Privacy Policy

The Argentina Files operates this website and is responsible for its editorial content and website practices. Questions about this Privacy Policy, legal notices, privacy requests and rights requests may be sent to legal@theargentinafiles.com.

This site has no user accounts, no registration, no comment system and no payment facility, so there is no routine collection of personal information from readers. The information involved falls into two categories.

Information you provide

The only way to provide personal information to this site is to write to one of its published email addresses. If you do, we receive whatever your message contains:

• your email address and any name or signature you include;
• the content of your message and any attachments you send;
• any further correspondence in the same exchange.

Information collected automatically

Visiting any website involves your browser sending technical information to the server that delivers it. For this site, that information — collected through hosting and analytics infrastructure described below — is limited to:

• the pages you view on this site and the time of the request;
• the referring page or source, where your browser sends one;
• general device and browser information, such as browser type, operating system and approximate screen size;
• approximate location derived from network information, at country or region level;
• IP address, as processed by hosting and analytics infrastructure in the course of serving and measuring requests.

This information is used in aggregate. The site does not build profiles of individual readers, does not attempt to identify visitors, and does not track visitors across other websites.

Information is used only to:

• deliver, secure and maintain the site;
• understand in aggregate which material is read, so that editorial effort goes where it is useful;
• diagnose technical faults and protect against abuse, such as attempts to disrupt or gain unauthorised access to the service;
• respond to correspondence you send, including correction requests, rights enquiries and privacy requests;
• comply with legal obligations.

We do not sell personal information. We do not share it with advertisers, and there is no advertising on this site. We do not use it for behavioural advertising or for cross-site tracking, and we do not disclose it to third parties except to the service providers described below who process it on our behalf, or where disclosure is required by law.

The site currently sets one first-party language-preference cookie, NEXT_LOCALE, to remember English or Arabic. The application configures it for one year with SameSite=Lax. It holds the selected locale and is not used for advertising or analytics. The site does not display an analytics-cookie banner because the current implementation sets no advertising or analytics cookies; requirements can vary by jurisdiction. Separately, choosing a language writes the same preference to one local-storage key. The current site does not read that duplicate value back or transmit it, and you can clear it through your browser's site-data controls.

Opening a case file also writes to a separate key in your browser's local storage: the heading of the section you last reached in that case file, not a percentage or a precise scroll position. Its only purpose is so that, if you come back to that case file later, the page can offer a small, dismissible notice letting you jump back to roughly where you left off — it never scrolls the page for you. This is recorded per case file, stays on the device and browser you were using, and is never transmitted anywhere: it is not a cookie, it is not sent to this site or to any other party, and it is not used for analytics of any kind. You can clear it at any time through your browser's site-data controls, the same way as the language-preference key above.

The site currently uses Vercel Web Analytics on every page. Vercel documents the service as processing request data to create a hash valid for 24 hours and recording page URL, timestamp, referrer, filtered query parameters, approximate location, browser, operating system and device type. It does not use analytics cookies. See Vercel's Web Analytics privacy notice for the provider's current description.

No other analytics or error-monitoring client was found in the current implementation. If another service is introduced, or analytics begins setting identifying cookies or tracking individuals, this policy will be updated before that change is enabled.

The site depends on a small number of service providers, which process information only as necessary to provide their service. In use today:

• Vercel, for hosting and content delivery, which processes requests to the site including IP addresses in the ordinary course of serving them;
• Vercel Web Analytics, for aggregate traffic measurement, as described above;
• Google Fonts, whose typefaces are served from this site rather than fetched from Google by your browser, so visiting this site does not send a request to Google for them;
• email providers, which handle correspondence sent to the addresses published on this site.

This policy allows for future use of additional services of the following kinds, none of which is in use today: privacy-respecting analytics, error and performance monitoring, newsletter or mailing-list delivery, and a search or media-hosting provider. Where such a service is introduced and it processes personal information, this policy will be updated to name it.

Each provider handles information under its own privacy terms. External sites linked from the record are not service providers and are governed entirely by their own policies.

The site is served over encrypted connections and is a static publication with no reader database, no login system and no stored reader records, which removes most of the risk that a site of this kind would otherwise carry. Access to correspondence and to the publishing infrastructure is restricted.

No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and no absolute guarantee can be given. If you need to send sensitive information, consider whether email is an appropriate channel for it before doing so.

Correspondence is reviewed when the matter it concerns closes. Routine messages are deleted when there is no continuing editorial, legal, security or administrative need. Correspondence concerning a correction, rights request or legal matter may be retained as part of the publication's record of how that issue was handled and is reviewed again if the reason for keeping it changes.

Vercel controls the retention of analytics data and hosting or security logs under the account settings and provider notices in force at the time; those provider-controlled periods are not set by this site and may change. The 24-hour analytics hash is described above. Hosting logs are used for delivery, security and diagnosis, while analytics records are used for aggregate readership measurement. The provider notice linked above is the dated source for the current analytics design.

You may ask what personal information about you this site holds, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, or object to its use. Depending on where you live, you may have these rights by law; where you do not, requests are still considered.

Send privacy requests to legal@theargentinafiles.com. Please describe what you are asking for clearly enough that the request can be acted on. Requests are answered within a reasonable time, and within any period required by applicable law.

Note that a privacy request is a different thing from a request to change the editorial record. Information published about a person in the investigative record is journalism, and requests to correct it are handled as correction requests on their factual merits rather than as data-deletion requests. Those should be sent to the editorial address published in the Terms of Service, and are welcome.

This site is not directed to children under 13, and it does not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. There is no registration, no account and no facility through which a child could submit personal information to this site.

If you believe a child under 13 has provided personal information to this site, write to legal@theargentinafiles.com and it will be deleted.

This site is operated from the United States and is read internationally. The infrastructure that serves it delivers content from servers in multiple countries. If you visit from outside the United States, information involved in serving and measuring your visit may be processed in the United States or in other countries, where data-protection law may differ from that of your own country.

The current implementation uses the language-preference cookie and Vercel Web Analytics described above and was not found to use advertising cookies, cross-site tracking or reader profiles. Legal requirements can vary by jurisdiction. If you have a privacy request, the route in the Privacy Requests section above is open to you regardless of where you live.