Privacy Policy

1. The Collecting Entity and the Purposes of Collection

MarkReadFintech (馬克解讀金融科技), the operator of this site, is the party collecting your data. We collect it for these purposes:

• To provide reader account services (signing in, following topics, and remembering which events you have already seen).
• To produce your personal digest, personalised to the topics you follow, and send it to the email address you specify.
• To send you the public weekly newsletter, if you subscribed to it yourself.
• To understand how the site is used overall, so that we can improve how content is arranged and how features work (statistics and research; we do not run personalised advertising).
• To keep the service secure (preventing abuse, abnormal traffic and account takeover).

We do not sell, do not rent out and do not trade your personal data, and we do not use it to deliver advertising.

Contact point for personal data matters: privacy@radar.markreadfintech.com.

2. Categories of Personal Data We Collect

• Identity and contact data: your email address. If you sign in with Google, what we obtain from Google is your email address and an account identifier (used to confirm that it is the same person); we do not obtain your Google Contacts, your Google Drive or other data.
• Account settings: the topics you follow, how often we send your personal digest, and which plan you are on.
• Records of your behaviour on the site: the page paths you visit; which events you open and expand; whether the time you spent reached our reading threshold; the keywords you search for on this site; clicks on links to other sites; records of clicks from a personal digest email back to the site; and an anonymous identifier generated by our server, together with general information about your browser and device (the User-Agent).
• Technical records: server access logs (including IP address and time), used for security and traffic protection.

This site does not require a password (it uses one-time sign-in links or Google sign-in instead), and it does not collect your national ID number, financial account details or credit card details — this site currently handles no payments.

3. The Period, Territory, Recipients and Methods of Use

Period

For as long as your account exists. After your account is deleted, your data is handled as described in Section 6. The retention period for each category of data is set out in Section 6.

Territory

Our servers are located in Taiwan. The third-party services described in Section 5 below may process data outside Taiwan (for example in the United States or the European Union), which counts as an international transfer.

Who Receives It

The operator of this site, and the third-party service providers we need in order to provide the service (see Section 5). Where required by law or regulation, or where it is necessary to protect the rights of this site and of others, we may also provide data to the competent authorities.

Methods

Your data is stored as electronic files in a database, and the service is delivered through the website interface and by email. We process it by automated means only as far as is reasonable and necessary, and we do not make automated decisions that produce legal effects concerning you.

4. Cookies and the Anonymous Identifier

• Sign-in cookie (essential): remembers that you are signed in. It lasts 30 days and is extended automatically while you are using the site. It is cleared when you sign out or delete your account.
• Sign-in flow cookie (essential): exists only briefly, during the sign-in process. It ties the sign-in email or the Google authorisation to this particular browser, to prevent others from hijacking the sign-in. It is cleared as soon as sign-in is complete.
• Anonymous identifier (analytics): a random number generated by our server that, before you sign in, cannot be matched to your real identity, stored in a cookie (lasting up to 400 days). It strings together the activity coming from one browser, so that we can produce overall statistics. Once you register and sign in, this number is linked to your account; when you delete your account, the number is deleted along with it.
• Local storage (localStorage): holds a flag recording that you have dismissed this site’s notice banner, and a random number used only to correlate analytics records. It does not contain any personal data.
• Third-party analytics cookies: set by Google Analytics 4; see Section 5.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. Blocking essential cookies will stop sign-in from working; blocking analytics cookies will not affect your reading. If your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal, then for visitors who are not signed in, this site sends none of its own behavioural analytics events at all.

5. Third-Party Services

• Google Tag Manager / Google Analytics 4 (“GA4”) (Google LLC): loaded on every page, used for overall traffic statistics. The events we currently send are: the language of the page (Chinese or English), whether or not an on-site search happened and the status of its result, and the submission, success or failure of the newsletter subscription form. GA4 only receives aggregate interaction events that contain no personal identifiers; we do not send GA4 your email address, your account ID or any other field that could identify you personally, and the actual words you searched for on this site are not sent either. There is therefore no record on the GA4 side that could be matched to you as an individual and would need to be deleted separately.
• Google account sign-in (OAuth) (Google LLC): when you choose to sign in with Google, Google verifies your identity and returns your email address and an account identifier.
• Newsletter delivery system (listmonk, self-hosted) + Resend: stores subscribers’ email addresses and subscription status, and does the actual delivery. We keep two lists: the public weekly newsletter list (you are added only if you tick the box yourself, and it uses a second confirmation step) and the member system list (which carries the transactional emails that go with a signed-in account, such as sign-in links and the personal digest). Click tracking is switched off on our sending domain.

6. Retention Periods

• Account and settings (email address, the topics you follow, how often we send your personal digest): for as long as your account exists; deleted immediately when you delete your account.
• Behaviour records already linked to an account: they live and die with the account, and are deleted along with it when you delete your account.
• Anonymous behaviour records not yet linked to any account: kept for 25 months from the time our server receives them, after which a scheduled clean-up process deletes them.
• One-time sign-in links: valid for 15 minutes and usable only once; expired records are deleted by a daily clean-up process.
• Newsletter subscription data: kept until you unsubscribe. Where we have stopped sending to an address because mail bounced or because of a complaint, we keep the suppression record we need, so that we do not email you again.
• Server access logs: kept only for security and debugging. They are kept for a short period, and are deleted by log rotation once that period has passed.

7. Your Rights and How to Exercise Them

Under Article 3 of Taiwan’s Personal Data Protection Act you have the following rights over the personal data this site holds, and these rights cannot be waived in advance: to make an enquiry or to request a review, to request a duplicate copy, to request supplementation or correction, to request that we discontinue collection, processing or use, and to request deletion. Here is how to exercise them:

• Checking and correcting: sign in and go to the Settings page, where you can see the email address you sign in with, which plan you are on and how often we send your personal digest; you can add or remove topics at any time in My Radar.
• Stopping emails: for the personal digest, choose “Do not send” on the Settings page; for the public weekly newsletter, you can unsubscribe on that same page, or click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any issue.
• Deleting your account: at the bottom of the Settings page there is a “Delete Account” section. Deletion happens immediately once you confirm a second time, and that page also lists what the deletion covers. Your subscription to the public weekly newsletter is a separate consent and is not cancelled automatically along with your account, so please unsubscribe separately, using one of the methods above.
• Other requests (for example asking for a duplicate copy, or making an enquiry or deletion request when you cannot sign in): please write to privacy@radar.markreadfintech.com, and we will deal with it once we have confirmed your identity. You can also contact us through the contact channels at MarkReadFintech.

You are free to choose not to provide personal data; but without an email address you cannot create an account or use the topic-following and personal digest features. The news content on this site itself can be read without signing in.

8. Data Security

Connections are encrypted with HTTPS throughout. Sign-in cookies are protected with HttpOnly, Secure and SameSite. We also check that requests which change state come from the same origin. Sign-in links are one-time and short-lived. We access data only as far as is necessary to provide the service, and we delete data that is past its retention period on a regular basis.

9. Minors

The content on this site is intended for adult readers. If you are under 18, please obtain the consent of your legal representative before you create an account.

10. Changes to This Policy

If this policy is revised, we will update the “Last updated” date on this page; where a material change is involved, we will also post a separate notice on the site. By continuing to use this site, you indicate that you understand the revised policy.