Privacy Notice
Compass Intel is a personal publication about security news and analysis. It is deliberately built to collect as little about you as possible: there are no accounts, no comments, no tracking scripts and no advertising network. This notice explains the little that does happen.
Who is responsible
Compass Intel is written and published from the United Kingdom by an individual working under that name. The publisher is the data controller for the limited processing described below.
Email is the contact channel for everything: questions about this notice, corrections, data requests and complaints. Write to compass.cyber.intel@protonmail.com and you will get a reply.
The site is published under a pseudonym for personal safety reasons, which is common in security writing. That does not reduce your rights or my obligations — every request described in this notice is handled in full, through the address above.
What is collected
Compass Intel itself does not collect anything. However, like every website, it is served by a hosting provider that keeps standard server access logs. These typically record:
- your IP address
- the date and time of the request
- the page or file requested
- your browser and operating system (the 'user agent' string)
- the referring page, if you arrived via a link
These logs are generated and held by Netlify, the hosting provider, and are used only to keep the site running, diagnose faults and identify abuse such as denial-of-service traffic or scanning. They are not used to build a profile of you, and they are not combined with anything else.
The lawful basis for this is legitimate interests (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) — specifically, the interest in operating a secure and reliable website. You can object to this processing at any time using the contact address above.
Cookies and tracking
This site sets no cookies. There is no analytics package, no tag manager, no session storage, no advertising pixel and no third-party embed. There is nothing here for you to consent to or opt out of, which is why you will not see a cookie banner.
Fonts are served from this site's own server rather than a third-party CDN, so loading a page does not disclose your IP address to any font provider.
[If you later add analytics, replace this section. Cookieless, self-hosted analytics can stay consent-free if the data is used solely for aggregate statistics and stays under your control; anything sent to a third party for their own purposes – Google Analytics included – needs a consent banner.]
Links to other sites
Articles here link to vendor advisories, research write-ups, news reports and other external sources. Once you follow one of those links you are on someone else's site, subject to their privacy practices, not this one. Their handling of your data is outside my control and outside the scope of this notice.
How long anything is kept
Server logs are retained by Netlify for a short period — typically no more than a few days, in line with Netlify's own log retention practices — and then deleted automatically. Any email you send me is kept for as long as needed to deal with it, and then deleted.
Where data is held
This site is hosted via Netlify's global content delivery network. Netlify, Inc. is based in the United States, so some processing of server logs may take place there. Where that happens, the transfer is made under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or, where that safeguard does not apply, the standard contractual clauses set out in Netlify's own Data Processing Agreement.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you have the right to ask for a copy of any personal data held about you, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to how it is used and to have it transferred elsewhere. Requests are free and I will respond within one month.
In practice, server logs are hard to link to an individual without more information, so a request may need enough detail to identify the relevant entries – or may not be something I can fulfil at all, in which case I will explain why.
If you are unhappy with how a request is handled, please raise it with me first so I have a chance to put it right. You can then complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.
Changes to this notice
If the site changes in a way that affects your data – adding a newsletter, a contact form, comments or analytics – this notice will be updated before that feature goes live, and the date at the top will change.