Legal, sourcing and privacy

What NXEWS is

NXEWS is an automated newsroom. It reads the public feeds of several hundred news organisations around the world, works out which reports describe the same event, and writes its own account of that event. Every story on this site was written by a machine — no human journalist wrote, sub-edited or signed it — and every story says so.

Nothing here is exclusive. NXEWS has no reporters, no cameras and no sources of its own. It knows only what the publishers it reads have already published, and it is worth exactly as much as they are.

The same event is published in every language the site supports, from one language-neutral record of the facts. A reader in Tel Aviv and a reader in São Paulo are reading the same story, not two different ones.

Facts are reported. Expression is ours.

Copyright protects the way a report is written, not the events it describes. That distinction is the whole basis on which this site operates, so we hold ourselves to it strictly rather than approximately.

Source text is machine input. It is fetched, stored in a staging table, read by the writer, and pruned. It is never served to a reader, never indexed as our content, and never syndicated onward. What a reader sees is a new piece of writing about the same events, produced from a neutral list of what those events were.

The one thing that may legitimately be reproduced word for word is a quotation — repeating what a person said, with attribution, is reporting rather than copying. Quotations are marked as quotations and are kept short.

This is not left to good intentions. An audit runs over the archive and compares every published story with the source reports it was written from, measuring the longest run of identical words and the proportion of eight-word sequences the two share. A story that shares a long verbatim run with its source is treated as a defect and is corrected or withdrawn. The audit is arithmetic over stored text — it does not ask a model whether we complied.

Every story names the publishers it was written from and links to them. If your report was one of them, the link points at you.

Pictures

NXEWS does not generate images. There is no image model behind this site. Every picture is one of two things: a photograph we hold a licence for, or a cover drawn by the site itself in code — a piece of generated geometry in the section’s colour, which is ours and needs no permission.

A licensed photograph carries its author, its licence and a link back to the original, on the article and again on the credits page. Licences that require attribution — the Creative Commons BY and BY-SA family in particular — require exactly that, in a place a reader can find, which is why a single page lists all of them.

If a picture on this site is yours and is not credited the way its licence requires, tell us. Image complaints are the fastest thing we act on, because the fix is to remove the picture and fall back to a drawn cover, and that costs the story nothing.

See every picture in use and its licence

How we read other people’s sites

NXEWS reads feeds that publishers chose to publish, at the addresses they chose to publish them. It identifies itself, it fetches one page at a time per host, and it waits as long between requests as the host asks it to.

Every host’s robots.txt is read before anything else and cached for a day. A path a publisher disallows is not fetched — and, more to the point, the audit re-checks that afterwards: it takes the robots.txt we stored, re-parses it, and re-asks whether each page we hold text from was allowed. It does not trust a flag the fetcher set. A robots.txt that cannot be read at all is treated as a refusal, not as silence.

The same audit reads what a publisher has said about automated and AI clients specifically — the crawler groups a robots.txt can name for that purpose — and flags any host that refuses them and whose text we nevertheless hold. Where a feed carries a publisher’s whole article rather than a summary, that is recorded too, per source, so that a habit of storing full text wholesale shows up as a number instead of going unnoticed.

If you would rather NXEWS did not read your site at all, the quickest route is a line in your robots.txt; the form below is the second. Both work, and neither requires a lawyer.

Corrections

Before publication, every figure, date, quotation and name in a story is traced back to the reports it came from. A story that cannot be traced is held rather than published.

When something that a reader could already have seen turns out to be wrong, it is changed and the change is recorded — publicly, permanently, with the wording before and after. The corrections log is not a courtesy; it is the only reason to believe anything else on this page.

Read the corrections log

What an automated newsroom gets wrong

It inherits every error in its sources. If four publishers repeat the same wrong figure, this site may report it with the same confidence they did, in both English and Hebrew.

It reads early reports of fast-moving events, which are the reports most likely to be revised. A story published twenty minutes after an event is a story written from twenty-minute-old information.

It can misread emphasis. A machine weighing several accounts of the same event can put the qualification where the source put the certainty, or drop a hedge that mattered — an error of shading rather than of fact, and harder to catch for exactly that reason.

