Privacy Policy

The Frontline (“we”, “us”) is an independent news and multimedia organisation in Zimbabwe. We run the website thefrontlinezw.com. We are responsible for the personal information described in this policy. You can reach us through our contact form.

When you read the site. We use Vercel Web Analytics to count visits. It records anonymous, combined statistics: which pages are viewed, the website that sent you (for example Google or WhatsApp), your country, and your device and browser type. It does not use cookies and does not identify you personally. Our hosting provider also keeps short-lived technical logs (such as IP address and browser type) to keep the site running and secure.

When you sign up for our newsletter. Your email address.

When you send us news. What you choose to give us: your story, its location, any photo, and optionally your name and phone number or email.

When you contact us or ask about advertising. Your name, contact details, business name if you give one, and your message.

When you subscribe. Paid subscriptions are not yet live. When they are, payments will be handled by a payment provider; we will not store your card details.

Newsroom staff. For our editors and reporters: name, username and a securely scrambled (hashed) password.

• To run, secure and improve the website, and to understand which stories readers find useful.
• To send the newsletter you asked for.
• To check, follow up and report the news you send us, and to contact you about it if you gave contact details.
• To reply to messages, corrections, privacy requests and advertising enquiries.
• To meet our legal obligations.

We use only what the site needs to work. We do not use advertising or tracking cookies.

• Staff sign-in cookie (newsroom staff only): keeps editors signed in to the dashboard for up to 7 days.
• Subscriber cookie: remembers that you have access to premium stories, for up to 30 days.
• Weather city: if you pick a city in the weather bar, your browser remembers it on your device (local storage). It is never sent to us.

You can clear cookies and site data in your browser settings at any time.

Headlines from other outlets. We show headlines from other Zimbabwean news outlets, and sometimes their preview photos. Those photos load directly from the outlet's website, so the outlet can see that your browser requested the image, as with any website. Clicking “read the full story” takes you to their site, which has its own privacy policy.

Sharing buttons. The WhatsApp, Facebook and X buttons only contact those services when you tap them.

Adverts. Adverts on our site are images. They do not track you. Tapping an advert takes you to the advertiser's website.

Weather and sports data are fetched by our servers, not your browser, so those providers don't receive your details.

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with:

• Service providers who run the site for us, mainly Vercel (hosting, file storage and analytics). Their servers are outside Zimbabwe, including in the United States, and they handle data under contract and their own security measures.
• Authorities when the law requires it. We take the protection of journalistic sources seriously and will resist requests to identify a confidential source as far as the law allows.

If you tick “Don't publish my name”, we will not name you in anything we publish. Only our newsroom staff can see submissions. We may publish your story or photo, edited, as described in our Terms.

• Newsletter email addresses: until you unsubscribe.
• Messages, enquiries and news submissions: as long as needed to deal with them, and no longer than is reasonable for our records. You can ask us to delete yours sooner.
• Analytics: anonymous, combined statistics only.
• Hosting logs: kept for a short period by our hosting provider.

Under Zimbabwe's Cyber and Data Protection Act [Chapter 12:07] you can ask us:

• to tell you what personal information we hold about you and give you a copy;
• to correct it if it is wrong;
• to delete it, or to stop using it, where the law allows; and
• to stop sending you the newsletter (you can also unsubscribe at any time).

To make a request, use our contact form and choose “Privacy or my personal data”. If you are unhappy with how we handle your information, you can complain to the Data Protection Authority, the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ).

The site uses encrypted connections (HTTPS). Submissions, enquiries and staff accounts are kept in private storage that only our newsroom systems can access. Staff passwords are stored scrambled, never in plain text. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable steps to protect your information.

The Frontline is a general news site. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 18 without a parent or guardian's consent. If you believe a child has sent us their details, please contact us and we will delete them.

We will update this page if our practices change, for example when paid subscriptions launch, and change the “last updated” date at the top.