Last updated: 24 October 2026

This policy explains what personal data swiftlake.com ("we", "us") handles when you read this website, why, and what rights you have. It is written to meet the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Portuguese data protection law (Lei n.º 58/2019) and the Portuguese ePrivacy law (Lei n.º 41/2004), and we also follow the UK GDPR and similar laws elsewhere. swiftlake.com is a publication of data-driven analysis. You can read everything on it without an account, and we do not ask readers for any personal information.

Who is responsible

The owner and operator of swiftlake.com, based in Portugal, is the data controller. You can reach us through the contact form.

What we collect

• Server logs. Like every website, our hosting provider records technical data for each request: IP address, the page requested, date and time, browser and device information (user agent), and the referring page if there is one. We use it to keep the site secure, fix faults and prevent abuse. Our legal basis is our legitimate interest in running a secure service (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)). Logs are kept for a limited period, normally 30 days, and are not used to build profiles of readers.
• Anonymous reading statistics. To understand what readers find useful, we keep simple counts on our own servers: how many times each article was read on each day, and the website that sent the reader to us (the hostname only, for example "news.example.org", never the full address). We do not store your IP address, your browser or device details, or any identifier, and we cannot tell one reader from another or follow a reader from page to page. We do not count crawlers, or visitors whose browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal. Our legal basis is our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)). Because these counts are anonymous aggregates and nothing is stored on or read from your device, they do not need your consent.

We do not collect names, email addresses, phone numbers or payment details from readers, and there are no reader accounts, comments or newsletters. The only exception is the contact form.

Contact form

If you write to us, we receive your message, your email address and, if you give it, your name. The message is sent by email through Gmail (Google, our processor) and is not stored on the site. We use it only to reply, on your request or in our legitimate interest in answering you, and normally keep it no longer than 12 months. You can ask us to delete it at any time.

Cookies and tracking

Reading the site sets no cookies. Our statistics are our own and are anonymous (see above). We do not use third-party analytics, advertising, social media or other third-party trackers, and the pages you read load their styles, scripts and fonts from our own domain. Article images and charts are served from Google Cloud Storage (Google, our processor). Your browser therefore contacts Google's servers to fetch them, and Google receives your IP address and browser details for that request, as with the server logs above. Images carry no cookies and are not used for tracking or advertising.

Only the site owner's login uses a cookie: a first-party session cookie, which is strictly necessary and so does not need consent. It is not set for readers.

Who we share data with

We do not sell your personal data and we do not share it for advertising. The site is hosted on Google Cloud, which acts as our processor and handles the server logs described above on our instructions. Google may process data in countries outside your own. Where the law requires it, such transfers rely on safeguards such as the EU Standard Contractual Clauses or the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. We may disclose data if the law requires it or to protect the site from abuse.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you can ask us to access, correct or delete personal data we hold about you, to restrict or object to our handling of it, and to receive a copy of it. You can also complain to a data protection authority. In Portugal that is the Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados (CNPD, www.cnpd.pt). You can also complain to the authority in the country where you live. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are used in California law, and we do not make automated decisions about you.

Because we do not keep data that identifies readers, we may not be able to find your records from a request. We may ask for details such as the approximate time of your visit and your IP address to look through the logs that still exist.

Children

This site is aimed at a general adult audience. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children.

Links to other websites

Articles may link to the sources of the data they analyse. Those websites have their own privacy practices and we are not responsible for them.

Changes to this policy

We will post any change on this page and update the date above. If a change affects how we use personal data, we will make that clear on the site.

Contact

For any question about this policy or your data, use the contact form.