Read the news without being read back.

Most news sites don't sell you news. They sell you to ad networks. Every time you load a page, dozens of third-party scripts fire — Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, AppNexus, The Trade Desk, Doubleclick, Criteo, Quantcast, Chartbeat — each one logging your page view, your scroll depth, your dwell time, your referrer, and increasingly, a fingerprint of your device that survives even when you clear your cookies.

WeSearch ships none of that. We use no third-party analytics, no advertising network, no fingerprinting library, and no audience-measurement vendor. We don't even self-host an analytics tool. The only writes that happen on a page load are the things you explicitly ask for: a reaction you tap, a comment you post, a story view you generate by visiting a /s/<slug> landing page.

What we do collect

• Story view counts per /s/<slug> page. Aggregate, not per-user.
• Reactions and comments you explicitly post. Linked to your local API key (which we hash before storing).
• API usage events for the developer side: which resource was called, how long it took, whether it succeeded. Used for fair-use limits.
• Server logs: IP, user-agent, requested path. Rotated within 30 days.

What we do not collect

• Real names, addresses, phone numbers.
• Reading history, scroll patterns, dwell time, mouse movements.
• Cross-site behavior. We don't know where you came from, we don't know where you went.
• BYOK credentials. AI keys you provide for in-browser features (Tenor, OpenAI) are forwarded to the upstream provider per request and never persisted server-side.
• Anything that would let an ad network rebuild a profile of you.

Cookies and storage

WeSearch uses localStorage on your device — not cookies — for: your API key, OG-image cache, preferred feed category, BYOK keys (browser-only), tour-completed flag, your "Mine" feed list, your bookmarks-list and friends-list. None of this is sent to our servers except the API key in the Authorization header. We do not set tracking cookies.

Third parties we have to talk to

WeSearch is an aggregator — we proxy your requests to upstream providers. When you check the weather, we forward your latitude/longitude to Open-Meteo. When you load a story page, we may fetch the original article's OpenGraph image from the publisher's CDN. We don't share your identity, only what's necessary to fulfill the request.

One third party that does sit in the request path itself: Cloudflare, our CDN + DDoS shield. Every request to wesearch.press hits a Cloudflare edge before reaching our origin. Cloudflare receives the IP, user-agent, and requested path of every request. They are not an advertising company, do not sell traffic data to ad networks, and the no-third-party-script edge is configured strictly. We use them for global TTFB and origin protection — the trade-off is disclosed here in plain text. If you want to bypass Cloudflare entirely, route via Tor; we don't block it.

How we know we're clean

You can verify this yourself. Open WeSearch in your browser, open DevTools → Network, and reload. Filter by domain. You'll see only requests to wesearch.press (and the Google Fonts CDN, which receives no identifying information beyond a font request). No google-analytics.com. No connect.facebook.net. No googletagmanager.com. No doubleclick.net. No chartbeat.com. No quantserve.com. No amazon-adsystem.com. No criteo.com. No scorecardresearch.com. None of the long tail of audience-measurement vendors that fire on every other news site.

Why this matters

The tracker stack is what made the open web feel exhausting. Every page is a billboard, and the billboards are watching you back. The promise of "free news" came with a bill that was never disclosed: a profile of you, sold to ad buyers, fed back to recommendation engines, fed forward to retargeting systems, and ultimately reused for political advertising. Reading a paywall-free news site in 2026 should not require accepting a tracker payload that follows you across the web for the next year.

WeSearch's privacy stance is the editorial position. We don't claim other publishers should match it — they have different business models — but we won't run their tracker stack just because it would help us understand "engagement." If we wanted engagement, we'd have built a different site.

Frequently asked