Privacy notice
Who is responsible
Vertical Observer is published by Colibri Holdings Ltd, which is the controller of the personal data described here under UK and EU data protection law. Colibri Holdings Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company number 09741137, with its registered office at 71 Queen Victoria Street, London EC4V 4BE, United Kingdom. ICO registration ZB415775. For any privacy question or request, write to privacy@verticalobserver.com.
Reading the site
Every page can be read without an account and without giving any personal data. There is no advertising on the site, and personal data is neither sold nor shared for advertising.
The site is hosted by Render and delivered through Cloudflare's network. As with any website, their servers process the technical details a browser sends with each request (IP address, browser and device type, the page requested, the referring page and the time) to deliver pages, keep the service secure and prevent abuse. They keep these logs under their own retention schedules, and Vertical Observer does not use them to identify readers. The lawful basis is legitimate interests in running a secure website.
Fonts are served from this site rather than a font service, so loading a page sends no request to a third
party for a typeface. Your browser keeps up to two settings for this site in local storage, not cookies:
vo-theme if you switch to the light theme, and vo-consent with your answer to the
analytics question. They never leave your browser, and clearing this site's data removes them.
Analytics
Google Analytics 4 runs only if you select Accept analytics in the banner. Until you choose, and if you decline, no Google Analytics script loads and no analytics cookie is set. A Global Privacy Control signal from your browser counts as declining.
With your consent, Google Analytics records the pages you view (without query strings), approximate location
(country or region), device and browser type, the referring site (its address only), interactions such as
scrolling and following links to other sites, and whether a newsletter sign-up form was submitted. It sets
first-party cookies whose names begin with _ga. Advertising storage, advertising user data, ad
personalisation and Google signals stay off even after you accept. Google Analytics 4 does not log or store IP
addresses, and Google keeps the data for up to 14 months. The lawful basis is your consent.
Change your choice at any time with Cookie settings at the foot of every page, or here. Declining removes this site's Google Analytics cookies and stops further collection in this browser.
This Week in Vertical
This Week in Vertical is a free weekly email. Signing up takes two steps. Submitting the form sends your email address and your consent to the newsletter service, which records the request and emails you a confirmation link. You are subscribed only after you open that link and press Confirm subscription. Confirmation links are valid for 48 hours.
The service keeps your email address, a one-way hash of it used to limit repeated requests, the version of the consent wording you accepted, the website the request came from, when you asked and when you confirmed, and whether the confirmation email was accepted for delivery. These records sit in a private Supabase database. Routine cleanup removes requests that were never confirmed after seven days and confirmed consent records after 365 days. A request whose outcome is uncertain is kept until it has been reviewed, so that an earlier unsubscribe is never reversed by mistake.
Resend, Inc. (United States) holds the subscriber list and sends the emails; this site's email is sent from Resend's EU (Ireland) region. Where personal data is transferred to the United States, Resend relies on the safeguards set out in its data processing terms. A subscription stays on the list until you unsubscribe.
For each issue the service also keeps a delivery record per subscriber: the issue, the provider's contact and message identifiers, and whether the email was accepted for delivery. Delivery records are kept for 13 months and then deleted.
Every issue carries a link to unsubscribe or manage your preferences, which acts on This Week in Vertical only. You can also write to privacy@verticalobserver.com. The lawful basis is your consent, which you can withdraw at any time; withdrawing does not affect what happened before. If you have accepted analytics, a sign-up is recorded in Google Analytics as an event, without your email address.
Who processes data, and where
| Provider | What it does | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Render Services, Inc. | Hosts the site | United States |
| Cloudflare, Inc. | Delivers the site at the network edge | Global network |
| Supabase, Inc. | Processes newsletter sign-ups and keeps the consent records | European Union (Ireland) |
| Resend, Inc. | Holds the subscriber list, sends the confirmation email and each issue, and records whether each issue was accepted for delivery | United States; emails are sent from the EU (Ireland) |
| Google Analytics 4, only with your consent | European Economic Area and United States |
Where a provider processes personal data outside the UK, the transfer relies on the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses. A copy of the safeguard relied on for any provider is available on request.
People named in reports
Reports and company profiles name people in their professional roles, such as executives, founders and officials, as published by the sources cited with each record. Data protection law makes an exemption for journalism, which can limit some of the rights below for this material. If something about you is wrong, a correction is usually the quickest remedy: write to corrections@verticalobserver.com.
Your rights
Under the UK GDPR and, where it applies, the EU GDPR, you can ask for a copy of your personal data, have it corrected or erased, restrict or object to its use, and receive it in a portable form, and you can withdraw consent at any time. Write to privacy@verticalobserver.com; requests are answered within one month, free of charge. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk, 0303 123 1113) or to the data protection authority where you live.
Changes
The date at the top of this notice changes whenever the notice does.