Privacy & terms

Who is responsible

The controller for the data processing described here is Mel Flores, c/o The Missed Bit, Postfach, 8404 Winterthur, Switzerland — see the legal notice. For anything data-related, email support@themissedbit.com.

What we collect

When you subscribe, we collect your email address and which bits you chose (the AI and Tech bits). To keep The Missed Bit free, the sign-up also invites optional profile details — your job function, seniority, and/or company website — which we use only in aggregate to describe our readership to sponsors, never to identify you individually. These details are voluntary; you can subscribe without them. We may record basic delivery data such as whether an email was opened or a link clicked, to understand what's useful. You can object to this measurement at any time by emailing support@themissedbit.com.

How we use it

To send you the bits you asked for, and to operate and improve the newsletter. We do not sell or rent your data, and we don't share it except with the service providers below who help us run The Missed Bit. We send you the newsletter on the basis of your consent — you subscribe and confirm your email, and you can withdraw that consent at any time by unsubscribing. Profile details and delivery statistics are processed on the basis of our legitimate interest in running, securing, and describing a sponsor-funded newsletter in aggregate.

Delivery time & your time zone

The Missed Bit is a morning briefing, so we aim to deliver it around 6 a.m. wherever you live. To do that, we estimate your country and time zone from the IP address recorded when you sign up. This estimate happens once, on our own systems, against a local copy of the DB-IP database (IP Geolocation by DB-IP, licensed CC BY 4.0) — no lookup service receives your address, and we keep only the resulting country and time zone, never a location profile. We do this on the basis of our legitimate interest in delivering the newsletter at a sensible local hour. If the estimate is wrong, or you'd rather we didn't hold one, email support@themissedbit.com and we'll correct or remove it.

Who processes your data

We use MailerLite (MailerLite Limited, Dublin, Ireland) to store subscriptions and deliver the newsletter — subscriber data is stored in the European Union. This website is served by Cloudflare (Cloudflare, Inc., San Francisco, USA), which processes technical connection data such as IP addresses to deliver the site securely.

If you reached us through one of our Instagram ads and then subscribed, we also tell Meta (Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, Dublin, Ireland) that the sign-up happened. What this involves is described under “Measuring our ads” below.

Cloudflare is based in the United States and certified under the Swiss–U.S. and EU–U.S. Data Privacy Frameworks. MailerLite's listed sub-processors store data in the European Union (Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland); where MailerLite involves its U.S. affiliate (MailerLite, Inc., United States), this is covered by the EU Standard Contractual Clauses in its data processing agreement. The linked policies describe these safeguards and how to obtain a copy — or email support@themissedbit.com and we'll point you to them.

How long we keep it

For as long as you're subscribed. When you unsubscribe, your data is removed from the active list; we may keep a minimal suppression record (your email address) so you don't get contacted again, plus aggregate statistics that no longer identify you.

Your rights

• Unsubscribe anytime — one click at the bottom of every email
• Ask what data we hold about you, and request a copy
• Ask us to correct or delete your data
• Withdraw your consent at any time — unsubscribing does this for the newsletter — without affecting past processing
• Object to or restrict processing, and receive your data in a portable format
• Complain to a supervisory authority — in Switzerland the FDPIC, in the EU/EEA your local data protection authority

To exercise any of these, email support@themissedbit.com.

Cookies & local storage

This site aims to run without non-essential cookies. One small exception: if you arrive through a tagged link (say, from our Instagram), we keep that tag in your browser's session storage so that, if you subscribe, we know which channel brought you. It identifies the channel, not you, and is deleted when you close the tab.

For traffic measurement we use Cloudflare Web Analytics, run by the same provider that already serves this site. It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device, and Cloudflare states it does not fingerprint visitors or track them across sites. We see only aggregate numbers — page views, referrers, countries, browsers, and device types — never a profile of you; Cloudflare handles the underlying connection data as our host, as described above. That's why adding analytics didn't add a cookie banner. We measure on the basis of our legitimate interest in knowing whether and how the site is read. If we ever add anything that does need consent, you'll see a real choice here first.

Measuring our ads

We sometimes advertise the newsletter on Instagram. When Meta shows you one of those ads and you tap it, Meta adds its own click identifier to the link you open. If — and only if — you then subscribe and confirm your address, our server tells Meta that a sign-up followed that click, and sends back that same identifier. Nothing else happens: we never send Meta your email address, not even in hashed form, and we never send your name or anything you picked in the form.

There is no Meta script on this site and no Meta cookie. The exchange happens server to server, after the fact. If you arrived any other way — organically, from a link, or by typing the address — nothing is sent to Meta at all, because there is no identifier to send.

Why we do it: without it, Meta only knows that a page was opened, so it keeps showing our ads to whoever is cheapest to reach rather than to people who actually want a newsletter. Knowing which ads lead to real readers lets us stop paying to interrupt everyone else. We do this on the basis of our legitimate interest in running our advertising responsibly, and we do not use it to build advertising audiences from our subscribers. You can object at any time at support@themissedbit.com, and we'll exclude your sign-up from this measurement.

Our sign-up form also reports a handful of anonymous counters back to us — form seen, someone started typing, submitted, failed and why (for a mistyped address we record only the ending, never the address), plus the optional job/seniority picks as plain tallies. The typing counter is a single tally per visit: it records that an entry began, never a keystroke or any part of what was typed. No cookie, no identifier, no way to tell who is behind a count; they exist so we can fix the form where people get stuck. Same basis as above: legitimate interest.