymously monitor open rates and clicks on stories for editorial feedback. We are unable to identify clicks or opens from individual users.
We do not give any personally-identifiable data about our subscribers to any third party. We may aggregate information in a non-personal way for current/potential advertisers, or for bragging rights.
You can unsubscribe directly from every newsletter using the unsubscribe link in every one. That will instantly stop our emails, and will send you full user account deletion information.
Our website and servers
We use Amazon AWS infrastructure to cache, host and serve this site, and to send emails. You can read their privacy policy.
We use our own anonymous page tracker, and may collect server logs including IP addresses and user-agents for technical and budgetary reasons: both sets of data are deleted after a maximum of 180 days. We don’t specifically maintain server logs for the servers that deal with creating user logins, or when you click through to a story (though logs are kept locally for 24 hours or so). We occasionally use Slack alerts for error tracking, which may contain ephemeral logfile information.
We host our own RSS feeds and images; this privacy policy goes for those, too.
Our websites and database is hosted within the EU, and cached globally. We use a mixture of EU and non-EU servers to send mail. Received email is mirrored on global infrastructure operated by a variety of organisations.
On our index page, we’re using Cloudflare’s Turnstile, a privacy-aware method of testing whether the person subscribing is a real human being. The library is, unavoidably, loaded every pageload, but the code is only run when a user types their email address. We’d prefer not to run this at all, but our popularity unfortunately comes at a cost of being targeted by a few bots.
Our classified advertising system collects your email address. It uses Stripe to collect payments; when you pay by credit card, your address, zip code, IP address and other personal details are collected by Stripe. Much of that data is available to us in Stripe’s dashboard (though we can’t see your full credit card number). Here’s Stripe’s privacy policy.
Audio files played on our podcast pages are referenced directly from the podcast provider, but only connect when you hit play.
Links to Apple Podcasts go through a redirector to connect you to the correct Apple Podcasts storefront. This uses VIEWER_COUNTRY_CODE data from Amazon Cloudfront.
Some pages unavoidably have additional privacy implications: podcast pages for Spotify-exclusive podcasts include a Spotify embedded player, for example, and search results may include images from other websites. We’ll clearly identify any of these conditions on those pages. (Vimeo and YouTube players are only embedded after you click to play them).
Cookies
To read our website, or email, we do not use cookies.
When you log in
We leave one cookie called classifieds, visible to pages within the /classifieds/ folder only, which is a personal cookie to let us know who you are. We ask for your consent for this cookie as you log in. Similar cookies are used by Podjobs (and visible only to pages starting /add/). We use classified as a legacy name, since that’s all there was once.
We leave another cookie, visible to all pages, which is simply loggedin=true. It has no personal information: it just lets us know whether to display a login button in the UI, or a link to a more personalised page.
If your account allows directory editing privileges, you’re given another cookie, which is again simply edittools=true - not personally identifiable but it gives an edit button in the UI. That’s visible to all pages. It doesn’t give any privileges, obviously, without checking your personal cookie.
We don’t ask for permission to leave the loggedin or edittools cookies, because as simple “true/false” values, they are not personally identifiable data, and we cannot use them to track you.
When you search
Our search feature is highly targeted by bots. So, the first time you search in a 24 hour period, we run Cloudflare’s Turnstile product to check if you’re a human.
Once we’ve checked, we leave a cooke currently called human=true. If we see this, we won’t run a human check the next time. (We’ll change this up once the bots learn about it.)
We don’t ask for permission to leave the human cookie, because it is not personally identifiable data, and we cannot use it to track you.
Visitors to the Podnews Weekly Review website
This is not the privacy policy for the Podnews Weekly Review website, at https://weekly.podnews.net/ - that’s operated by Buzzsprout.
If you visit that, Buzzsprout will drop a cookie called _buzzsprout_session. It is visible available across the entire *.podnews.net domain.
Our website doesn’t use this cookie, and we’ll delete it for you as soon as we see it.
For podcast listeners
This section is intended for listeners of the Podnews Daily and New Podcasts podcasts, which are available on a variety of third-party platforms.
We use the Open Podcast Prefix Project to measure and analyze our podcast traffic. The service has a full privacy policy here; it does not retain or analyse any IP addresses without one-way encryption first.
When you download these podcasts, in its entirety, we (at Podnews) get to know five things about you:
- Your device’s user agent (the name of the app you’re using, and often the type of device you’re connecting with).
- Sometimes we learn a referral address, showing us the website or path you took to listen to the podcast.
- Your IP address. This is normally a 12-digit number (or a longer IPv6 identifier), from which it is possible to work out your approximate location, often down to your suburb, and the name of your ISP or mobile provider. Sometimes it’s possible to work out your employer or school from an IP address.
- The date and time of the download.
- What file you downloaded, and (for Podnews Daily) whether you downloaded all of it or just a little bit.
Whatever app you listen on, your playback data may also be collected by that app, and you should check the privacy policy of the podcast app that you use.
Impressum and DMCA procedure
These details are in our 'about’ section.
Recent updates to this policy
The following are material updates over the last twelve months.
26 Mar 2025: Added the search cookie; and removed Podscribe (in the event, we used it for 48 hours).
22 Jan 2025: Added Podscribe for our podcast.
17 Sep 2024: Removed mention of the Podclock podcast. Added a geo-redirect for Apple Podcasts web.
15 May 2024: Removed the use of Plausible, which we ran for about a month.