Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains what information Omonar collects when you visit omonar.com or interact with us, how we use it, and the choices you have. If any of this is unclear, or you want to exercise a right described below, email us at desk@omonar.com.

1. Information we collect

Automatically, when you visit the Site. Our hosting provider records basic technical information about each request: your IP address, the user-agent string your browser sends, the URL you requested, and the timestamp. We use this to run the Site, debug problems, and defend against abuse.

When you subscribe to the newsletter. We collect and store the email address you enter.

When you pitch, tip, correct, or otherwise write to us. We keep the email address you wrote from and the contents of your message for as long as it’s editorially useful.

Product analytics and error monitoring. We use PostHog to count page views, watch for client-side errors, measure how article and newsletter funnels perform, and record a small sample of visits as anonymized session replays. PostHog is configured so anonymous visitors never get a persistent person profile: only counted, aggregated events. Form fields are masked before a replay leaves your browser, and query strings are stripped from the URLs we record, so anything riding in a link (a token, an email address) is never sent.

Audience measurement. We also use Google Analytics 4, loaded through Google Tag Manager, to understand how readers find us and which stories travel. Google Signals is switched off, so this data is not joined to Google’s advertising profiles. If we add measurement tools beyond what is described here, we’ll update this Policy first and flag the change in the newsletter.

Advertising. The Site carries display advertising served through Mediavine. Mediavine and the advertising partners it works with may set cookies or read a device identifier to choose which ads you see, to cap how often you see the same one, and to detect invalid traffic. Those partners, and what each of them does with the data, are listed inside the consent tool reachable from the Cookie choices link in the footer. Advertising partners may also use Chrome’s Topics API, which infers broad interest categories from your own browsing and shares only those labels. We do not give any advertiser your email address or anything else you send us directly. Some articles also include clearly labeled affiliate links; see section 8.

Reader accounts and saved articles. The Site uses audience tools from Mediavine, which let you create a reader account, save articles, and follow the Site. These store an identifier in your browser so the Site can recognize you on your next visit, and anything you enter when creating an account goes to Mediavine. What it collects and how long it keeps it are described in Mediavine’s privacy policy.

2. Cookies and similar technologies

The Site uses these cookies and equivalent browser storage:

• Analytics (PostHog): one first-party cookie plus local storage, holding a random device identifier and the current session id. Kept up to 12 months.
• Analytics (Google Analytics 4): the _ga and _ga_* cookies, which tell one browser apart from another. Kept up to 24 months.
• Advertising (Mediavine): cookies and equivalent storage set by Mediavine and its advertising partners to select ads, limit repeats, and detect invalid traffic, along with the record of the consent choice you made in their tool. Retention is set by each of those companies and described in their own privacy policies.
• Reader accounts (Mediavine): local storage holding an identifier for your reader account and the articles you have saved. Set whether or not you sign in, and retained per the Mediavine privacy policy.
• Consent and region: two of our own. omo_geo holds the two-letter country code our CDN reports, lasts 12 hours, and is used only to decide whether to show you the cookie banner. omo_consent records your answer for 12 months so you are not asked again.

If you are in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland, none of the analytics or advertising cookies above are set until you accept them. Until you do, Google Analytics stays in a consent-denied state and PostHog keeps everything in memory for the current page only, with session replay switched off. Ads still appear, but they are chosen without cookies and without any profile of you, and declining keeps them that way permanently. Your answer is collected through our advertising partner’s own consent tool, which also covers the other companies it works with and which you can reopen at any time through the Cookie choices link in the footer. A decline is honored wherever you are, not only in those regions.

3. How we use your information

We use the information described above to:

• Deliver the newsletter you subscribed to.
• Respond to pitches, tips, corrections, and other messages.
• Operate, maintain, secure, and improve the Site.
• Comply with legal obligations and enforce our Terms of Use.

