Omar Shaban Ismail
What Omar Shaban Ismail's site collects from visits, contact, the newsletter and the AI analyst, who processes it, how long it is kept, and your rights to obtain or erase it.
Last updated: 2026-07-31
The controller of data collected through this site is Omar Shaban Ismail, Gaza, Palestine. For anything concerning privacy: omar@palthink.org, or through the contact page.
This is the personal site of a researcher in political economy. It is not a shop or an advertising platform, and no visitor account is ever created.
This site keeps its own visit statistics, the way any web server log does. For each visit we record: the page, the time, the IP address it came from, the country and city inferred from it, the browser's time zone, the device type, browser and operating system, the language the page was shown in, the page it was reached from, how long it was open and how far it was scrolled, and any outbound links or PDFs clicked. This log contains no name, no email and no other identifying details, and is not tied to an account.
The legal basis is the legitimate interest in knowing which of this research is read, and where. The log is not used for advertising, for profiling, or to make any automated decision about anyone.
The IP address is kept for 90 days and then automatically erased, leaving an anonymous identifier that cannot be traced back to it. The remaining statistics are kept without continuing to identify a particular person.
A technical note: no website can read your device's MAC address — it never leaves your local network.
Some services process data on the site's behalf, or see it by virtue of standing in the path. This is the complete list:
The site's own server is outside the European Union, as are the services listed above. If you are in the EU, using this site transfers your data outside it. We sell your data to no one, and share it for no advertising purpose.
When you submit the contact form we store your name, email, organisation (if you give one), the request type and the text of your message, and use them to reply to you and to keep the thread's context. The legal basis is taking steps at your request.
The message stays in the inbox for as long as the correspondence is live or of reference value. You may ask for it to be deleted at any time. Your address is never used for unsolicited bulk mail, and is not added to the newsletter unless you subscribe yourself.
Subscription is double opt-in: you enter your address, a confirmation email is sent, and you are added only after you follow its link. We store the address, the language and time of subscription, and the IP address it came from — that address is kept specifically as evidence that the subscription came from you.
The legal basis is your consent, which you can withdraw at any moment through the unsubscribe link at the foot of every issue, without needing to write to us. The list is shared with no one and is not sold.
The analyst uses a random session cookie marked httpOnly that ties your conversations to your browser without creating an account; no code on the page can read it. Messages are stored in the site's database so you can reopen the history and continue.
The text of the conversation is sent to OpenAI to generate the reply, as described above. Do not write anything into the conversation that you would not want passing through a third party.
You can mark an answer helpful or unhelpful and add a reason or a correction. Your feedback is used for learning only with your explicit consent, and even then any general learning passes through a human review. No model's weights are trained automatically on what you write.
Private memory is optional and tied to the analyst session cookie. When enabled, preferences that improve later conversations may be saved. These memories expire automatically after 180 days. You can review and delete one memory or all of them from the “Memory & Privacy” panel on the analyst page.
The site itself sets one cookie: the analyst session described above, and only if you use the analyst. It uses your browser's local storage for two things: your language preference, and remembering that you have seen the privacy notice.
Cookies set by the external services listed above are governed by their own policies. This site sets no advertising cookie of its own and takes part in no cross-site tracking network.
You have the right to ask for: a copy of the data we hold about you, its correction, its erasure, a restriction on its processing, an objection to processing based on legitimate interest, or a portable copy. Where processing rests on your consent, you may withdraw it at any time without affecting the lawfulness of what preceded.
Writing to omar@palthink.org is enough. A reply follows within a month at most.
A practical note: the visit log carries no name, so locating your rows in it usually needs an IP address and an approximate date; after 90 days that becomes impossible, because the address has been erased.
If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom and believe your data has been handled improperly, you are entitled to complain to the data protection authority in your country.
This site is addressed to researchers, journalists and policymakers, not to children, and no data about children is knowingly collected.
When what the site collects, or who processes it, changes, this page is updated and the revision date above with it. The list of external services above is generated from the site's actual configuration, so a service appears there when it is switched on and disappears when it is switched off.