Privacy Policy

The principle before the details

This page sets out what WinAddons learns about you when you read winaddons.com, what we do with it, who else is involved and how you can object. Because our readers live under many different privacy laws, it is written to hold true wherever you are. The governing idea is restraint. No account is needed to read anything here, we gather only what running a news site requires, we discard it as soon as its purpose is served, and we do not assemble profiles of individual readers. A site that reports on how Microsoft handles telemetry ought to be able to explain its own data handling plainly, and this is that explanation.

What reading the site tells us

Every request for a page leaves the trace any web server records: the IP address behind it, the page asked for, the time, the page you arrived from, and the browser and device your software identifies itself as. We keep those logs to keep the site up, to find faults and to fend off scrapers and denial-of-service traffic. They live for a short, fixed period, are then deleted or reduced to anonymous totals, and are never tied to a name.

Readership is measured with an analytics tool that counts visits and shows which stories were read, for how long and on which kinds of device. It shortens IP addresses before storing anything and is set not to profile individuals. What we see are totals, which guide which sections get more attention and what we tell advertisers. We cannot tell which administrator read the story about a failed update or which gamer read the one about a console price, and that is by design.

What writing to us tells us

An email to support@winaddons.com gives us your address, your name if you add it, and whatever the message contains. They are used to answer you and act on what you sent, nothing more. A message is kept while the matter it belongs to is open: a correction request sits with the record of that correction, a tip stays until the story is published or dropped. Mail from confidential sources is handled under the tighter rules on our contact page and is kept out of shared systems. Nobody who writes to us is added to a mailing list, and addresses are never sold, rented or swapped.

Do not send us Microsoft account credentials, product keys, tenant identifiers, recovery codes or screenshots that reveal them. No story requires them, and they are deleted on arrival.

Cookies and the advertising network

We set a few cookies of our own, to remember your preferences and to keep the readership count honest. Our cookie policy names every category, says what each does and explains how to refuse them. Where your local law requires consent before non-essential cookies are set, none is set until you consent.

WinAddons is paid for by display advertising, delivered through a third-party advertising network, an arrangement our ownership and funding page explains. To pick an advertisement and record that it was shown, the network receives the technical facts of the request: the page address, the type of device, a rough location inferred from your IP address, and a cookie identifier. Across the many sites it serves, the network may combine those facts into interest profiles, governed by its own privacy policy rather than ours. It never receives your name, your email address or the contents of anything you have sent us. Our consent controls, your browser settings and the opt-out tools that exist in your jurisdiction all reduce how targeted the advertising is; none of them removes it.

The complete list of uses

We use reader data to serve pages, to count readers in aggregate, to keep the site secure, to answer mail and to meet obligations the law imposes. Nothing else. Reader data is never sold, never fed into an automated decision about you, and never passed to Microsoft or to any other company we report on.

Rights under the GDPR, the CCPA and comparable laws

If the GDPR protects you, you may ask to see the personal data we hold on you, have it corrected or deleted, restrict or object to its use, receive it in a portable form, withdraw any consent you have given, and complain to your supervisory authority. The lawful grounds we rely on are our legitimate interest in running, securing and measuring the site in the aggregate; your consent, for non-essential cookies; the need to reply when you write; and legal obligation.

If the CCPA or a similar consumer privacy statute protects you, you may ask what personal information we collect and how we use it, have it deleted or corrected, and opt out of its sale or its sharing for cross-context behavioural advertising. We sell nothing. Advertising cookies may amount to sharing under some of those statutes, and both the consent controls and a Global Privacy Control signal switch them off. Exercising a right never changes how we treat you.

To make a request, email support@winaddons.com with PRIVACY as the first word of the subject line, saying what you are asking for. You will get an acknowledgement within two business days and an answer within whatever period the relevant law allows, usually far sooner. We may ask you to show that you are the person concerned, and will ask for nothing beyond that.

Providers, transfers and demands from authorities

Our hosting, email and analytics providers handle data for us under processing agreements where the law requires them; the advertising network handles it for its own purposes, as set out above. Readers and providers sit in different countries, so processing may happen outside the one you live in; where rules such as the GDPR govern that transfer, we rely on the safeguards those rules recognise. We hand data to police or courts only under legal compulsion, we push back on demands that look overbroad or that aim to identify a source, and we tell you a demand was made unless the law forbids it.

Signals, children, retention and security

A Global Privacy Control signal from your browser is treated as an opt-out from sale or sharing wherever the law recognises it, and as an instruction to switch off non-essential cookies everywhere else. This is a site for adults. We do not knowingly gather personal information from anyone below 13, or below the higher age your jurisdiction sets, and if you think a child has written to us, tell us and the message will be deleted. Server logs last weeks, not years; analytics survives only as totals; mail lasts as long as its purpose. Pages are served over encrypted connections, reader data is accessible only to the people who need it, and security updates are applied promptly, which is the least a site that writes about patching can do. No system is beyond compromise. If a breach touches personal data we hold, we will tell affected readers and the relevant authorities as the law requires, and say publicly what happened.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, the wording on this page changes and the date of revision is recorded. Anything material is announced on the site rather than left for readers to detect by comparing versions. Questions about any of it go to support@winaddons.com with PRIVACY in the subject line.