Privacy

The short version

Reading this site anonymously leaves nothing on your device and creates no record of you. There is no cookie banner because there are no cookies to ask about. If you sign in, we hold your email address and what your account has done here, and you can have all of it deleted by asking.

Who is responsible

This site is run by Ido Nov as a personal project. Questions about your data, requests to see it, correct it or delete it, all go to contact@wikicompare.app, and are answered by a person rather than a process.

If you only read

No account, no cookie, nothing in local storage. Analytics runs in cookieless mode: PostHog counts visits using a hash it computes on its own servers from your IP address and browser, salted with a key that is thrown away daily, so the count cannot be turned back into a person or followed from one day to the next. We record which article was opened and whether it came from cache — never what you searched for, and never the text you clicked.

Two other parties see your IP address simply because your browser talks to them: the article photographs are served by Wikimedia, and the typefaces by Google Fonts.

If you sign in

We hold, for as long as the account exists:

• Your email address, and the name and profile picture if you used Google.
• Sign-in sessions, each recording the IP address and browser the session was opened from. This is what lets you stay signed in and what would show a sign-in you did not make.
• Your credit balance, any attempt to donate and the amount typed, coupon codes redeemed, and which article comparisons your credit has paid for.

Signing in is by emailed link or by Google, so there is no password here to lose. The donation and coupon records outlive a closed account in anonymised form — the count of people who tried to pay is the point of them — but the account they pointed at, and everything that names you, is deleted with it.

Why we hold it

To sign you in, to keep the credit ledger honest, and to know whether anybody is using this. Nothing here is sold, rented, or used to advertise to you, and none of it is used to build a profile of what you read.

Who processes it for us

• Vercel — hosting.
• Neon — the database.
• PostHog — analytics, as described above.
• Resend — delivering your sign-in link.
• Google — sign-in, if you choose it, and the typefaces.
• Anthropic — reads the Wikipedia articles to produce the comparison. It is sent the encyclopedia's text and nothing about you.

These are companies outside Israel, mostly in the United States and the EU, so using this site means your data is handled abroad.

Email

The sign-in link is the only email sent automatically. We will not add you to a mailing list, and if we ever want to write to you about anything else, we will ask first and take no for an answer.

Your rights

Under the Protection of Privacy Law you may ask to see the data held about you, to have it corrected if it is wrong, and to have it deleted. Write to contact@wikicompare.app and you will get an answer within 30 days. Providing any of this is voluntary — the only consequence of withholding it is that you cannot have an account or credit.

Wikipedia text and photographs

The article prose and the lead photographs in the columns are the work of Wikipedia's contributors, excerpted and abridged for comparison rather than reproduced whole, and reused under CC BY-SA 4.0, which this site and anything drawn from it carry too. Each column links the exact revision it was read from, and each photograph names its author and licence.

If a comparison is wrong about you

Comparisons are written by a language model from the articles, so they can be wrong or incomplete, and a marked difference is a pointer to check the sources rather than a finding. If one says something false about you, write to contact@wikicompare.app and the comparison comes down while it is looked at.

Changes

If this notice changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes with it.