Privacy Policy

1.Who we are

SentiNews is an academic media-monitoring platform created by Nurasyl Kairkhanov and Akezhan Meirkhanov, students of Astana IT University, as part of their diploma project. The platform is non-commercial and is intended for research, demonstration, and educational use.

2.Information we collect

We collect only the minimum amount of data needed to operate the service:

• Account data: your name, email address, password (stored as a salted bcrypt hash), preferred language, and avatar (if you sign in with Google).
• Authentication data: refresh tokens, the device/browser that issued them and your IP address. This is used to power Active Sessions in your profile.
• Project data: project names, search keywords and aliases, and other settings you choose.
• Public news content: the platform fetches and stores publicly available news articles (title, URL, publication date, source, language, country, author when available).

3.How we use your data

We use your data only to provide the platform's features:

• To authenticate you and protect your account.
• To collect and analyse public news mentions for the topics you create.
• To compute analytics: sentiment, topics, geographical distribution, sources, influencers, and time-series.
• To send transactional emails such as email verification codes.

4.Cookies and local storage

We do not use third-party tracking cookies. The platform stores access and refresh tokens, your selected language, theme, and the "Remember me" preference in your browser's localStorage so the website can remember you between visits.

5.Third-party services

To collect and analyse news, the platform sends queries to the following external APIs. We do not share your account data with them — only your search keywords:

• OpenAI API — used for sentiment analysis and AI summaries.
• Google OAuth — optional, used only if you choose to sign in with Google.
• News APIs: NewsAPI.org, SerpAPI (Google News), NewsData.io, Event Registry (NewsAPI.ai), World News API.
• SMTP provider — used to deliver verification emails.

6.How we store your data

All account and project data is stored in a PostgreSQL database hosted in a controlled academic environment. Passwords are never stored in plain text — only as a bcrypt hash. We do not sell, rent, or share personal data with any third party for advertising or commercial purposes.

7.Data retention

We keep your data for as long as your account is active. You can delete your account at any time from Profile → Settings → Delete account, which permanently removes your account, sessions, and projects.

8.Your rights

Because SentiNews is an academic project, you can at any time:

• View and edit your profile in Profile → Settings.
• Sign out of any active session.
• Change your password.
• Delete your account along with all associated data.

9.Changes to this policy

Because this is a research project, the platform and this policy may change as the project evolves. The latest version is always available at this page, and the date at the top reflects the most recent update.