Privacy

Touchline is a football blog. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to log into, and no newsletter running. This page says what happens to your data when you read it, which is very little — and that is a design decision, not an oversight.

Who is responsible

Touchline is published and operated by its editor, who decides what is collected here and why.

What we collect when you read

Every time a page opens, our own counter records the path of that page, the domain you came from (never the full address, which would reveal the search you made), a rough screen size, and whether your browser asks not to be tracked. It sets no cookie and stores nothing on your device.

To separate one reader from another within a single day, your IP address and browser description are combined with a secret that changes every night and is never saved, then reduced to a short fingerprint. The IP address itself is not stored. Once the night passes, the fingerprint cannot be traced back and the same reader appears as somebody new. It follows that we cannot recognise a returning visitor, build a profile, or connect anything on this site to a person.

The legal basis is our legitimate interest in knowing whether what we publish is read at all. The data is aggregated daily into counts; the request lines behind those counts are currently kept, and hold no identifier.

Google Analytics, with your consent

If you accept analytics cookies, we also use Google Analytics 4, which sets two cookies and sends your visit — including your IP address — to Google, who may process it outside the European Union. The legal basis is your consent, and nothing is sent before you give it: until then the Google script is not loaded at all. You can withdraw at any time on the cookies page, which also deletes those cookies from your browser.

Who else sees it

The site runs on a hosting provider, which keeps its own server logs as any host does, and Google receives what is described above if you consented. Nothing is sold, shared with advertisers, or passed to anyone else.

Your rights

European law gives you the right to see, correct or delete the personal data an organisation holds about you. Here that right runs into an honest limit: we hold nothing that identifies you, so we cannot find "your" data in order to show or delete it — and we will not ask you for more information in order to try. If you accepted Google Analytics, the cookies on your device are yours to delete, from the cookies page or from your browser.

You may complain to a supervisory authority in Italy or where you liveif you believe something here is wrong.

Changes

If this site starts collecting something else — a newsletter, comments, advertising — this page changes before that happens, not after. The date below tells you when it was last touched.