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.

A short-lived session cookie lets us remember, for this visit, which stories you opened, upvoted, or downvoted, so the front page can reorder itself around them. It carries no name or email, just a random id, and it disappears when you close the browser. The record of what you viewed is purged automatically after 30 days; votes stick around a little longer, but they're never anything more than that same anonymous id, with no way back to you once the cookie is gone.

A handful of other cookies just remember how you like the page to look: color, light or dark, photo style, and the audience view. If you search a place in Travel or Events, we also remember that country or city, so the section stays filtered to it next time you visit. Each of these persists for a year, and each can be cleared where you set it: the location by hitting "clear" next to the filter on that section's page, the rest from the control that sets them. On your first visit to Travel or Events we may infer your country from your IP address, in memory only, to pre-select a location; that inference is never stored, and the location cookie can be cleared at any time.

Commenting is the one place Kaleido asks you to sign in, through whichever login provider we support. That creates an ordinary account session, separate from the anonymous one above, so we can attribute your comment and moderate abuse.

We do not sell your reading, and we do not hand it to third-party ad trackers. Photos are licensed for the pieces they run with; the rest is the plumbing any website keeps to serve pages and stay up.