Last updated: September 28, 2026
Overview
Political Water Cooler ("we," "us," "the site") aggregates publicly available political news headlines and links to their original sources, alongside our own independently generated bias/lean ratings. This policy explains what information we collect from visitors and how we use it.
Information we collect
We collect very little. Specifically:
- Click data. When you click through to a source article, we log which article, source, and story cluster was clicked, for our own aggregate analytics (e.g. which stories get the most engagement). This is not tied to your identity, an account, or a persistent visitor identifier.
- Flag submissions. If you use the site's "flag" feature to suggest an article is miscategorized (news vs. opinion), we record that suggestion along with a randomly generated, one-time session identifier. This identifier is not linked to your name, IP address, or any other identifying information, and is used only to prevent the same flag from being counted more than once.
- Standard server logs. Our hosting provider (Cloudflare) automatically processes standard connection metadata (such as IP address and browser user-agent string) to serve the site and protect it against abuse, the same way any website host does. We do not separately access, store, or analyze this data ourselves beyond what our host provides for security and performance.
We do not use cookies, browser local storage, or tracking pixels. We do not require or offer visitor accounts, logins, or email sign-ups, and we do not collect your name, email address, or other personal information through normal use of the site.
How we use information
The limited data described above is used only to operate and improve the site — understanding which stories and sources readers find useful, and moderating the accuracy of our news/opinion classifications. We do not sell visitor information, and we do not have visitor information to share with advertisers because we do not collect it in the first place.
Third-party services
We rely on a small number of third-party services to operate the site, none of which receive visitor personal information from us:
- Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) — an independent third-party rating dataset we license to help score news sources.
- Cloudflare Workers AI / Anthropic — used to generate our own independent, automated lean-review analysis of source content.
- Meta (Facebook) — we maintain a Facebook Page and use Meta's API to publish our own posts there; this does not involve visitor data from this website.
Children's privacy
This site is intended for a general adult audience interested in political news and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time as the site evolves. The "Last updated" date above will reflect the most recent revision.
Contact
Questions about this policy can be sent to contact@politicalwatercooler.com.