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Legal
What this site stores about you, why it stores it, and how to have it removed. Short, because there is not much of it.
The Meridian is published by an individual, not by a company. There is no registered legal entity behind it: one person decides what is collected and what happens to it, and is responsible for it under data protection law.
For anything on this page, including a copy of your data or a deletion request, write to contact@themeridiannewsdecoded.com.
Two things are collected, and only if you volunteer them: your email address if you sign up to the newsletter, and your email and password if you create an account. Nothing else. Reading the site anonymously collects nothing at all.
There are no analytics. One third-party script does run on the public pages — Google’s advertising loader, described under Advertising below. Nothing else is loaded from anyone else.
Signing up stores your email address, the date you signed up, and a single word recording where the sign-up came from. That is the whole record: no name, no reading history, no identifier tying it to anything else.
The list is write-only from the side of the website. The public site can add an address and cannot read, change, or list what is stored. That is enforced by a database rule rather than by convention, so a flaw in the website cannot expose the list.
No newsletter has been sent yet and no address has left the database. When sending begins, this page will name the company that delivers the mail, because that company will necessarily handle your address. Until then, ask at contact@themeridiannewsdecoded.com to be removed.
Creating an account stores your email address and a password. The password is never stored as you typed it: the authentication service keeps a one-way hash, and this site never sees or handles the original.
Alongside the account sits a small profile: your role, reader or editor, and for people who write here a display name and a short biography. Display names and biographies appear publicly on stories, so treat those two as published rather than private.
Signing in sets a session cookie so you stay signed in between pages. It is not used to track you and is not readable by anyone else.
Accounts and the newsletter list are held in Supabase, which provides the database and the sign-in system. It processes this data on the instructions of the publisher and for no other purpose.
There is no self-service delete button yet. Write to contact@themeridiannewsdecoded.com from the address on the account, or naming the address on the newsletter list, and it will be removed. You do not have to give a reason.
Removing a newsletter subscription deletes the row entirely. Removing an account deletes the login and the profile with it. Anything you published while an editor stays published, because the stories belong to the publication rather than to the account.
This site loads Google AdSense on its public pages. No advertisement is being shown yet — the slots are still reserved empty space while the account is with Google for review — but the script itself runs from the moment a public page opens, and that is the part worth telling you about rather than waiting for the first ad to appear.
Google and its advertising partners may set and read cookies on your device to measure advertising and to choose which advertisements to show, including personalised ones selected from what they know of your browsing on other sites. That data is collected by Google, not by this publication: it never reaches this site’s database, and the publisher cannot see it.
Readers in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland are asked before any of that happens. Consent is collected through Google’s Consent Management Platform, which puts the choice in front of you, records your answer, and passes it to Google’s advertising systems. The answer is not permanent: you can reopen the consent banner and change your choices at any time, and the change applies from that point on. Refusing costs you nothing here — the stories, the search and the reading list all work exactly the same either way.
You can change what Google may use, and switch personalised advertising off entirely, at Google My Ad Center. What Google collects from sites carrying its advertising is set out in how Google uses information from partner sites. Blocking third-party cookies, or blocking the script outright, also works and breaks nothing here.
It does not sell reader data, and it builds no tracking or interest profile of its own — nothing in this codebase records what you read. What it does do is carry Google’s advertising script, which collects for Google on Google’s terms, as described under Advertising above. Beyond that and the service provider named above, nothing is shared with anyone. These are statements about how the software is built today, and this page changes before any of them stops being true.
Data protection in North Macedonia is governed by the Law on Personal Data Protection, which follows the same structure as the European GDPR. In broad terms you can ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, and complain to the national supervisory authority if you are not satisfied with the answer.
Every one of those requests goes to the same place: contact@themeridiannewsdecoded.com.