Privacy & cookies
Updated October 18, 2026. This notice describes data used by Row Seventeen at rowseventeen.com. Reading our articles does not require a reader account.
Delivering the site
Our hosting and delivery providers process technical request information, such as IP address, browser information and requested URL, to deliver pages, protect the service and diagnose failures. These infrastructure records are separate from our readership database.
Reader rankings
We count a read after an article is active and visible for eight seconds. Your browser creates a random identifier stored locally for that UTC day. We send it with the article identifier to our own server, where a day-specific hash is stored. Repeat reads from the same browser count once per article per day. Browser-level read records are retained for at most nine days. Anonymous daily article totals are retained for long-term owner analytics. Our readership database does not store IP addresses, and we do not pass this readership identifier to advertisers. Known bots and browsers requesting Do Not Track are excluded.
You can clear this site's local storage in your browser settings. Blocking storage prevents this counter from recording reads and does not prevent you from reading articles.
First visits and referral channels
We use the same daily random readership identifier to count first-landing sessions and attribute engaged reads. A session ends after 30 minutes without a tracked page navigation or engaged read, or at the UTC day boundary. Reloads and duplicate requests during a session do not add visits. We keep the first channel during internal navigation. Social UTM source labels and external referrer hostnames are normalized to Facebook, Threads, Instagram, search, direct/no source or other. We never store the original referrer URL, URL query, email or IP in these analytics tables. Session hashes are retained for at most nine days; anonymous daily channel and article totals are retained for owner analytics. These are browser sessions, not identified people. Older reads without source data are not assigned an estimated channel. Do Not Track and known-bot exclusions also apply to visits.
Article hearts and sharing
Hearts use a random first-party browser cookie, kept for up to one year, to remember one active heart per article in that browser. Tap the heart again to remove it. Our server stores a hash of this identifier with the article and the time of the reaction. We do not store your IP address in the hearts database or share this identifier with advertisers. Counts are public; the browser identifier is not. Without reader accounts, another browser, device or cleared cookie cannot be recognized as the same reader.
Sharing uses ordinary outbound links and your device’s sharing or clipboard features. Social networks receive the article URL only when you choose their sharing option; we do not load social-network tracking widgets for these buttons.
Google advertising
We use Google AdSense to support the journal. Ads on article pages can be displayed after Google approves the site. When advertising is enabled, Google and its advertising partners may use cookies, local storage, device information and online identifiers to deliver and measure ads, prevent fraud and, where permitted and consented to, personalize advertising based on visits to this and other websites.
Where applicable, Google's consent message lets you accept, refuse or manage these choices. Refusing personalization does not stop you from reading the journal. The available advertising and storage choices depend on your region and consent. To revisit your choice, open an article and select Cookie settings at the bottom of the page when Google's privacy message API is available.
Learn how Google uses information from partner sites, read Google's privacy policy, or manage Google ad personalization in My Ad Center. Browser cookie controls can also limit or remove stored data.
External links
Our source and highlight links take you to other publishers. Those services apply their own privacy policies and regional access rules when you visit them. Team logos are served from our own site.
Changes to this notice
We update this page when our data practices change. The date at the top identifies the current version.