Privacy by architecture

Privacy & data sovereignty

Most of the web treats your attention as a product. Pollar is built the other way around: your data stays in the European Union, on infrastructure we run ourselves, with no advertising trackers anywhere in the stack. Here’s exactly how.

Hosted in the EU — on our own servers

  • Our entire stack — the app, the databases, object storage and search — runs on servers we manage in the European Union (Germany). There is no US hyperscaler in the path.
  • Because the data never leaves the EU, it isn’t exposed to US data-transfer regimes (the Schrems II problem). European data, under European rules.
  • Self-hosting also means no third party gets a side-channel copy of your traffic in exchange for a “free” service.

Analytics that can't identify you

  • We measure traffic with Umami — self-hosted on our own infrastructure, never a third-party cloud.
  • It is cookieless and storage-free: no cookies, no localStorage, no device fingerprint, no cross-site identifier.
  • It records only anonymized aggregates — page views, referrer, country — and cannot single out an individual. Processed under legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR); no consent-banner gymnastics required.

No trackers. No ad-tech. No exceptions.

  • No Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no advertising cookies, no data brokers — none of it, ever.
  • We don’t run ads, so we have no incentive to profile you. The business doesn’t depend on your data.
  • Images are served exclusively from our own pipeline — we don’t hot-link third-party images, so no outside server learns what you read.
  • A strict Content-Security-Policy is enforced right in your browser: it blocks any script, connection or image from a domain we haven’t explicitly allowed — so even an accidental third-party request simply can’t fire.

Transparent, AI-assisted journalism

  • Pollar is AI-assisted and human-edited. Summaries and the daily brief carry a visible AI disclosure — we don’t pass machine-written text off as hand-written.
  • Our sourcing, methodology and corrections process are published openly in our editorial standards — aligned with European media-credibility norms (EMFA).
  • Published in four EU languages — English, Polish, German and French — with each member state treated as equally relevant.

Accessible by design — built for everyone

  • Pollar is built to WCAG 2.1 level AA — the standard the European Accessibility Act requires: full keyboard operation, screen-reader text alternatives (even for data charts), a 4.5:1 contrast ratio in light and dark, and colour is never the only signal.
  • Accessibility is ongoing engineering work, not a launch-day checkbox — we audit it as we ship every change.
  • We publish a full accessibility statement with a direct channel to report any barrier.