Privacy Policy

Last updated 23 September 2026.

Who we are

urgent.news is an independent news aggregator. Questions about privacy or this policy: legal@urgent.news.

What we collect

Reading urgent.news requires no account, sign-up, or personal details, and we run no advertising. The site sets a small set of first-party cookies that remember your own choices, described below. Separately, we keep an aggregate count of requests — described under Measurement — which records nothing that identifies you.

Since 22 September 2026 the site also carries a product-analytics tool, PostHog, which records how pages are used and can replay a visit as a reconstruction of the screen. This is a real change from what this page said before, and it is set out in full under Analytics. It never runs on the pages that show or accept an API key.

One part of the site does hold a record: if you ask for an API key, we keep an account. That is described in full under API accounts below. It is entirely optional, it is never needed to read anything here, and it is not linked to your reading in any way — because, as set out above, no record of anyone's reading exists to link it to.

Cookies

Every cookie here is first-party — nothing is set by an advertising network, and none of it is used for advertising or sold to anyone. They fall into two groups, and the difference matters.

Your choices. These are set by us, with HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Lax, and store nothing but the preference you picked.

Cookie	Purpose	Lasts
un_follow	The topic desks you follow (for /for-you)	1 year
un_cc	The country edition you pick from the flag menu	1 year
un_theme	Your light / dark preference	1 year
un_admin	Sign-in for the site's operator only	12 hours
un_consent	Your answer to the measurement question below — yes or no. Shared with terminal.urgent.news so you are only asked once	1 year

Analytics. PostHog sets its own first-party cookie, and stores the same value in your browser's local storage. It holds a random identifier, not a name or an address.

Cookie	Purpose	Lasts
ph_…_posthog	A random device identifier and the current session id, so separate page views can be counted as one visit and a return visit is not counted as a new person	1 year

That second group is analytics, not a functional preference, so we make no claim that it is "strictly necessary". If you are in the EU, the EEA or the UK we ask first: until you answer, the analytics code is not loaded, so no analytics cookie exists to set. Everywhere else it is on by default and you can switch it off below — and either way, the site honours your browser's Do Not Track setting and the Global Privacy Control signal, with which nothing is fetched at all. Clearing site data in your browser removes all of the above.

Note what is not in those tables: there is no login cookie for readers, and the session referred to above is an analytics session, not a signed-in one. API keys are sent as a request header by whatever program you write, never stored in your browser by us, so having an account changes nothing about what this site puts on your machine.

Analytics

We use PostHog (PostHog Inc., US cloud) to understand how the site is used: which pages get read, where people arrive from, where a layout confuses them, and what breaks. It is loaded on ordinary reading pages and nowhere else — it does not run on the operator's admin panel, on /keys, on the page that displays a newly issued API key, or on the account page, so an API key is never on screen while it is running.

What it records for a visit: the pages you open and leave, the links and buttons you click and the text printed on them (our own published text, never what you type), the address you arrived from, your country, and your device, browser and screen size. It gives your browser a random identifier, stored in the cookie described above, so that five pages read in a row count as one visit rather than five strangers. That identifier is not a name, and we never attach one to it: we do not identify readers to PostHog, and we do not link reading to an API-key account — see API accounts.

Session replay is on. This is the part worth understanding properly. PostHog records the changes to the page as you use it and replays them later as a reconstruction of what the screen showed — pages, scrolling, mouse movement and clicks. It is not a video of your screen, it sees nothing outside this site's tab, and it uses no camera or microphone. Text you type is masked before it leaves your browser: the recording shows that a field was filled, not what was in it. Because reading here needs no account, there is no password or personal detail to enter in the first place.

Search deserves naming rather than glossing. A search query travels in the page's own address (/search?q=…) and is printed on the page you get back. We strip it out of every analytics event before it is sent — so what you searched for is not a property we collect — but a replay is a picture of the page you were looking at, and that page shows it. If that matters to you, the Do Not Track switch below stops all of it.

The same applies on terminal.urgent.news, our keyboard-driven terminal: it is the same product measured in the same project, with the same settings, and this section covers it.

One thing to be exact about: like any server it talks to, PostHog's sees the IP address your request comes from — that is how the country above is worked out — and handles it under its own policy. We neither receive it nor keep it; what we do with an IP address is unchanged and described under Location.

What this answer does not cover. Our host, Cloudflare, injects its own web-performance beacon into pages — the thing that reports how fast a page loaded. It sets no cookie, stores no identifier and cannot follow you between visits or between sites, which is why it is not part of the question above and not something you are asked to consent to. It is switched on at the network level rather than by this site's code, so the controls here do not reach it; blocking scripts in your browser does.