It has no judgement about consequences. It does not know that naming someone is safe in one country and dangerous in another, and it does not know when a true sentence is a cruel one.

Read it as a fast, wide, unusually well-sourced summary of what the world’s press is reporting — which is what it is — and not as a paper of record. Where it matters, follow the source links. They are on every story for this reason.

Terms of use

The site is free to read, with no account and no registration. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to log in to.

NXEWS stories — the text we wrote — may be quoted with attribution and a link, as you would quote any publication. Wholesale republication of the site, or automated re-scraping of it, is not permitted; if you want a feed, we publish real ones and they are the supported route.

Pictures are a separate question from text. A photograph on this site is used under a licence granted by its author, not by us — we cannot pass that licence on. Its terms are listed on the credits page, and they are the ones that apply to you.

The site is provided as it is. It is automated, it publishes continuously without a human reading each story first, and it can be wrong. Do not use it as the sole basis for a decision that matters — medical, legal, financial or otherwise.

Links to other sites are links, not endorsements. What is on the other end of them is that publisher’s responsibility.

Privacy

There are no reader accounts or third-party analytics on this site. NXEWS uses its own first-party visit counter so the desk can distinguish a real visit from repeated page openings. Data from this counter is not sold or shared; advertising services, when enabled, operate separately as described below.

The site may set these first-party cookies:

• a language cookie that remembers the language in which you read;
• an edition cookie that remembers the regional edition you selected;
• a comment cookie, created only after you post a comment, that lets the site recognise your own comment;
• a random reader identifier, kept for up to one year, used only to count returning browsers; and
• a random visit identifier that expires after 30 minutes of inactivity, so moving between pages or refreshing does not create another visit.

For each visit the site records the encrypted IP address, the referring site and path without its query string, the landing and latest page, first and latest time, page count, language, device class, campaign tags and a country code only when a trusted hosting layer supplies one. Crawler and prefetch requests are excluded.

Visit rows, including the encrypted address, are available only inside the authenticated desk and are automatically deleted after 30 days. Cookie values are never stored directly; only keyed digests are kept.

The counter honours Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track signals. Clearing the first-party cookies makes the browser new to the counter.

Advertising, Google AdSense and cookies

NXEWS is preparing to use Google AdSense. No Google advertising tag is loaded until a valid publisher account is configured, a certified consent message is published and the desk explicitly enables review or live mode. When advertising is enabled, Google and other advertising vendors may use cookies, web beacons, IP addresses and other identifiers to deliver, limit, measure and protect advertising.

Third-party vendors, including Google, may use advertising cookies to serve ads based on a reader’s previous visits to this site or other sites. Learn how Google uses information from sites and apps that use its services: How Google uses data on partner sites

Where personalized advertising is available, readers can manage or opt out of ad personalization in Google Ads Settings: Google Ads Settings

For readers in the EEA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, advertising is governed by a Google-certified consent management platform. It offers consent, refusal and granular management choices before personalized advertising data is used. Readers can reopen those choices through the “Privacy and cookie settings” control shown when advertising is active. Depending on the choice and region, ads may be personalized, non-personalized or limited.

If you send a complaint through the form below, we keep what you type in it — your name, organisation and address if you give them, the page you are complaining about and your reason — for as long as the complaint is open and as a record afterwards. Your IP address is not stored: it is hashed, and the hash exists only to stop one sender flooding the form.

If you think we have taken something of yours

This is the route, and it is meant to work without a solicitor. Give us the address of the page, tell us what is wrong with it, and we will look at it. You do not need to prove ownership to get our attention; you may need to for us to act.

What we commit to, in plain terms:

• a reference number on screen the moment you submit, so you have a record;
• acknowledgement within two working days;
• a decision, and an answer, within five working days of that;
• a complaint about a picture is acted on first and assessed second — the picture comes down and a drawn cover replaces it while we look;
• if we agree with you, the story is withdrawn or rewritten and the change is recorded in the public corrections log.

There is no email address you have to find and no form that disappears into a mailbox nobody reads. Complaints go into a queue the desk works through, and the reference number below will tell you where yours is.

You can also write to us at legal@nxews.com — it reaches the same desk, just more slowly.