Privacy Policy

Contact and operator

Digital Editorial is a United States publication operated by Brayton Stafford. Privacy questions, account deletion requests, and legal notices may be sent to contact@digitaleditorial.com.

Information we collect

When you create an account, we collect your email address, password credential, display name if provided, account plan, and basic account timestamps. Passwords are stored as password hashes. Signed-in sessions use HTTP-only cookies so the site can keep you logged in.

If you use For You, we store the topics you choose so the edition can be personalized. If you subscribe to the $3.33/month custom aggregation plan, we store your saved custom-feed names, keywords, topics, and any preferred sources you submit so the ingest pipeline can compose those private desks.

Payments are processed by Stripe. Digital Editorial receives subscription, customer, and entitlement status from Stripe, but it does not store full card numbers or card security codes. Stripe may set cookies or use its own checkout and billing portal technology when you pay or manage a subscription.

Editorial pipeline data

Digital Editorial uses Tavily and open-web search, and may use optional public X/Twitter recent-post signals, to find source material for news coverage. X posts are treated as public corroboration signals, not private reader data.

The publication uses xAI/Grok where configured, with OpenAI as a fallback, to compose original articles from cited sources and to generate original AI editorial illustrations. Digital Editorial does not use scraped news photography and has a policy against generating real-person likenesses for editorial art.

How we use information

• Authenticate accounts, maintain secure sessions, and show account status.
• Personalize For You sections and paid custom aggregation desks.
• Process subscriptions, cancellations, and entitlements through Stripe.
• Operate, debug, protect, and improve the site and ingest pipeline.
• Respond to reader requests, account deletion requests, and legal obligations.

Cookies and logs

Digital Editorial uses session cookies for authentication. Stripe Checkout and the Stripe customer portal may use Stripe cookies when you interact with payment pages. Digital Editorial does not use third-party advertising trackers.

The site is self-hosted on a home-lab k3s deployment. Server and application logs may include request metadata such as IP address, user agent, route, timestamps, and error details. Logs are used for security, reliability, and abuse prevention.

Sharing

Digital Editorial does not sell personal data. We share information with service providers only as needed to operate the publication: Stripe for billing, search providers for source discovery, and AI providers for article and illustration generation. We may disclose information if required by law, to protect the site, or to investigate abuse.

Retention and deletion

Account records, topics, custom-feed settings, and subscription status are retained while your account is active and as needed for operation, security, accounting, and legal obligations. You may close your account or request deletion from the account page where available, or by emailing contact@digitaleditorial.com. Some limited records may be retained where required for billing, fraud prevention, backups, or legal compliance.

Your choices and rights

You can review and change account topics and custom feeds from your account experience. You may request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal information by using the account page where available or emailing contact@digitaleditorial.com. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights to portability, objection, restriction, or appeal.

Children

Digital Editorial is a general-audience news publication and is not directed to children under 13. Readers under 13 may not create accounts. If you are under 16 in a jurisdiction that requires parental consent for online services, use the site only with appropriate consent.

Security and changes

Digital Editorial uses reasonable technical and organizational safeguards for a small publication, including HTTP-only session cookies and hashed passwords. No internet service is perfectly secure. We may update this policy as the product, law, or infrastructure changes; the posted last-updated date controls the current version.