Your data

Submitting an error report sends five things about you, and one more: a technical anti-robot field, which stays empty whenever a person fills the form. Nothing else. The five are:

• The article link, reduced to its final segment before it leaves your browser.
• The passage you are quoting.
• Why you believe it is wrong.
• A supporting source link, if you gave one.
• A way to reach you, if you gave one. This field is optional and a report without it is read the same way.

The report is written to one table of our own database, hosted in Europe. It is not published, it does not appear on the site, and it is not attached to the article a reader sees.

The newsroom reads it, to check the claim and correct the article if the claim holds. Nobody else can: the roles a public visitor connects through have no right to read that table at all.

Nothing you write in the form is sent anywhere else. Our error monitoring receives the technical identifier of a failure and never the text of a report, and no other service receives any of it.

The server holds the address your request came from in its own memory, to limit how many reports one address can send in a minute. It is never written to the database, it never leaves the server, and it is removed from that memory once a minute has passed, at the server's next moment of activity; until then it sits in that memory and nowhere else.

Reports are kept for the follow-up of corrections: an error reported once should still be traceable when the same claim resurfaces. A report is deleted twelve months after it has been handled, and it is deleted with its article if that article is ever removed.

To ask what we hold about a report you sent, write to the newsroom at the address on the contact page.