Privacy Policy

Information you provide

When you create a membership account, we receive your name and email address. Passwords are stored only as one-way password hashes; Historium cannot read your original password. If you contact us, we also receive the message and any materials you choose to send.

Verification and account recovery

We use your email address to send account-verification and password-reset messages from contact@historium.media. Verification and reset links are time-limited. Security tokens are stored in hashed form and are invalidated after use or expiry.

After the allowlisted owner completes verified Google sign-in, Historium may set a strictly necessary remembered-device credential so Studio does not require a new Google sign-in whenever the short PHP session ends. The browser receives an opaque host-only, Secure, HttpOnly and SameSite=Lax cookie; the database stores its selector and keyed token hash, linked to the owner account, rather than the reusable token. The credential rotates when restored, has a rolling lifetime of up to 90 days and an absolute lifetime of one year, and is invalidated by owner-role, account-status or authorization-version changes. Explicit sign-out revokes the credential presented by that device. Expired or revoked server records may remain for a short security and cleanup period before bounded deletion.

Saved content, progress, and private history

When a signed-in member uses My Historium, we store the account identifier together with stable identifiers for content they save and for films or articles they begin. For films we may retain the playback position, duration, completion state, and last-viewed time. For articles we may retain an approximate reading percentage, a safe section marker, completion state, and last-viewed time. These records do not store article text, video titles, IP addresses, browser user-agent strings, or referrer URLs. Current public titles, images, and links are resolved from Historium's editorial catalogue when the private library is displayed.

Saved items and progress are used only to provide the member's private collection, continue-watching or continue-reading controls, and recent activity. A member can clear saved items or viewing and reading history from My Historium. These records are deleted automatically if the related account is deleted.

Technical information

Our hosting provider may process IP addresses, request times, browser information, and security logs to deliver and protect the service. Cloudflare Turnstile processes technical signals on the contact form to reduce automated abuse.

On-page article translation

Historium first uses a separately published editorial translation when one is available. If a reader explicitly requests another language and no published edition exists, Historium may send the article title, summary, readable article text, and the source and requested language from the published server record to MyMemory, a service operated by Translated, through its keyless HTTPS translation interface. The browser sends Historium only the public article slug, a revision identifier, and the requested language. Historium does not include the reader's IP address, account identifier, browser details, form contents, or other private account data in the translation-provider request. The provider necessarily receives the request from Historium's server and may process the text, Historium's server address, and the public contact address supplied for service limits under its own terms and privacy practices.

Machine-generated translations are displayed only inside the current article page, are labelled as automated, and are not published or indexed as independent editorial editions. To avoid sending the same unchanged article repeatedly, Historium stores the translated text in private non-public storage by source revision, target language, and provider version. The configured reuse period is currently one year; expired entries are no longer served and are removed when encountered or through later operational cleanup. The translation endpoint instructs browsers and search engines not to cache or index its response. Machine translation can be unavailable, delayed, incomplete, or inaccurate; the source-language article remains authoritative. The server-side provider transport can be disabled, after which an already published translation or a supported browser's on-device translation may still be available.

Cookieless audience measurement

Historium operates a first-party, cookieless audience counter on normal public pages. It creates a rotating pseudonymous visitor key with a one-way keyed HMAC from request-level network and browser signals, then stores the key rather than the raw IP address or full browser user-agent string. Reports may use the public page path, event time, visible active time, a two-letter country code when supplied by the hosting platform or a trusted content-delivery network, the referring host without its full URL, a coarse acquisition channel, and coarse device, browser-family and operating-system categories. “New” and “returning” figures are retained-window estimates, not permanent cross-device identities.

Audience tables do not store query strings, full referrer URLs, names, email addresses, account identities, search text, form contents, or private administration, authentication and submission routes. Signed-in administrator traffic and configured internal addresses are excluded. Reports use only a configured 60-to-90-day window. Records that leave that window are scheduled for removal by subsequent bounded cleanup runs, so deletion work does not lock the shared database. The counter sets no analytics cookie.

