Privacy

Who is responsible

Zetsel is published by Kraftwrk, a sole trader registered in the Netherlands and based in Rotterdam. That makes Kraftwrk the controller for everything described here. Write to info@kraftwrk.nl about anything on this page, including a request to see or delete what is held about you.

Reading Zetsel

You can read the whole paper without an account and without telling it anything. Reading is measured only in aggregate, through Vercel Web Analytics, which counts page views and a couple of anonymous actions such as opening a story. It sets no cookies, it does not identify you, and the measurements are served from this website’s own address rather than from a third party. Your IP address reaches Vercel because Vercel serves the site, which is unavoidable for any website.

Two things on the page are fetched by your browser from somewhere else, which means those services see your IP address: the weather in the masthead comes from Open-Meteo, and the small publication icons beside each story come from DuckDuckGo’s icon service. The weather is always Rotterdam’s, never yours: the site never asks for your location. Fonts and everything else are served from here.

Asking for a sign-in link

Zetsel has no passwords. You give an email address and it sends a link that signs you in. When you ask for one, a single line goes into a log: a scrambled one-way version of your address rather than the address itself, the IP address the request came from, the time, the campaign tag that was in the link you arrived through if there was one, and the name of the website that sent you, for example “read.cv”, never the page you were on.

The first three exist so the form cannot be used to make a stranger’s inbox ring: three links an address an hour, ten an IP address. The last two are the only marketing measurement Zetsel has, and they answer one question, which is whether the things done to tell people it exists actually work. The basis for both is legitimate interest under Article 6(1)(f): keeping the form safe, and knowing where readers come from.

That line can be connected back to you, by scrambling your address the same way and matching it, so the desk can see which campaign brought which member and not only how many. It is used in totals. It is never shared. The whole log is deleted automatically after ninety days.

Having an account

An account holds your email address, the name you chose to be greeted by if you gave one, the stories you saved, the thumbs you gave, and whether you asked for the morning edition and when. Those are kept because they are the service: the saved list is the reason to have an account at all. The basis is the agreement between you and Zetsel, and for the morning edition specifically it is your consent, given by ticking the box and proven by opening the link.

Accounts are stored with Supabase, which hosts the database and handles the sign-in links, and the site runs on Vercel. Both act only on Zetsel’s instructions. The picks, headlines and summaries are written by a model from Anthropic, which reads published articles and never anything about you.

The morning bell

If you turn on notifications, your browser creates an address for your device and Zetsel stores it so it can send the morning notification there. Deleting it is the same switch, off. The notification itself travels through the push service your browser maker runs, which is Google, Apple or Mozilla depending on your browser.

The morning edition by email

Nothing is being sent yet. Ticking the box records that you agreed and when, so that the list is lawful on the day it starts. When it does start, every email carries an unsubscribe link that works in one click, and there is no open tracking and no click tracking in it. You can withdraw the agreement at any time on your account page, which is the same thing as unsubscribing.

Deleting your account

The button is on your account page and it means what it says: your profile, your saved stories and your thumbs are deleted immediately, and the account itself with them. From the sign-in log, the campaign, the referring site and the IP address are cleared at the same moment, because none of those protect anything. The scrambled address and the timestamp stay until the ninety days are up, so that deleting an account cannot be used to reset the limit on the form, and then they go too.

What is kept on your device

No advertising or tracking cookies, ever, and no consent banner because there is nothing here to consent to. Two small things are stored: whether you chose the dark theme, in a cookie, so the page can be drawn correctly before it appears; and, on the first page of a visit, a short note of the campaign tag and the name of the site you came from, in session storage, so the sign-in form still knows where you arrived from if you read for a while first. The note is deleted the moment you close the tab and it cannot follow you anywhere. Signing in stores a session so you stay signed in.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of everything held about you, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, or object to the legitimate-interest processing described above. Write to info@kraftwrk.nl and you will get an answer within a month, usually the same week. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, the Dutch data protection authority.

Something wrong in an edition rather than in this page is a correction. Last updated 29 September 2026.