Privacy at StoriesNavigation
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1. Held about you
Nothing at all. StoriesNavigation has no sign-up or login and keeps no user accounts, so it holds no personal file on anyone. Its pages are static documents, and handles entered in the search box go unrecorded on our side. One caveat: every search reloads the page as /?u=name, so the handle travels inside the URL itself, where the entry-4 host and delivery network may note it in their access logs. The one measurement made here is the origin count in the next paragraph; how the site earns its keep is laid out in entry 5. Any future change would be announced here, and the date above would move.
On the origin count: once a page has been visible for a few seconds, it logs the referrer’s host name (not a complete address), the page reached, the country of the visitor, and a campaign tag when the link provides one, as +1 on that day’s total. Cookies, identifiers and IP addresses stay out of it. DNT and GPC visitors are not logged. A quarter of a year later the totals are gone. Whether visitors come back is measured by remembering one day in the visitor’s own browser; the visit itself is then sorted into a handful of gap classes, and only that class is logged. The remembered day identifies no one and stays on the device. Deleting this site’s stored data removes it, and DNT or GPC visitors have nothing remembered.
2. Held by your own browser
A short list of recently opened handles is written to local storage on your device and transmitted nowhere. It covers that single browser only; no other device or profile can read it. To wipe it, use the clear control beside the list, erase this site’s data in browser settings, or simply close a private window, which discards it on its own. A service worker also stores two pages of this site, the homepage plus the error page, for opening without a connection; profiles and media never enter that store, and erasing the site data clears it too.
3. The path a lookup takes
Stage one: pressing View hands this site’s edge the handle, on the same address you are reading now. Before the request goes any further, the delivery network puts that search through an unseen bot test; no puzzle appears unless traffic looks unusual. Stage two: the edge relays the handle onward to our server, while counting how many requests each IP address sends over a short window, to apply request limits. Stage three: our server turns to an outside supplier of profile data (the data provider), which reads the account at Instagram and passes the result back for our server to relay to the page. The provider is told which handle was entered, and what it sees is our own machine knocking; your IP address, the particulars of your browser and the address of this site remain with us. Stage four: the page pulls photos and clips straight off Instagram’s picture servers. Your IP address is visible to those servers, as with any picture fetched on the web, but no referrer naming this site is sent. Our server stands in for you on three things: avatars, bundle covers and every downloaded file. Where any of this matters to you, ordinary precautions apply here as anywhere online: a VPN hides your real address from remote servers, and a privacy-hardened browser trims the extra details it volunteers.
4. Parties in the chain
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Host: serves the static pages and the site’s edge.
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Delivery network (CDN): the layer between you and the host; it screens out abusive traffic and carries out the unseen bot test (Cloudflare Turnstile) at every search, glimpsing the IP address and basic browser signals only fleetingly while doing so.
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Data provider: obtains open profiles on request from our server, per entry 3.
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Instagram’s picture servers: per entry 3, the source of each photo and clip opened on the page.
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Ad network: the outside business behind each promotion listed in entry 5.
Beyond these, no party gets data from StoriesNavigation, and nothing is ever sold.
5. Advertising
Promotions fund this guide. A commercial ad network, not StoriesNavigation, picks and delivers them, and its own terms govern whatever it gathers. Visitors meet no permission dialog first, wherever they are. Expect that network, plus the firms buying space through it, to store small files or tracking pixels on your device as the promotions load.
- A page under the page: touching the screen almost anywhere can send a sponsor’s site into a new tab, which then tucks itself beneath this one.
- Drifting panels: compact sponsored boxes slide across the text, each carrying a cross to close it.
- Full-display takeovers: once a lookup finishes, or midway through a guide, a promotion may blanket the display and stay there until dismissed.
- A push-alert question: after you search, the browser can ask whether storiesnavigation.com is allowed to send alerts. Accept, and sponsored messages come through even with every tab of ours shut. Browser settings for the site let you revoke it whenever you like.
- Paid trails: “Keep exploring” closing the text of a bio, “Next stop, sponsored” panels and tiles scattered through results and guides, a band glued to the lowest edge of the window, and “Trending trails” shortcuts below recent handles, inside the viewer overlay and at the page foot.
- Saved files: tapping a save button can launch one sponsor page too, and never a second within sixty seconds. Your download itself comes through unchanged.
- Information reaching the network: your connection’s IP, the browser and language it reports, window size, the name of this website, and a note of whether a promotion appeared or was tapped. It serves them to choose promotions, limit repeats, tally displays plus taps, and detect fraud; targeting can build on browsing elsewhere.
- Blocker probe: each search starts by pinging the network. When an extension swallows that ping, the lookup is cancelled and a note asks you to let promotions through. What gets counted is how many lookups were cancelled, nothing else: no handle, no address.
The handles you search never leave our hands for the network. Note that a result page address spells the handle out (/?u=name), so scripts that run on the page, the promotional ones too, may read it.
6. Rights you keep
Any reader may request a copy of what we hold on them, a correction, or erasure. Expect a short letter back saying the search came up empty, since no record here is tied to any person. The party answerable for this policy is StoriesNavigation itself, reached through the mailbox in entry 7. You can also take the matter to your own country’s data protection regulator.