Privacy

The Spine doesn't want to know who you are. The site is read-only — no accounts, no sign-in, no comments — and the only data passing through it is news that has already been published elsewhere.

What we collect from readers

Nothing personal. The site doesn't set tracking cookies, doesn't use Google Analytics, doesn't use Facebook Pixel, doesn't embed third-party social widgets, and doesn't require any account to read every story in the archive. Standard server logs (IP address, user-agent, requested URL, timestamp) are kept by our hosting provider for ~30 days for operational reasons; they're not analyzed for any reader-tracking purpose.

What we store

We store the news that the pipeline ingests and synthesizes. For each article one of our source outlets publishes, we keep the URL, headline, RSS publication date, and (where extraction succeeds) the article body text — used as input to the synthesis step. The synthesized stories themselves are stored in our database and shown on the site. None of that is reader-specific data.

Article body text is held only as long as needed for synthesis and quality review; older articles can be aged out. The synthesized stories are kept indefinitely as part of the public archive.

Third-party services

• Vercel hosts the site and runs the daily pipeline.
• Supabase stores the synthesized stories, the article metadata, and the run logs.
• Anthropic provides the Claude models used for synthesis and cluster verification.
• Voyage AI provides the embedding model used to cluster related coverage.
• Jina AI Reader, Bing News, archive.ph are used during article ingestion + extraction. They never see reader traffic.
• GitHub Actions triggers the daily synthesis run.

None of these vendors receives any reader-identifying data, because the site doesn't collect any to send.

If a newsletter is added later

When (if) The Spine adds an email newsletter, the only data collected from subscribers will be the email address they enter, used solely to send the newsletter. Unsubscribe links will be on every email. No selling, no sharing, no ads-targeted segmentation. This page will be updated at the same time the newsletter goes live.

Contact

Privacy questions can be sent to timothy.s.bolger@gmail.com. The site is operated by an individual, not a company.