Privacy you can actually trust.

The Media Challenge Initiative ("MCI", "we") runs this website at www.mciug.org. We believe analytics should help us improve the site without surveilling you. We do not use Google Analytics, advertising pixels, or any third-party tracking. The analytics we use are first-party (run on our own servers) and designed to collect as little as possible.

We only set cookies after you choose "Accept" on our consent banner:

• mci_consent — remembers your cookie choice (accept or decline).
• mci_vid — a random, anonymous visitor identifier (kept ~12 months) so we can tell new visitors from returning ones. It is not linked to your name or any personal account.
• mci_sid — a random session identifier that expires after 30 minutes of inactivity, used to group page views into a visit.

These are strictly first-party. We use no third-party or advertising cookies. If you decline, no analytics cookies are set and no visit data is collected.

When you consent, each page view records a small, non-identifying record:

• The page visited, page title, referrer, and any campaign tags (UTM) in the link.
• Approximate location (continent, country, and city) and your browser language.
• Device type, browser, and operating system.
• Visit duration and number of pages viewed.

We deliberately do not collect your name, email, precise location, or any other personal information through analytics.

• Your IP address is never stored. It is anonymized (the last part is removed) and only a one-way, salted hash is kept — used briefly to estimate location and filter bots, never to identify you.
• We honor your browser's "Do Not Track" setting — if it's on, we don't track at all.
• Automated bots and crawlers are filtered out and not recorded.
• Data is aggregated for reporting; we never sell or share it for advertising.

You are always in control. You can decline on the consent banner, or withdraw consent at any time by clearing this site's cookies in your browser (the banner will appear again, and you can choose "Decline"). Turning on "Do Not Track" in your browser also stops all analytics.

If you use our contact form or subscribe to updates, we use the details you provide (such as your name, email, and message) only to respond to you or send the updates you requested. We do not sell this information.

To estimate the country/city of a visit, our server performs a one-time geo lookup of the anonymized IP using a geolocation service; no personal data or cookies are shared with it. The site is hosted on reputable infrastructure providers who process data only to deliver the site.

Questions about this notice or your data? Email info@mciug.org or reach us via our contact page.