Privacy Policy

1. Overview

Lebanon Feed (“we”, “us”, “our”) operates the news aggregation service at lebanonfeed.news. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and your rights regarding your data.

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Automatically Collected Data

When you visit Lebanon Feed, we may automatically collect:

• Page visit data: pages viewed, timestamps, and referrer URLs
• Approximate location: country, city, and approximate geographic coordinates derived from your IP address (we do not store raw IP addresses — only a one-way hash). We may also use the ipapi.co service as a third-party geolocation fallback
• Browser geolocation: if you grant permission, we may use the browser Geolocation API to obtain approximate coordinates (low accuracy, city-level). This is only requested once per session and is never used without your explicit browser permission
• Device information: browser name and version, operating system name and version, device type (desktop/mobile/tablet), device vendor and model — derived from your user-agent string (truncated to 500 characters)
• Visitor ID:an anonymous, randomly generated identifier stored in your browser's localStorage to distinguish unique visitors
• Session ID: a per-session identifier stored in sessionStorage, cleared when you close your browser tab

2.2 Cookies & Local Storage

We use:

• Cookie consent preference: stored in localStorage to remember your cookie choice
• Visitor ID: stored in localStorage as an anonymous persistent identifier
• Session ID: stored in sessionStorage as a per-session identifier
• Vercel Analytics: anonymous, privacy-friendly analytics (no cookies)

2.3 Information We Do NOT Collect

• Personal names, email addresses, or contact information
• Payment or financial data
• Social media profiles
• Raw IP addresses (hashed for privacy)

3. How We Use Information

We use collected information to:

• Understand visitor patterns and improve our service
• Display aggregate analytics (e.g., visitor map on admin dashboard)
• Monitor and prevent abuse of the service
• Generate anonymized usage statistics

4. AI-Generated Content

Lebanon Feed uses third-party AI providers (such as OpenAI) to process article content. AI is used for the following purposes:

• Article summaries:AI-generated summaries of news articles in the article's original language
• Translations: AI-powered translations of article titles and summaries into English, Arabic, and French
• Vector embeddings: mathematical representations generated from article content via OpenAI for similarity detection and story clustering (embeddings are always processed through OpenAI regardless of other AI provider configuration)
• YouTube relevance classification: AI determines whether YouTube videos are relevant to Lebanese news
• No personal user data is included in AI requests — only article content and metadata
• AI-generated content is stored server-side and may be shared across users
• We are not responsible for potential inaccuracies in AI-generated content

5. Content Sourcing

Lebanon Feed aggregates news content from publicly available sources using the following methods:

• RSS feeds: we subscribe to publicly available RSS and Atom feeds from Lebanese and regional news outlets
• Web scraping:for select sources, we extract article metadata from publicly accessible web pages. Our scraper checks and respects each site's robots.txt directives before making any requests
• YouTube aggregation: we collect video metadata from public YouTube channel RSS feeds and classify video relevance using AI
• Bot identification: our automated requests identify themselves as LebanonFeedBot/1.0 (+https://lebanonfeed.news)
• All aggregated content links back to the original source — we do not claim ownership of third-party content
• Source publishers may request exclusion from our service at any time by contacting us

6. Data Sharing

We do not sell, trade, or share your data with third parties for marketing purposes. We may share anonymized, aggregate data with:

• Vercel: hosting and analytics provider
• Supabase: database hosting provider (stores anonymized visit data)
• AI providers (such as OpenAI): article content is sent for summary generation, translation, and classification — no user data is included
• ipapi.co: third-party geolocation service used as a fallback for approximate visitor location

7. Data Retention

• Visit analytics: anonymized visit data is retained for aggregate analytics purposes and periodically purged. All visit data is anonymous (no personal identifiers)
• Ingest logs: system operation logs are automatically deleted after 7 days
• Article content and AI outputs: article data, AI summaries, translations, and embeddings are retained indefinitely
• Commodity prices: only the most recent records are kept (approximately 7 days of history)
• YouTube videos: RSS-ingested video metadata is automatically removed after 30 days
• In-memory caches: cleared on server restart

8. Your Rights

Since we do not collect personally identifiable information, there is minimal personal data to manage. However, you can:

• Use browser privacy tools (ad blockers, private browsing) to limit or prevent data collection
• Deny the browser geolocation permission prompt to prevent coordinate collection
• Clear your browser's localStorage to reset your anonymous visitor identifier
• Contact us to request removal of any data you believe is linked to you

Note on analytics: Because all tracking data is fully anonymized (no personal identifiers, IP addresses are hashed and discarded), basic page-visit analytics are collected for all visitors to maintain and improve the service. You can prevent this by using browser extensions that block requests to tracking endpoints.

9. Security

We implement reasonable security measures including IP hashing, HTTPS encryption, and access controls. However, no system is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute data security.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Changes will be posted on this page with an updated revision date.

11. Contact

For questions regarding this Privacy Policy, please reach out by contacting us.