Privacy Policy
This page sets out what Somali Update collects about you, why, who else ends up with it, and how you make it stop. Where the law wants precision we have used precise language rather than trying to be readable about it. Last updated: August 2026.
One thing first. The site is free because advertising pays for it, and advertising runs on data about readers. We need little of it ourselves. Most of what is gathered while you read is gathered by other companies, and our job is to keep that list short and the switch working.
What we collect
Some of it arrives whether anyone wants it or not. Every request your browser makes is logged: the IP address, the browser, the page you came from and the time. We use the logs to serve the site, to see what broke when something breaks, and to block traffic trying to hammer a news site over.
The rest we chose to collect, and each category has a reason we can give in one sentence.
- Analytics. Aggregate measurement of which pages were read, from which country and on what device. We look at whether the follow-up got read, not at who read it.
- Newsletter. The address you gave us, the date, and whether our sends arrive.
- Comment accounts. A display name, an email address, your comment, and the IP address it came from, which is our only defence against spam and impersonation.
- Email. Whatever you send to our one inbox.
- Advertising identifiers. Cookies and identifiers set by advertising vendors, an approximate location from your IP, and which ads were shown and clicked.
There is a lot we do not ask for. No date of birth, no gender, no documents, no payment details, because nothing here costs money. We build no reader profiles and attach no name to analytics. Our contact page explains how to reach us safely before you send a tip.
Why we process it, and on what basis
Where the UK and EU rules apply, three bases cover everything. The first is our legitimate interests as a publisher: delivering the pages you asked for, keeping the site up, preventing abuse, and defending ourselves against a legal claim about a story. Aggregate measurement sits here too.
The second is your consent. Advertising cookies are set only after you agree in the consent manager, and personalised advertising only where you have said yes. The newsletter runs on consent too, which is why ending it takes one click.
The third is legal obligation: records a business has to keep, and answering a valid legal demand. On this beat that is not hypothetical, so it gets a paragraph below.
Who else sees it, and where it goes
Running a news site means renting infrastructure. Our hosting and content delivery provider sees log data, an analytics provider handles the measurement above, an email service holds the newsletter list, and a spam filter checks comments. Each is a processor working on our instructions and may not use what it sees for its own purposes.
Advertising is different. Placements we do not sell directly are filled through the programmatic exchanges that serve our display inventory, and those vendors set their own identifiers. We restrict which categories may serve here and require every partner to honour the consent choices made on our pages. The live list of vendors is named inside the consent manager, because that list changes and a name printed here would be stale. Our advertising page covers what an advertiser can buy.
We do not sell reader email addresses, and newsletter sponsorship does not include the list. Reader information goes to authorities only against a legal demand valid where it is made, and where we may say a demand exists, we will. Requests aimed at identifying a source are the ones we spend money resisting, as our about page explains.
Because our vendors are rarely in the reader’s own country, personal data is transferred internationally, including to the United States. Where data protected by UK or EU law leaves that jurisdiction, we rely on an adequacy decision where one exists and otherwise on the standard contractual clauses.
Cookies, and the switch
The consent manager appears on your first visit and reopens from the site footer. It names the vendors and remembers your answer. Refusing everything except the strictly necessary category leaves the site fully readable.
Which cookie does what, and how to clear them, is in our cookie policy. A Global Privacy Control signal from your browser is treated as an opt out of sale and sharing.
Your rights in the UK and the EU
If the UK GDPR or the EU GDPR applies to you, you have rights we do not get to negotiate. Use them.
- Access: a copy of the data we hold about you.
- Rectification: correction of anything inaccurate.
- Erasure: deletion, where we have no overriding reason to keep it.
- Restriction: a pause while a dispute about accuracy is settled.
- Portability: a copy of whatever you handed over, in a format another service can read.
- Objection: to processing based on legitimate interests, and absolutely to direct marketing.
- Withdrawal of consent, at any time, without a reason.
- A complaint to your national data protection authority.
Write to support@somaliupdate.com with PRIVACY at the start of the subject line. We answer within a month, longer only if the request is genuinely complicated. We may ask one question to confirm you are the person the data belongs to, and no more: a policy demanding a passport scan before it deletes an email address has missed the point.
One limit, plainly. These rights cover data we hold about you as a reader. They are not a route to removing your name from a published story, and the law that grants them treats journalism separately. If an article is wrong, our corrections policy is the way in.
Your rights in California
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended you can ask what categories of personal information we hold and where they came from, ask for a copy, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. You can also tell us not to sell or share it, and we cannot treat you worse for asking.
We do not sell personal information for money. Serving personalised advertising through the programmatic chain can amount to sharing for cross-context behavioural advertising, so we treat it as sharing rather than argue the definition. The Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information control sits in the footer and in the consent manager, and we honour Global Privacy Control signals. We do not knowingly sell or share the information of anyone under 16.
How long we keep it, and children
Server logs stay in identifiable form for weeks, then go or are reduced to counts. Analytics is kept in aggregate and never tied to a name. Newsletter addresses stay until you unsubscribe, after which we keep a minimal record so we do not add you back by accident. Comments stay while the article is published.
Email is kept while it is live, and a message about a correction stays with the record of that correction, because a corrections log with the reasons stripped out is not a log. Advertising identifiers are held by the vendors that set them, for the periods their disclosures state.
This site is not directed at children. We aim no part of it at readers under 13, do not knowingly collect their information, and do not allow our inventory to be sold as child-directed. Where local rules set the age of digital consent at 16, we apply 16. A parent who thinks a child gave us an address should write, and we will delete it.
Changes, and where to write
When this policy changes we change the date at the top. If a change alters what we collect or who receives it, we say so in a notice on the site and in the newsletter rather than reissue the document quietly.
Privacy requests go to support@somaliupdate.com with PRIVACY in the subject line. It is the only address we run, the editors read it, and the rest of the rules for using the site are in our terms of service.