This data is held by PostHog on our behalf, under our account, on US infrastructure, and is used only to improve this site. It is not sold, not shared with advertisers, and not used to build an advertising profile. PostHog acts as our processor under its own privacy policy and data-processing terms.

Choose, here, now. This works for everyone, wherever you are, and your answer is kept in the un_consent cookie for a year. Saying no takes effect on the next page you load: the analytics code stops being loaded at all, nothing further is sent to PostHog, and the identifier it stored is deleted from your browser — its cookie is expired and its entry in local storage is cleared.

Measure my visits Do not measure me

If you are in the EU, the EEA or the UK you will have been asked this by a banner on your first page, and nothing was loaded before you answered. Elsewhere, measurement is on unless you say otherwise here.

Or tell your browser. Turn on Do Not Track, or use a browser that sends Global Privacy Control, and none of this starts anywhere: the page checks that signal before it fetches PostHog at all, so there is no analytics request, no recording, no cookie and no identifier — not merely a tool that has been asked to keep quiet. Blocking third-party scripts or clearing this site's data has the same effect. You can also email legal@urgent.news and ask us to delete what is held for your device identifier, if you can tell us which one it is.

Measurement

Separately from the analytics above, and by a completely different mechanism, we keep a counter, incremented on our own server as each request is served, so we can tell how much of our traffic is people rather than crawlers and which sections are read. This one runs for every request, including those from programs, and needs nothing in your browser at all.

Each count records: the kind of client (a browser, a search crawler, an AI crawler, a feed reader, or a request whose referrer marks it as spam), which kind of page was asked for (a story, a desk, a feed — not which one), the website your request came from if any (its domain only, never the full address), your country, the response status, and — for browsers — the family and major version of the browser itself, such as Chrome/120 or Safari/17. That last one is deliberately coarse: a family and a whole-number version is a value shared by many millions of people, and it is kept because without it the counts cannot tell a person from a program wearing a browser's name. The full User-Agent string, which would identify your device and exact build, is never stored.

It does not record your IP address, any cookie, any session or visitor identifier, the full address of the page you came from, or which specific article you read. Nothing links one count to another, so the records cannot be assembled into a history of any person or visit. These counts go to our own infrastructure and are never sold or shared.

API accounts

Requesting an API key creates an account. It holds: your email address, a hash of each key we issue, an optional label you choose, and a count of API calls per key per day. That is the whole record.

We store the key only as a one-way hash, so a copy of our database cannot be turned back into working keys — and so we genuinely cannot show you a key you have lost, only issue a new one. Nothing is ever mailed to the address: it is a contact and billing reference, and there is no newsletter, no marketing, and no other use for it. The daily counts are per key, not per request — we do not record which endpoints you called, what you asked about, or the results you got.

To close an account and have its email and usage history deleted, email legal@urgent.news from the address on it.

Payments

Paid plans are billed by Stripe, which acts as our payment processor. Card details are entered on Stripe's own pages and go to Stripe, not to us: we never see, receive, or store a card number. What we keep is the identifier Stripe gives us for your customer and subscription record, your plan, and its renewal date — enough to know what you are entitled to, and no more. Stripe processes your payment data as an independent controller under its own privacy policy.

Location

To open the right country edition by default, we read your IP address momentarily, at our network's edge, to resolve it to a country. We do not store, log, or otherwise retain your IP address, and you can override the edition at any time from the flag menu. This is about our handling of it; the analytics provider described above sees it at its own end, as every server you connect to does.

Infrastructure and third parties

The site runs on a major cloud and content-delivery provider; your requests transit its global network and are processed under its own terms, and because the site runs at the network edge, processing may occur in many countries. That provider also injects its own privacy-preserving web-performance beacon into pages, which reports page-load timings and no identifier. The other processors are PostHog for analytics and session replay (Analytics) and Stripe for payments (Payments). Anything the site generates is produced from published article content, never from data about you.

What we don't do

We do not sell, rent, or share personal data; we do not serve ads; we do not build advertising profiles; and we do not combine what the analytics above records with any account, email address or API key. No data about you is used to train a model.

Your rights

You may ask about, and request correction or deletion of, any personal data we hold. If you are in the EU or UK and those laws apply to your use, you also have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection, and may complain to your data-protection authority. To exercise any of these, email legal@urgent.news. We do not sell or share personal information within the meaning of the California CCPA/CPRA.

Children

urgent.news is a general news service, not directed at children, and collects no data from them.

Changes

If this policy changes we'll update the date above. Material changes will be noted on this page.