Privacy policy

1. What we do not do

At Vlaanderen Vandaag we are committed to a clean website:

• No advertising and no ad profiling. We show no ads and build no profiles to target you.
• No third-party analytics. We do not use Google Analytics or anything equivalent. Audience measurement is our own and never leaves our servers.
• No data selling. We do not trade in your data, nor pass it to anyone for their own marketing.
• Reading costs you no data. You can read any article without registering, and an ordinary visit stores nothing in your browser.

2. Data controller

The controller is Trocalia Digital S.L. (trading as Troc Media), Spanish tax ID B70751490, registered office in Barcelona. For anything concerning your data, write to us at info@vlaanderenvandaag.be.

3. What data we process, why, and on what basis

We process data in four distinct situations. For each we state the purpose, the legal basis and how long we keep it.

• a) When you visit the site. To know how many people read us we store a SHA-256 fingerprint derived from your IP address, your browser and the current date. Neither the IP address nor the browser string is stored in the clear, and because the date is part of the calculation the fingerprint changes every day. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in measuring readership with the least possible data (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Retention: as long as needed to produce audience statistics.
• b) When you write to us through a form. We collect your name, email, website if you give one, and your message, for the sole purpose of replying. The message reaches us by email and is not stored in any database. Legal basis: steps taken at your request prior to entering into a contract, and our legitimate interest in answering enquiries (Art. 6(1)(b) and 6(1)(f) GDPR). Retention: as long as needed to handle the enquiry and evidence our reply.
• c) When you buy a publication. We process the contact details of the person publishing and the billing details. Payment and invoicing are handled by Stripe, which collects the payment data and tax address directly: we never see or store the card number. Legal basis: performance of the contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) and, for tax matters, compliance with legal obligations (Art. 6(1)(c)). Retention: tax records for the statutory periods (4 years for tax purposes and 6 years under the Spanish Commercial Code).
• d) If you are a company we offer our services to. We maintain a professional contact file with the company email address, business name, website, telephone, address, sector and, where public, tax ID. This data comes from corporate websites, directories and other publicly accessible sources, and we address people solely in their professional capacity, never as private individuals. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in direct business-to-business marketing (Art. 6(1)(f) and Recital 47 GDPR, and Art. 19 of the Spanish Data Protection Act). Retention: for as long as that interest subsists. If you unsubscribe, we keep your address on a suppression list indefinitely, precisely so that we never write to you again.

For the commercial emails we send we also record whether the message is opened and whether any link is clicked, together with the IP address and browser it happens from, to measure whether our messages are of interest and to tell a person apart from an automated security scanner. Legal basis: legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). You can object at any time using the unsubscribe link included in every message.

4. Cookies and browser storage

If you come to read, we install no cookies. You can check for yourself: an ordinary visit to any article sends no cookie to your browser. We use no advertising cookies, no social-network cookies and no third-party analytics.

There is a single exception, and it is only fair to explain it: if you arrive through a link in one of our commercial messages, we store two of our own technical cookies in your browser so we can show you the page personalised for your company and know that the visit came from our message:

• empresa: the domain of the company we are addressing. Lifetime: 180 days.
• lead_ref: the email address we sent the message to, so the visit can be attributed correctly. It is httpOnly, meaning no script on the page can read it. Lifetime: 180 days.

Neither is used for advertising or shared with third parties. You can delete them at any time from your browser settings, and if you have never received a message from us they will never be set at all.

5. Who else processes this data

To operate we rely on the following providers, which process data on our behalf and on our instructions:

• Stripe — payments, invoicing and payment data.
• SMTP2GO — sending and delivering email.
• Google (Gemini API) — translating articles into the different languages and assisting with drafting.
• Runware — generating the illustrative images.
• CubePath — website hosting, in Barcelona (Spain). Email is served from a server located in Frankfurt (Germany).

We may also disclose data to public authorities, courts and law enforcement where a legal rule requires it. Outside those cases, we do not share data with third parties.

6. International transfers

Our servers are in the European Union, but some of the providers above — notably Stripe, Google, Runware and SMTP2GO — may process data outside the European Economic Area. Where that happens, the transfer relies on the mechanisms under Chapter V GDPR that each provider has in place, such as the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses or the EU–US adequacy framework. If you want the detail for a specific provider, write to us and we will provide it.

7. Your rights

You may at any time exercise your rights of access, rectification, erasure, objection, restriction of processing and portability, and object to receiving commercial messages. Simply write to info@vlaanderenvandaag.be saying which right you wish to exercise; we will reply within one month at the latest.

If you believe we have not handled your request properly, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Spanish Data Protection Agency (C/ Jorge Juan 6, 28001 Madrid — www.aepd.es), which is the competent supervisory authority.

8. Minors

Neither reading the newspaper nor buying a publication is directed at minors, and we do not knowingly collect data from minors.

9. Changes to this policy

If we change how we process data we will update this page and its revision date. We suggest checking back from time to time.