No third-party requests
Every font, image, script and stylesheet on this site is served by us. There are no advertising networks, no social-media widgets, no embedded video players and no analytics tags. Opening a page here does not tell any other company that you did.
Article cover images are drawn by the site itself rather than fetched from an image host, for the same reason.
What your browser stores
If you switch between light and dark mode, your choice is saved in your
own browser under ucsnews.theme. It never leaves your
device and we cannot read it. Clearing your browser storage removes it,
and the site falls back to your system preference.
Reading Mogadishu Eye sets no cookies. A session cookie is issued only to signed-in staff using the editorial panel, and only for the duration of that session.
Server logs
Our web server keeps ordinary access logs: the address requested, the time, the HTTP status, the browser’s user-agent string and the IP address the request came from. These exist to keep the site running and to investigate abuse. They are not used to build reader profiles and are not shared with anyone.
Newsletters
If you sign up for a newsletter we store your email address. That is the one thing on this site that we keep about a reader, and only if you ask us to.
Alongside the address we store: which letters you chose, whether the subscription is confirmed, the times it was created, confirmed and cancelled, and two random tokens — one that confirms the address and one that unsubscribes it. We do not store your IP address, the pages you read, whether you opened a letter, or whether you clicked anything in it. Our letters are plain text and contain no images, so there is nothing in them that could report back.
Nothing is sent until you confirm. Signing up sends one message asking you to confirm; if you never do, that is the only message that address ever receives. This is also what stops someone adding your address without you.
Leaving takes one click, from a link in every letter, with no password and no account. We keep the record that the address was subscribed and asked to stop — that is how we can show we had permission, and it stops the address being added again by accident. Ask the editors and we will erase it outright.
The list lives on our own server, in the same database as the articles. It is not shared, sold, or given to an advertising or analytics company. Sending the letters requires a mail provider, which necessarily handles your address in order to deliver to it.
What we do not have
We do not run analytics, so we have no record of which pages you read or how long you stayed.
We have no accounts for readers. There is nothing to register for and nothing to log in to — a newsletter subscription is an address on a list, not an account.
If you write to us
Messages sent to the newsroom are kept in the mailbox they arrive in, for as long as the matter is live and afterwards as a record of corrections and right-of-reply requests. We do not add correspondents to any list. See the contact page.
Your rights
You can ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. Because we collect so little, the answer is usually that we hold nothing beyond server logs and, if you have written to us, your message. Requests go to the editors via the contact page.
Changes to this policy
When what we collect changes, this page changes with it, in the same update — not afterwards.