Historium also uses Google Analytics with Consent Mode v2 on normal public pages. Analytics and advertising storage remain denied by default. In that state the Google tag does not create Analytics cookies, and limited cookieless signals may be processed to produce aggregate or modelled readership and performance reports. Sensitive and non-campaign query values are removed from measured page addresses; strictly formatted campaign codes may be retained to attribute a visit. Historium does not intentionally send names, email addresses, passwords, account identifiers, contact-message text, comment text, search text, or reset tokens to Analytics. Limited events may indicate that an account action, comment submission, contact request in a fixed inquiry category, download request, translation, share, or media-playback milestone occurred.

Outside regions that require an advertising consent message, Historium shows a slim disclosure notice and keeps Google Analytics storage denied. In the European Economic Area, United Kingdom, Switzerland, and other contexts where it applies, Google’s certified consent platform presents the required advertising and storage choices. Its controls can be reopened from Cookie choices in the footer. Browser privacy controls, content blockers, and network filtering may prevent measurement entirely.

Advertising and Google AdSense

Historium may use Google AdSense to display advertising in designated areas. The AdSense and Privacy & Messaging loader may be requested on normal public pages for site verification, fraud protection, consent messaging, and advertising readiness even when no manual advertising area is filled. When an ad is requested, Google and third-party advertising vendors or networks may process device and browser information, IP address, the public page being viewed, approximate location, ad impressions and interactions, consent signals, and cookies or similar identifiers to deliver and measure ads, prevent fraud, limit repetition, and report performance. Depending on applicable law and your choice, ads may be personalized, non-personalized, or limited.

Where your choices and applicable requirements allow, Google and third-party advertising vendors may use cookies to serve ads based on your previous visits to Historium and other websites. These advertising cookies enable Google and its partners to select personalized ads using browsing activity on Historium and elsewhere on the Internet.

Where required, Google’s certified consent platform presents and records advertising choices before optional advertising storage or personalization is used. The footer’s Cookie choices control reopens the applicable Google message for regulated visitors. You can manage Google advertising preferences at Google Ads Settings, review Google’s Ad Technology Providers, and use the industry YourAdChoices opt-out tool where available. Google explains its processing on partner sites in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services and in the Google Privacy Policy.

Embedded media

Documentary pages use YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed domain. Playing or interacting with a video may still send information to YouTube under Google's policies.

How information is used

• To answer legitimate editorial, licensing, press, and production inquiries.
• To create, verify, secure, and support membership accounts.
• To remember a member's saved content, playback position, reading progress, and private recent activity across signed-in devices.
• To provide eligible music downloads and maintain essential security records for those downloads.
• To provide community features and moderate comments.
• To protect the service from fraud, spam, and security threats.
• To understand aggregate readership and performance through cookieless measurement and, when permitted, more accurate cookie-backed analytics.
• To fund publishing through clearly separated advertising and measure or protect those ad deliveries.

Retention and sharing

Saved-content records remain until the member removes them or the account is deleted. Private progress and recent-activity records are bounded per account; older entries may be removed automatically as the limit is reached, and members can clear the history sooner from My Historium.

We retain account data while an account remains active and for a limited period afterward when needed for security, legal obligations, or dispute resolution. Expired verification and recovery records are removed or invalidated. We do not sell personal information. Data may be processed by service providers that operate hosting, transactional email, audience measurement, advertising, consent management, article translation, YouTube embeds, and abuse protection. Google sign-in is retained only as a restricted administrative fallback and is not offered as public membership.

Your choices

My Historium lets a signed-in member remove individual saved items, clear all saved items, and clear private viewing and reading history at any time. Saved-content and progress records are also removed if the related account is deleted.

You may update basic account information through your account page and may request access, correction, or deletion of personal information connected to your inquiry or account, subject to applicable law and legitimate security or recordkeeping needs. Cookie choices in the footer opens Google’s certified consent message where it applies and Historium’s Analytics choice elsewhere. Advertising preferences are also available through Google Ads Settings and participating vendors’ own controls.

Contact

Privacy questions can be sent to contact@historium.media.