Privacy policy.

Information you give us

Comments. To comment on a story you give a display name, an e-mail address and your comment. Your name, the comment and its date are shown publicly once a moderator approves it. Your e-mail address is never shown on the site; editors use it only to deal with the comment, for example if it needs clarification or breaches our rules.

Messages. If you e-mail us, we receive your address and whatever you include in the message, and use it to reply and to follow up on corrections, tips or business enquiries.

Staff accounts. Hobe News journalists and editors sign in to our publishing tool with a name, e-mail address and password. Readers do not have accounts.

Hobe News does not currently run an e-mail newsletter and does not collect e-mail addresses for one.

Information collected automatically

Like any website, our servers and network providers receive technical information with each request: your IP address, browser and device type, the page requested and the referring page. We use it to deliver pages, keep the site secure and limit abuse such as automated comment spam.

Story readership. We count how many times each story is read. The count records only totals per story and day, broken down by device class (mobile, tablet or desktop) and by whether the visit came directly, from a search engine, from social media or from another site. It stores no name, address or other identifier. A small cookie notes which stories your browser has already been counted for that day so a reload is not counted twice; it expires after 24 hours.

Hobe News does not use Google Analytics or any other third-party analytics service.

Cookies and similar storage

We use the following without asking, because the site needs them to work as you would expect:

• your reading language, saved stories and story-alert preferences, kept in your browser’s local storage;
• your privacy choice, so we do not ask again;
• the 24-hour readership cookie described above;
• a secure session cookie for staff who sign in to the publishing tool.

Advertising cookies are optional. They are only used if you choose “Accept advertising cookies”. You can change your choice at any time with the Cookie settings link at the bottom of every page.

Advertising

Hobe News is funded partly by advertising. On English-language pages, and only if you accept advertising cookies, we use Google AdSense. When it loads, third-party vendors including Google use cookies and similar technologies to serve ads based on your visits to this and other websites, to limit how often you see an ad, to measure ads and to detect fraud. Google may collect identifiers such as cookie IDs and your IP address for these purposes.

You can choose not to receive personalised ads from Google at Google’s ad settings, and learn more in how Google uses information from sites that use its services. Your browser or device settings can also block or delete cookies.

If you decline advertising cookies, no Google advertising code is loaded. Kinyarwanda-language pages never carry Google ads. Sponsor banners booked directly with Hobe News are images on our own servers; clicks on them are counted as totals, using your IP address only briefly so repeated clicks are not counted twice.

Story alerts

If you turn on story alerts, your browser gives us a push-notification address and the encryption keys needed to deliver alerts, along with your chosen language. This address is issued by your browser’s push service; it does not include your name or e-mail. Turning alerts off removes the subscription from our records straight away. If you block notifications in your browser instead, the subscription is removed once deliveries to it start failing.

Service providers

We do not sell personal information. We share it only with services that help us run the site:

• Hubfly, which hosts the website, its database and uploaded images on servers in the European Union;
• Cloudflare, which routes traffic to hobenews.com and protects it from attacks;
• Google, for advertising on English pages when you have accepted advertising cookies;
• your browser’s push service (for example Google, Mozilla or Apple), which delivers story alerts you asked for;
• our e-mail provider, which delivers account e-mails to staff.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it.

How long we keep information

We keep comments, with the name and e-mail address given, for as long as the story they belong to is published, unless you ask us to remove them or a moderator deletes them. Abuse-prevention counters linked to IP addresses are kept only for short time windows. Story-alert subscriptions last until you turn them off. Staff sign-in sessions expire after at most seven days. E-mails are kept as long as needed to deal with them.

Your choices and rights

You can ask to see the personal information we hold about you, to correct it or to have it deleted, including a comment you posted, by writing to [email protected]. Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to object to some uses and to complain to a data-protection authority. We will answer within a reasonable time.

Security

The site is served only over encrypted HTTPS connections. Staff passwords are stored only as strong one-way hashes, and access to our systems is restricted. No system is perfectly secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security, but we work to protect the information we hold.

Children

Hobe News is a general news publication and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has given us personal information, please contact us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

We will update this page when our practices change and revise the date at the top. Significant changes will be noted on the site.

Contact

Questions about privacy: [email protected]. See also our terms of use and contact page.