Personal, not identified.

Kaleido personalizes what you see without knowing who you are. There is no account to create and no profile to fill in; the tailoring happens against an anonymous session, not a person. We do not sell your reading, and we do not hand it to third-party ad trackers. Here is exactly what we store, and why.

Cookies

• sid: the anonymous personalization session. Remembers, for this visit, which stories you opened, upvoted, or downvoted, so the page can reorder around them. Just a random id, no name or email. Cleared when you close the browser.
• k_theme: your theme selection (currently the colour hue).
• k_appearance: light, dark, or system.
• k_photos: photo treatment, duotone or natural.
• k_tldr: your reading preference, the short TLDR version or the full article.
• k_location: the country or city you filtered Travel or Events to, so the section stays scoped next visit. Clearable from the filter. On your first visit we may infer your country from your IP to pre-select one; that guess is used in memory only, never stored.
• __Host-lsid: your signed-in session, set only when you log in to comment or edit. Lasts until you log out or close the browser.

With an account, and without

Most of Kaleido needs no account. You read, and you can upvote or downvote stories to steer your own front page. All of that rides on the anonymous sid session: no identity attached, and the record of what you viewed is purged after 30 days. Votes linger a little longer, but they are never more than that same throwaway id, with no way back to you once the cookie is gone.

Commenting is the one place we ask you to sign in, through whichever login provider we support. That creates an ordinary account session, separate from the anonymous one, so we can attribute your comment and moderate abuse. It does not merge with your anonymous reading; the two stay apart.

Your personalization, and moving it

The personalization you build up (call it your algorithm) is kept under a long-lived first-party cookie on this device and alongside it on our server, and it sticks around for as long as you keep visiting; we never sell it or hand it to anyone else, and you can wipe it whenever you like from your /you page. Sharing your session to another device is a deliberate act, so once you hand out a share link anyone who opens it can feed the same personalization, which is why you should keep it to yourself and not post it publicly.

If you subscribe to the Kaleido Letter, your email is linked to your otherwise-anonymous reading profile so the digest can be personalized the same way the site is. Unsubscribing or deleting your subscription (both one click, from any issue) removes that link; your address is never shared.

Analytics

We keep a light count of what gets read, so we know which pieces land and whether the site is holding up, and not much more. It runs on Liwan, a privacy-preserving analytics tool we host ourselves, and it sets no cookies and builds no profile of you. There is no cross-site tracking and no advertising identifier: it records that a page was viewed, not who viewed it, and your IP is used only in the moment to tally a visit, never stored against you. The small counting script loads from our own analytics host on every page.

Maps

On an event with a known location, we show a small map so you can place the venue at a glance. The map draws its tiles from OpenFreeMap, a free, donation-funded map host built on OpenStreetMap data, so your browser fetches those tiles directly and OpenFreeMap sees your IP address the way any site you open does. They set no cookies and need no account or key. We only load the map once you scroll it into view, and only on events that carry coordinates; nowhere else on Kaleido is anything requested from them. The "Google Maps" and "OpenStreetMap" links beside an event are ordinary outbound links too: they reach those services only if you click them.

Federation

Kaleido can publish to the fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, and the like). The site itself is an account you can follow from your own instance: new pieces land in your feed there, and you can reply, like, or boost them without ever making a Kaleido account. A reply that comes back may appear as a comment on the article, after the same moderation as an on-site one, so treat a fediverse reply as public. Federation carries the articles we publish, not your reading here: browsing and voting are never broadcast, and comments you post on Kaleido stay on Kaleido.