Privacy policy

Atlas of Today’s World is an independent encyclopedia of the present. You can read everything without an account, and we collect as little about you as we can. Questions and requests about your data: mucka@atlasoftodaysworld.org.

Reading the Atlas

• We do not use advertising or tracking cookies, and we do not build profiles of readers.
• Our hosting provider (Vercel) keeps short-lived technical logs, including IP addresses, to run and protect the site.
• We count visits with Vercel Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and stores no personal data — only anonymous totals such as page views and countries.
• We also count a few actions — a click on “Donate & Join”, a newsletter sign-up, a share, a visit that arrives from an AI assistant — as anonymous daily totals per section of the site. No cookie is set and nothing about you is stored with them; like searches, they are rate-limited by a one-way hash of your IP address.
• To open the globe over your country, the home page asks our server for the country of your IP address (as our hosting provider sees it). Only the two-letter country code is used, in your browser, and it is not stored.
• The globe loads map tiles and fonts from MapTiler or Esri and from OpenMapTiles. Your browser contacts those servers directly, so they see your IP address.
• Searches are rate-limited to stop abuse. For that we store a one-way hash of your IP address for up to a day, never the address itself.

Accounts

You can create an account with Google. We receive and store your e-mail address and the name on your Google profile, and we keep a session cookie that is strictly necessary to keep you signed in. Members of the Atlas team also have a role and, for some roles, a second factor (an authenticator app). Changes made in the editorial system are logged for 12 months without personal details.

You can delete your account at any time on the account page. That removes your profile and personal data from our database.

Newsletter

If you sign up, your e-mail address goes to Mailchimp, which sends the newsletter on our behalf. You confirm the subscription by clicking a link in a first e-mail (double opt-in), and every newsletter has an unsubscribe link.

Volunteer editors

If you apply to write for the Atlas as a volunteer, we keep your name, e-mail address and what you tell us in our database, so the editorial team can get in touch. Only the people who manage accounts can see it, and we delete it on request or when it is no longer needed.

If you applied without an account, you can ask us at any time for a copy of your application or for its deletion by writing to mucka@atlasoftodaysworld.org. We reply within 30 days.

Who processes the data

• Supabase — database and sign-in, hosted in Frankfurt (EU).
• Vercel — hosting of the website.
• Google — sign-in, only if you choose to sign in.
• Mailchimp — newsletter, only if you subscribe.
• Stripe — donations. Card details are entered only on Stripe's page and never reach us; we receive your e-mail, the amount and the state of a monthly donation.
• Cloudflare — bot protection (Turnstile) on sign-in and on the newsletter and volunteer forms.

How long we keep data

• Your account and what you saved in it: until you delete the account. Deleting it removes your profile, membership, invitations, volunteer applications and the files you uploaded that no article uses.
• Security log: records of changes made in the administration are kept for 12 months and contain no e-mail addresses or message texts.
• Abuse protection: short-lived counters of hashed IP addresses and e-mails that expire within hours.
• Hosting logs: our providers (Vercel, Supabase, Cloudflare) keep technical access logs for a limited time under their own policies, typically days to a few weeks.
• Newsletter: until you unsubscribe; Mailchimp keeps the subscription history.
• Monthly donations without an account: your e-mail and the state of the donation while it runs; we delete them when the donation ends or move them to your membership when you sign in with that e-mail. Stripe keeps payment records as the law requires.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask what data we hold about you, have it corrected or deleted, object to processing, and complain to your data protection authority. The legal basis is your consent (newsletter, account) and our legitimate interest in running a secure website (technical logs, abuse protection).