Privacy

This site is built to know as little about you as possible. In plain language:

• One cookie, and only if you say yes. We set no cookie on the public site ourselves. If you accept Google Analytics in the banner, Google sets one cookie (_ga, two years) so a return visit counts as a return; if you decline, or never answer, it does not. The only thing we write to your browser is your answer itself, in its local storage, so the banner does not ask again — and the section on your choice below is where you change it. That is a claim about us and not about the whole page: when a player from another company is framed on the front page, it writes storage of its own, and the section on the players we embed says what that means and why you are not asked first. (The site's own editing surface uses a session cookie. It is not publicly reachable, and its login endpoints return “not found” on this site.)
• No accounts and no profiles. Nothing here asks who you are, and no advertising or tracking pixel runs on the public site today.
• Aggregate analytics only. Page views are counted by Vercel Web Analytics (Vercel Inc., United States), our hosting provider. It is cookieless and aggregate — page path, referrer, country, and broad device type — and is never tied to an identifiable person. Your IP address is not stored. Search terms and filters are stripped from the page address in your browser before anything is sent, so what you searched for never leaves it. Page views are also measured with Google Analytics (Google Ireland Limited), loaded through Google Tag Manager. It loads with every consent purpose switched off and stays that way unless you accept in the banner: until then it sets no cookie, writes nothing to your device, and sends Google the page path and the technical details of your browser, not an identifier we could find you by. If you accept, Google additionally sets the cookie described above, and a later visit from the same browser is counted as a return rather than a stranger. Google is also told what kind of thing you did — a search, a filter, a click on a story or a shop link, a change of country, a finished quiz — counted, never named: for a search only how many characters it had, for a filter only how many makers it narrowed to, and for a click the address of the story or shop you opened. The page address it receives is stripped of any search or filter in your browser first; the one thing kept is a campaign tag on a link we published ourselves, so we can tell which of our own posts brought you. Google receives your IP address to answer that request, as any server you contact does. What Google does with what it receives is governed by Google's privacy policy.
• A live reader count. While this page is open in front of you, your browser sends a random number to us every twenty seconds so the site can show how many people are reading right now. Your device makes that number up on the spot. It is not derived from your address, your device, or anything else about you, and nothing is written to or read from your device to produce it — no cookie, and no browser storage of any kind. We hold it for sixty seconds, count how many are active, and delete it. It is never joined to anything else, and it cannot identify you or recognise you on a later visit.
• Country detection for the price tables runs in your browser and is never sent to us or stored.
• Outbound links tell the site you visit that you arrived from smartglasses.today, and nothing more — never the page you were on, never anything you searched for, and nothing about you. That is how the publishers we link to can see the readers we send them.
• An embedded player, when one is on the page.A page here sometimes frames a player published by another company. Your browser fetches it from them directly, so they see your address and that you arrived from smartglasses.today — and unlike an outbound link, that happens without you clicking anything. They also write cookies and browser storage under their own domain. The section below names them and says what we do and do not know about it.

Who is responsible

Contact: contact@smartglasses.today

Legal basis, and what is actually processed

Three things happen on our side when you read this site: the aggregate page counting and the live reader count described above, plus the server logs any web host keeps in order to serve pages and absorb abuse. All three rest on our legitimate interest in running and securing a working website (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). None of the three stores anything on your device or reads anything already stored there — no cookies, no browser storage, nothing to consent to under the ePrivacy rules that govern device access. That is why nothing we run asks you for consent. The one exception is the Google Analytics cookie, and it is an exception only after you accept it: that cookie rests on your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, §25(1) TDDDG), which you can withdraw in the section on your choice below, with effect from the next page you load. An embedded player is another thing, none of this paragraph applies to it, and it has its own section below.

Who else touches it

Four providers, all acting on our instructions — three in the United States and one in Ireland:

• Vercel Inc. — hosting and the aggregate analytics.
• Neon Inc.— the database holding the site's content, in AWS us-west-2. It holds headlines, links and editorial notes. The only other thing it ever holds is the sixty-second reader count described above: a random number your own tab made up, which says nothing about you and is deleted a minute later.
• GitHub, Inc.— the code repository and the scheduled job that fetches publishers' feeds.
• Google Ireland Limited — Google Analytics, via Google Tag Manager, in the no-cookie mode described above. Google may process what it receives in the United States.

