Legal and policies
Data retention and deletion policy
How long WeNepal keeps each kind of personal data, when it is deleted, and how to delete your account or ask us to erase your data.
Counsel has not yet signed off this text. It may change; the date above shows the current version.
We keep personal data only for as long as we need it for the purpose it was collected for, then delete it or make it anonymous. This policy sets out those periods. It should be read with the privacy policy. In this page "WeNepal", "we" and "us" mean the publisher that operates the service, which is responsible for your data under the Individual Privacy Act 2075 (2018) of Nepal.
Retention periods
| Data | What it includes | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| Sign-in codes | One-time codes sent by email or SMS, stored only as a hash | Expire after 10 minutes; deleted within one hour of expiry |
| Sign-in sessions | The session record behind the wn_refresh cookie | Up to 30 days, or until you sign out or delete your account |
| Your account | Phone number or email, name, district, language, topics, supporter status | Until you delete it, then a 7-day grace period, then erased |
| Newsletter subscription | Email, language, frequency, confirmation date | Until you unsubscribe. After that we keep only your email and the unsubscribe date on a suppression list, so we never email you again by mistake |
| Push notifications (app) | Device push token, chosen topics, language | Until you turn notifications off or uninstall the app; tokens reported as no longer registered are deleted automatically |
| Read counting | A daily-salted hash of your IP address, the story and the day, used to count one read per person per day | 2 days |
| Audience analytics | Page, device type, approximate location (country, city), referrer, with the IP address reduced to a daily-salted hash; raw IP addresses are not stored for analytics | 14 months |
| Contact messages, tips and suggestions | What you write, your name and email if given, the category | 24 months after the matter is closed, unless needed for a legal claim |
| Legal notices, complaints, corrections and takedown records | The notice, our response and the correspondence | As long as needed to deal with the matter and any legal claim, and at least 2 years |
| Security and audit logs | Staff actions and security events, including account events such as sign-up, sign-in session changes and deletion requests, with the IP address used | 2 years |
| Published stories, corrections and replies | The public record | Kept as part of the archive; corrections and retractions stay visible |
Deleting your account
You can delete your account yourself at any time:
- Website: sign in, open your account page and choose Delete account.
- App: open the Me tab and choose Delete account.
When you do:
- You are signed out on every device immediately and your sessions are ended.
- For 7 days your account is marked for deletion. If you sign in again during that time, the deletion is cancelled. This protects you from a mistaken or malicious deletion.
- After 7 days your phone number or email, name, district, topics, supporter status, saved stories and the notification registrations linked to your account are erased. Reactions are kept only as anonymous counts. Suggestions or messages you sent stay with our records but are no longer linked to your account.
- Saved stories are kept on your device and, while you are signed in, also synced to your account so they follow you between devices. The synced copy is erased with your account; the device copy goes when you clear site data in your browser or uninstall the app.
Asking us to erase data
If you cannot use the account page, or you want us to erase other data we hold about you (for example a contact message or a newsletter record), write to privacy@wenepal.com. We will ask you to confirm that the data is yours, for example by replying from the same email address, and we act on verified requests within 30 days.
We may keep some data where the law requires it or where it is needed to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim. If so, we tell you what we are keeping and why.
Backups
Our database provider keeps encrypted backups so the service can be restored after a failure. Deleted data is removed from backups when those backups expire on their normal rolling schedule. It is never restored into the live service except to recover from a failure, and in that case we delete it again.
Anonymous and aggregate data
Counts such as the number of reads of a story or the number of supporters do not identify anyone and may be kept without a time limit.
Changes
If we change a retention period, we update this page and the date at the top. A shorter period applies straight away; a longer period applies only to data collected after the change.
Contact
Deletion and data requests: privacy@wenepal.com.