Who this is
Astraas is an independent technology publication. The site is operated from India and read mostly in the United States. There is no company behind it beyond the person who writes it. Contact for anything on this page, including a request to delete something: hello@astraas.tech.
Reading the site
Every page loads one small first-party script that records a page view. It sends:
the page path, the host of the site you arrived from (not the full URL), a
utm_source value if one is in the link, and your browser's viewport
width. No third party receives any of it.
To count a visitor twice without knowing who they are, the script's server side computes a token from your IP address, your browser's user-agent string, today's date and a rotating secret, then keeps only the first 24 characters of the result. Your IP address is never written to disk. The token changes at midnight UTC and cannot be joined to the previous day's, so it is useless for following anyone over time — which is also why it does not need consent.
The script does nothing else. There is no scroll tracking, no session recording, no
fingerprinting, no advertising identifier, and no data sold or shared. It honours
Do Not Track: if your browser sends that signal, nothing is recorded at
all.
Cookies and local storage
No cookies. Two values are stored locally in your own browser and never transmitted:
astraas-theme— whether you chose light or dark.astraas-ec— the date you dismissed the newsletter prompt, so it does not ask again for 30 days.
Clearing your browser storage removes both. Nothing breaks.
Server logs
Like any web server, ours records requests — IP address, timestamp, path, user-agent — for security and debugging. These are separate from analytics, are not used to build any profile, and are not shared.
The newsletter
If you submit the form, we store your email address, which form on which page you used, and the date. We also store a hash of your IP address, purely to stop one person submitting the form repeatedly; unlike the analytics token this hash does not rotate, so we treat it as personal data rather than claiming it is anonymous.
We do not ask for your name, employer or anything else, and we do not enrich or append data from other sources. The list is not sold, rented or shared. Every email carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes the address.
Who sends it
The newsletter is sent by beehiiv, a US email platform, acting as our processor. Signups collected on this site are transferred to beehiiv in batches so the newsletter can be sent to you; beehiiv then holds your email address, the date you subscribed, and which form you used.
Be aware that beehiiv records more than this website does. Like essentially every email platform it logs whether you opened an issue and which links you clicked, and it sets cookies if you visit its own hosted pages. That is a real step up from the site's cookieless analytics, and it is the trade for receiving email at all. Their terms and privacy policy govern that data: beehiiv.com/privacy.
Confirmation is double opt-in: after submitting the form you get an email asking you to confirm, and nothing is sent until you do. If you never confirm, you never hear from us again beyond a single reminder.
Advertising
No advertising is running on this site at the time of writing, and no ad network has any code on these pages. The layout reserves space for future ad units, but nothing is loaded and nothing is requested from a third party.
That will change. When it does:
- The provider will be named on this page before the first ad is served.
- Ad providers generally do set cookies and may use them for personalised advertising. At that point visitors in the EEA, UK and Switzerland will be asked for consent through a proper consent tool, and visitors in US states with opt-out rights will get a working opt-out link.
- You can control Google's personalised advertising at any time at My Ad Center, and opt out of many other vendors at optout.aboutads.info and optout.networkadvertising.org.
Affiliate links
Some articles — mainly deals, gadget, computing and phone coverage — contain affiliate links. If you buy through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Any article containing them says so at the top, before you have had the chance to click one.
Affiliate programmes track the click on their own side, subject to their privacy policies, not ours. Commission never affects what gets covered or what is said about it, and measurement and benchmark articles do not carry affiliate links at all.
What we never do
- Sell or rent personal information.
- Build advertising profiles from your reading.
- Use third-party analytics — no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, nothing.
- Load social media trackers or embedded widgets that phone home.
- Email you anything you did not ask for.
Your rights
Wherever you live, you can ask us what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted, by emailing hello@astraas.tech. In practice, for almost everyone, the answer is "an email address, if you subscribed" — the analytics data genuinely cannot be traced back to a person, so there is nothing there to hand over or erase.
If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, the lawful basis for the newsletter is your consent, and for analytics and server logs it is legitimate interest in running and securing a website. You may object, and you may complain to your supervisory authority.
If you are in California or another US state with similar rights, you may request disclosure or deletion of personal information and opt out of any sale or sharing. We do not sell or share personal information, so there is currently nothing to opt out of; if that changes this page will change first.
Retention
Analytics rows are aggregate counts with a daily token, kept indefinitely because they identify nobody. Subscriber records are kept until you unsubscribe or ask for deletion. Server logs rotate on the host's normal schedule.
Children
This site is written for adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has subscribed, email us and it will be removed.
Where the data sits
The site runs on a single server in India, rented from Hostinger. Analytics rows, the subscriber list and any email you send us all live there. Nothing is replicated elsewhere and there is no separate cloud service holding a copy.
India does not have an EU adequacy decision, so if you are in the EEA or the UK your data is being processed outside your own jurisdiction. For the newsletter that transfer happens because you asked for the newsletter. For analytics there is nothing to transfer that identifies you. We are telling you this rather than burying it, because "hosted in the EU" would have been easier to write and would not have been true.
Changes
The date at the top changes when this page does. Anything that expands what is collected — advertising in particular — will be reflected here before it goes live, not after.