We do not sell your personal information, and we never hand an advertiser your email address or anything else you send us directly. Serving ads does involve our advertising partners processing your device and browsing signals as described in sections 1 and 2, which some state privacy laws treat as “sharing” for targeted advertising. You can opt out of it anywhere in the world through the Cookie choices link in the footer, and we also honor the Global Privacy Control signal automatically if your browser sends one. Affiliate links in articles send no personal information to the merchant; clicking one is an ordinary link visit.

4. Service providers

We rely on a small number of service providers to run the Site. They receive only what they need to perform their service and are contractually required to protect it:

• Website hosting: serving the Site and maintaining server logs.
• Data storage and authentication: storing editorial data and managing staff sign-in.
• Product analytics and error monitoring: helping us understand aggregate Site usage, catch client-side errors, and monitor system health.
• Audience measurement: Google (Analytics 4 and Tag Manager), showing us how readers reach the Site and which stories they read.
• Email delivery: sending newsletters and transactional replies.

We may also disclose information if we reasonably believe it’s required to comply with a law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request.

5. Data retention

• Newsletter email addresses are kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them.
• Messages you send us (pitches, tips, corrections) are kept for as long as they remain editorially useful, typically through publication of the related story and for a reasonable period after, for fact-checking and archiving.
• Server logs are kept for a short operational window (commonly around 30 days) per our hosting provider’s defaults, unless we need to retain them longer to investigate abuse.

6. Your rights

Everyone. You can ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, by emailing desk@omonar.com. We’ll respond within a reasonable time.

EEA and UK residents (GDPR / UK GDPR). Our lawful bases for processing are:

• Consent: when you subscribe to the newsletter, and for the analytics cookies described in section 2, which you can withdraw at any time through the Cookie choices link in the footer.
• Legitimate interests: operating the Site, security, debugging, and responding to messages you send us.
• Legal obligation: when the law requires it.

You have the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict, port, and object to our processing of your personal data, and to withdraw consent at any time. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority.

California residents (CCPA / CPRA). We do not “sell” or “share” personal information as those terms are defined under California law, and we do not process sensitive personal information for purposes that would require an opt-out right. Affiliate links set no cookies and pass no personal information to the merchant, so they are neither a “sale” nor “sharing” under California law. California residents have the right to know, delete, correct, and not be discriminated against for exercising these rights. Submit requests to desk@omonar.com; we’ll verify the request using your email address and any other information reasonably needed to confirm your identity.

7. Children

The Site is not directed to children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has sent us information, please contact desk@omonar.com and we’ll delete it.

8. Third-party links, embeds, and affiliate links

Our articles frequently link to, quote, and embed content from other sites: video platforms, social media posts, record labels, official artist pages, and so on. Those services have their own privacy practices; we aren’t responsible for them. When you interact with an embedded video, post, or widget, that platform may collect information about you independently of us. Embedded social media posts load from their platforms when the page opens, so those platforms can collect information about you even if you never click the post. Where we ask for consent, these posts load only after you accept, or after you press the load button on a post, which loads that platform’s posts on the page you are reading.

Affiliate links. Some articles include affiliate links, always labeled as such where they appear. If you buy something after following one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. These are plain links: they set no trackers of their own and pass no personal information to the merchant. The merchant will apply its own privacy practices once you arrive on its site. Our editorial coverage is never conditioned on an affiliate relationship, and no partner has any say in what we write.

9. International users

Omonar operates from the United States. If you write to us or visit the Site from outside the U.S., your information will be transferred to and processed in the U.S. and other countries where our service providers operate, which may have different data-protection laws than your country.

10. Security

We take reasonable measures (including TLS encryption in transit, access controls on our internal systems, and minimum-necessary data collection) to protect the information we hold. No online service is 100% secure, and we can’t guarantee absolute security. If we ever suffer a breach affecting your personal information, we’ll notify you in line with applicable law.

11. Changes to this Policy

When we update this Policy, we’ll change the “Last updated” date at the top and, for material changes, flag the update on the Site or in the newsletter. Continuing to use the Site after changes take effect means you accept the new Policy.

12. Contact

Privacy questions, requests, and complaints can be sent any time to desk@omonar.com.