Privacy Policy

Last updated: 12 Sept 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how Pakistan Bakhabar (“Pakistan Bakhabar”, “we”, “us”) handles information in connection with pakistanbakhabar.com (the “Site”), a bilingual Urdu and English news website covering Pakistan, the world, and a range of other subjects.

We are a small, independently run digital news publication. This policy describes our actual current practices, in plain language — not a generic template — and we will update it as the Site changes, including if and when we introduce advertising.

Information you provide directly

The Site does not currently have reader accounts, a comment system, or a newsletter sign-up. If you email us, we receive whatever information you choose to include in that message — such as your email address and its contents — and use it only to respond to you.

Information collected automatically

Like almost every website, the Site automatically processes some technical information whenever a browser requests a page — for example an IP address, browser and device type, the referring page, and the pages requested. This happens at two layers:

• Cloudflare, our content-delivery and security provider, processes this technical information at the network edge to deliver pages quickly, protect the Site from abuse, and route traffic. Cloudflare’s handling of this data is governed by Cloudflare’s own privacy policy.
• Our application and hosting infrastructure may keep short-lived operational logs (for example, error logs) to keep the Site running reliably and securely. We do not currently use a third-party log-monitoring or observability service.

Cookies and local storage

The Site does not currently set advertising or analytics cookies. It stores two small values in your browser’s local storage: your light/dark theme choice, and, on Urdu pages, your preferred reading typeface (Naskh or Nastaliq). These values are set only when you use the corresponding toggle, stay on your device, are never transmitted to our servers, and are not used to track you across other websites. You can clear them at any time through your browser’s settings.

Search

When you use the search feature, your query is used to return matching results and is not stored in a way that identifies you. To prevent abuse of the search feature, we apply a short, automatically expiring rate limit keyed to a best-effort identifier derived from your connection; this identifier is used solely to prevent excessive automated requests and for no other purpose.

Analytics

We do not currently run Google Analytics, Cloudflare Web Analytics, or any other third-party analytics service on the Site. If we enable an analytics service in the future, we will update this policy before it goes live.

Advertising, including Google AdSense

The Site does not currently display advertising of any kind, including Google AdSense. We are preparing the Site for a possible future AdSense application, and this section describes what will change if and when advertising is enabled — it does not describe current practice.

If or when we enable Google AdSense or a similar Google advertising product, Google and its advertising partners may use cookies, device identifiers, or similar technologies to serve ads, including ads based on your prior visits to this or other websites, and to measure ad performance. You will be able to opt out of personalized advertising through Google’s Ad Settings (adssettings.google.com) and, for participating companies generally, through www.aboutads.info or youronlinechoices.eu.

Google’s consent requirements for the EEA, UK and Switzerland

If we enable Google-served advertising, and before we serve personalized ads to visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, we will implement a consent management platform certified by Google and integrated with the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework, consistent with Google’s EU User Consent Policy. That consent tool will let those visitors choose whether to allow personalized advertising, will link to Google’s own information about how it uses data from sites that use its services, and will let visitors withdraw consent at any time.

Your consent choices today

Because the Site does not currently set advertising, analytics, or other non-essential cookies, no consent banner is shown today — the theme and typeface preferences described above are a functional setting you control directly, not tracking. If we add advertising, analytics, or any other technology that requires consent under applicable law, we will add an appropriate consent mechanism before that technology becomes active, as described in the two sections above.

How and why we use information

We use the limited information described in this policy to: operate, secure and maintain the Site; prevent abuse of the search feature; respond to messages sent to us directly; and, once introduced, to serve and measure advertising as described above. We do not sell personal information, and we do not use information collected through the Site to build advertising profiles today.

Third-party service providers

We rely on a small number of service providers to run the Site, each of which processes only the technical data necessary for its function and maintains its own privacy policy:

• Cloudflare — content delivery network, DNS, and edge security (Pakistan Bakhabar is served through Cloudflare’s network).
• Cloudflare R2 — storage and delivery of article images and other media.
• Upstash — short-lived, Redis-based rate limiting for the search feature only.
• Google AdSense — not yet enabled; will be added to this list, with full disclosure, if and when it is.

External links and embedded content

Articles may link to third-party websites for sourcing or context. We are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of sites we link to, and we encourage you to review their own policies. The Site does not currently embed third-party video players, social-media widgets, or similar embedded content.

Data retention

We do not operate reader accounts, forms, or persistent tracking, so we do not hold ongoing personal data about readers beyond what is described in this policy. The search rate-limiting identifier expires automatically within a short window measured in seconds. Cloudflare’s edge logs and our own operational logs are retained only as long as reasonably necessary for security, abuse prevention and troubleshooting, under the retention practices of those respective systems; Cloudflare’s own retention is described in Cloudflare’s privacy policy.

Security

We use reasonable technical measures to protect the Site, including HTTPS/TLS encryption for all traffic, a password-protected content management system restricted to staff, and abuse-prevention rate limiting. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

International data processing

Cloudflare operates a global network, so requests to the Site may be processed at edge locations outside Pakistan, including in your own country if you are visiting from outside Pakistan. Our hosting provider’s servers may also be located outside Pakistan. If Google-served advertising is enabled in the future, Google’s advertising systems likewise operate internationally, as described in Google’s own privacy policy.

Children’s privacy

The Site is a general-audience news publication and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us using the details below and we will remove it.

Your privacy requests

Pakistan does not currently have a dedicated, enacted data-protection statute. A Personal Data Protection Bill has been developed and publicly consulted on by the Ministry of Information Technology & Telecommunication, but — per the Ministry's own published materials — it remains draft legislation and has not been passed into law. Regardless, we will make a reasonable effort to respond to requests to know what limited information (if any) we hold about you, or to correct or delete it, sent to the email address below. If you are visiting from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, or another jurisdiction with its own data protection law, you may have additional statutory rights under that law, which we will honor to the extent it applies to us.

Governing law

Our operation of the Site is subject to the laws of Pakistan applicable to digital publishers, including the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016, as amended in 2025. This Privacy Policy does not itself create rights or obligations beyond what applicable law and our stated practices require.

Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy as the Site, our service providers, or applicable law change — most notably before we enable advertising or analytics. We will update the “Last updated” date above whenever we do, and we will call out material changes clearly on this page.

Contact us

For questions about this Privacy Policy, or to make a privacy request, email us at the address below.

[email protected]