Privacy notice

Serendib Vantage is the controller of the personal data described here — we decide why and how it is used.

The way to reach us about anything in this notice, including a privacy request, is the corrections form. Say that your message is a privacy request and leave an email address so we can reply.

Why we show this information

Serendib Vantage is a news reading service. We show outlets' own headlines and short teasers, group the reports of the same event together, and link to the original article. People appear because the outlets we link to named them.

What we hold

• Headlines, short excerpts and links published by news outlets, which can name people — including people in public life and people involved in legal proceedings.
• Summaries we generate with AI from those headlines and excerpts, which can also name them. Our summaries do not state a person's legal status.
• Images that an outlet supplies with its own feed, shown from the outlet's servers.

We do not build profiles of people, and we do not add information from other sources. Reports about criminal proceedings can be especially sensitive under data protection law; we show what outlets reported and link to them, and we do not present an allegation, an arrest or a remand as a finding of guilt.

Where it comes from

The public feeds and pages of established Sri Lankan and international news publishers. Every item links to the original, so you can check it against the source.

Our legal basis

We rely on our legitimate interest, and the wider public interest, in making news easier to find and compare, and on the protections data protection law gives to journalism and freedom of expression. We weigh that against the rights of the people named: we show only what the outlets published, and we do not add private details.

Accuracy

We show what outlets reported; we do not verify it, and the original report is the authority. Where a summary we wrote is wrong, or a headline is out of date, please send a correction.

How long we keep it

Collected headlines, excerpts and summaries are kept in our archive so that shared links keep working and so the outlook can be calculated over time. We review objections to continued publication case by case (see your rights).

You can read Serendib Vantage without an account. We do not offer accounts, newsletters or comments, and we do not sell or share visitor data for advertising.

Visit statistics (always on)

We use Vercel Web Analytics to count page views. It does not use cookies, it reports only aggregated statistics, and it does not let us identify individual visitors.

Google Analytics 4 (only if you accept)

With your consent, we also use Google Analytics 4 to understand which pages are read and which share and social links are used. Google Analytics sets cookies (named _ga and _ga_…) and sends usage data, including device and approximate location information, to Google. It is not loaded at all unless you click Accept in the cookie banner, and you can change your mind at any time:

Cookie settings

Our legal basis for Google Analytics is your consent. Withdrawing it stops future collection; it does not affect what was collected before.

Storage in your browser

The site stores a few small values in your own browser. They never leave your device.

• serendib-vantage.consent.analytics (localStorage) — remembers whether you accepted or declined Google Analytics.
• serendib-vantage.news.lastVisit (localStorage) — the time of your last visit to the news section, so we can mark stories that are new since then.
• serendib-vantage.news.sessionSince (sessionStorage) — keeps that “new since” marker steady while you browse; it is cleared when you close the tab.
• serendib-vantage:news-languages (localStorage) — the languages you said you read, so each story can lead with a headline in your language.

These are strictly necessary for features you use, so they do not need consent. You can clear them in your browser settings at any time.

The corrections form

If you use the corrections form, we receive your message, your email address if you choose to give one, and up to three images you attach. These are stored in Airtable. We use them only to check and act on your report and, if you left an email, to reply. Our legal basis is our legitimate interest in keeping the record accurate (and, for a privacy request, our legal obligation to respond). We keep submissions only as long as needed to deal with them and to keep a record of what we changed and why.

Server logs

Like any website, our hosting provider, Vercel, automatically records technical request logs (such as IP address, browser type and the page requested) to run the service and protect it from abuse. These are kept for a short period under Vercel's own policies.

Images from news outlets

Some stories show an image that the outlet supplied with its own feed. Your browser loads it directly from the outlet's servers, so, as with any image loaded from another site, that outlet receives your IP address and browser details when it serves it.

We use the following providers to run Serendib Vantage. They process data on our behalf, and several are based in, or store data in, the United States or other countries outside Sri Lanka, the EU and the UK.

• Vercel (United States) — hosting, server logs and cookieless visit statistics.
• Neon — the Postgres database that stores the news section's collected headlines, excerpts and summaries.
• OpenAI — writes some news summaries from published headlines and short excerpts, which can include the names of people in the news. No visitor data is sent to OpenAI.
• Airtable — stores corrections-form submissions.
• Google — Google Analytics 4, only if you accept.

Where personal data is transferred across borders, we rely on these providers' contractual data protection commitments (such as data processing terms and standard contractual clauses) and on the safeguards permitted by the laws that apply.

Whether you are named in a story or simply visit the site, you can ask us to:

• Access — tell you what personal data we hold about you and give you a copy.
• Correct — fix data that is inaccurate, incomplete or out of date.
• Object — stop using your data on the basis of our legitimate interest, where your circumstances outweigh that interest.
• Erase — delete data we no longer have a good reason to keep.
• Withdraw consent — for Google Analytics, using Cookie settings.

To make a request, use the corrections form, say what you are asking for, and include an email address so we can reply. We may need to confirm who you are before acting. We aim to reply within one month.

Some rights are limited where the data is part of public-interest reporting. For example, we may decline to remove a link to an accurate report by an established outlet — but we will always correct errors in our own summaries, bring outdated items up to date, and explain our decision.

Please contact us first so we can try to put things right. You also have the right to complain to the Data Protection Authority of Sri Lanka (dpa.gov.lk). If you are in the EU or UK, you can also complain to your local data protection authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office.

We will update this notice when the way we handle personal data changes, and change the “last updated” date at the top. See also our terms of use.