Because the others arein the United States, serving a page to a reader in the EU or UK involves an international transfer. We rely on the providers' standard data-protection terms for it. Given that no personal data about you is stored in any of them, the practical exposure is limited to the transient technical data — principally an IP address — needed to deliver a page at all.

Players we embed

A page here sometimes frames a player published by another company, so you can listen or watch without leaving. Every player we embed is named here:

• Spotify— the weekend listening player in the lead slot, when an editor has chosen something for it. What Spotify does with what it receives is governed by Spotify's privacy policy, not by this page.
• YouTube — event live streams (SPECS Launch 2026), on the front page, the company's desk and the event's row in the calendar, until 2026-09-18. It loads in YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com), which limits what YouTube keeps before you press play but does not stop your browser contacting YouTube, or YouTube using browser storage, when the page loads — everything below applies to it. What YouTube does with what it receives is governed by Google's privacy policy, not by this page.

These companies are not our processors and do not act on our instructions — that is the difference between this section and the one above it. Your browser fetches the player from them directly, so they receive your address, your browser and operating system, and the fact that you came from smartglasses.today. Not the page you were on, and not anything you searched for: this site sends the origin only, to them as to everyone else. They also write cookies and browser storage under their own domain, which we can neither read nor see. Nothing comes back to us from any of it — the player reports nothing to this site, and we do not know whether you pressed play.

That storage is exactly what the ePrivacy rules on device access govern, and you are not asked to consent to it. The player loads with the page, so by the time you could form a view about it, it has loaded. Our basis for making the request at all is our legitimate interest in publishing an editorial selection you can play where you are reading it (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). For the storage on your device the honest answer is that we have not asked you, and that the stricter reading of those rules — that a player nobody clicked needs consent before it loads — is a real one that we do not currently meet. If that changes, it changes in the direction of asking first, and this page is updated before it does, not after.

The transfer paragraph above does not cover them: they are not our providers, your browser reaches them without passing through us, and there are no data-protection terms of ours in that path. Where they take what they receive is answered by their own policy, and is not something we can promise you about. If you would rather none of this happened, block third-party frames or use a content blocker — the player is the only thing that stops working, and the rest of the page does not notice.

Your choice

The banner asks once whether Google Analytics may set its cookie. Your answer is stored in this browser only — it is never sent to us — and you can change it here at any time. Withdrawing takes effect from the next page you load; the cookie Google already set is no longer read or refreshed, and expires or is deleted by your browser.

Your current choice: not answered yet — cookieless counting only.

How long anything is kept

Aggregate analytics are retained by Vercel on their standard schedule, and by Google for the retention period set on our Analytics property, and contain no identifier that could single you out. The Google Analytics cookie, if you accepted it, lasts two years unless you delete it or withdraw; the record of your answer in local storage lasts until you change it. Server logs are short-lived and kept by the host for operational and security purposes only. The one thing we store ourselves is the live reader count, and it is deleted within five minutes at the outside — sixty seconds is all that counts as “now”, and rows are cleared past that. We keep no visitor database beyond it.

People named in the headlines we index

This site is a news index: it stores publishers' headlines verbatim, in their original language, with a date, the publisher's name and a link to the original article — and nothing else of the article. A headline sometimes contains a person's name, almost always someone acting in a public or professional role, because a newsroom already published it that way. Indexing those headlines and pointing readers at their source rests on our legitimate interest in operating a news index (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR), alongside the freedom to receive and impart information. We store no author bylines and no article text, and we add nothing about anyone that the publisher did not already print.

If a stored headline names you and you want it out of this index, write to contact@smartglasses.today. We assess such requests individually and, where your interests outweigh the index's, remove the entry. Removal here does not touch the publisher's original article — that request has to go to the publisher.

Your rights

If you are in the EU or UK you have the rights to access, rectify, erase, restrict and object, and to data portability. Write to contact@smartglasses.today. In candour: because we hold no personal data about visitors, most such requests will have nothing to return — we cannot find you in our records because you are not in them. That is not true of the companies whose players we embed: they hold what they collected and we do not, so a request about it has to go to them, and their policies say how.