Privacy

Summary

• The site uses no cookies for audience measurement.
• There are no visitor profiles, and no identifiers that persist between visits or across devices.
• The only measurement collected is a page-view count per page category and, for articles, per article.
• No session recording, no automatic click capture, and no recording of what you type.
• Fonts, images and data come from estimador.pt itself. Reading a page makes no request to Google or to any other font service.
• A few preferences and the games are kept only in your browser. The full list is further down.
• An email address is never required to read the site.

Audience measurement

We use PostHog, hosted in the European Union, configured in cookieless mode. Specifically:

• A single event type is sent: the page view. Every other event is discarded before it leaves the browser.
• The page address is reduced to a fixed category before sending. For example, /en/desporto/liga/jogador/joao-silva/ is sent as /en/desporto/liga/jogador/. Addresses that match no known category are sent as /en/other/.
• Articles are the exception: the address is sent whole. An address such as /en/artigos/article-name/ is sent exactly as it stands. An article's title is something we published, not something about the person reading it, unlike what you chose in a data explorer or the geography you selected, which are still discarded. Knowing which pieces are read is the reason there is any measurement at all. Only the addresses of articles that exist get through: the list is fixed when the site is built, and any other address under /artigos/ is sent as /en/artigos/artigo/, so an invented address cannot push arbitrary text into the measurement.
• No query string is ever sent. What you chose in a data explorer, the geography you selected, or any parameter after the ? never leaves your browser.
• No persistent storage: the measurement library runs in memory, with no cookies and no localStorage. Closing the tab clears the state.
• No person profiles, no session recording, no automatic interaction capture, no heatmaps, no surveys, no exception capture.
• The IP address is not recorded by the library and is not used for geolocation.
• Referrers, campaign parameters and browser properties beyond the library version are not sent.

These restrictions are implemented in the site's code: a filter at the outgoing boundary drops any event or property not explicitly listed above. If a future version of the library adds new fields, the filter rejects them by default.

Where the measurement key is not configured for an environment, nothing is sent at all.

Server logs

The site is served by Azure Static Web Apps (Microsoft). Like any web server, Microsoft keeps its own access logs, which may include the IP address and browser agent. We have no editorial control over those logs and do not use them for analysis.

The fonts (IBM Plex Sans and Newsreader) are served from estimador.pt, like the rest of the site, so they add no other recipient.

Kept only in your browser

Some parts of the site remember you without sending anything anywhere: they keep a value in your browser's local storage (localStorage). It stays on this device and in this browser, and clearing the site's data removes it. These are the keys, and the only ones:

None of them leaves the browser.

Beat the Model

Beat the Model has no accounts, no names and no leaderboard. Your picks stay in your browser, under the estimador:contra-o-modelo:v1 key, and are sent nowhere. To show the results, the page reads the results estimador.pt publishes for everyone, like any other page on the site; that request does not carry your picks.

Until October 2026 the game had a leaderboard on a server of ours, which kept per player a random identifier, the display name they chose and the cryptographic digest of a secret, never an email address or an account name. That server has been switched off and its records will be deleted. The game page removes the key that went with it (estimador:contra-o-modelo:player:v1) from your browser on your next visit.

Email subscription

Reading the site requires no address. Subscription exists only to say when a new piece is out, and it is optional.

Email delivery is not active at the moment. The site shows no email field and sends nothing to Buttondown. What follows describes the service as it will work once it is switched on.

The list is run by Buttondown, under its privacy policy and GDPR compliance commitment. It is the only processor involved.

How it works, when it is active:

• The end of each article and the article index show an email field. It is a plain form on this page, with no third-party script. When you press "Subscribe", your browser sends the address straight to Buttondown, in a new window, where Buttondown may ask for a check. estimador.pt has no server that receives the address and keeps no list of its own.
• The address is only used after you confirm the subscription in the message you receive. Without that confirmation it is discarded. Buttondown requires this confirmation on every subscription.
• Every message carries an unsubscribe link that takes effect immediately.
• The address is not shared, not sold, and not joined to audience measurement. Measurement records nobody's identity, so there is nothing to join: we do not know which pages you read before subscribing, or after.
• Nothing loads from Buttondown while you read. The field contacts no one until you send it. Someone who never subscribes never contacts Buttondown.

To follow the site without giving an address, the RSS feed carries the same pieces and identifies no one.

The data we publish

The figures published on estimador.pt are of two kinds: official public data (election results, statistical series, sports results) and model outputs we produce from them. Neither contains records about identifiable people, and neither is derived from the behaviour of the site's visitors.

The synthetic population (/populacao) is not a register of people. Its people and households were generated by a model calibrated to the 2021 Census: they are not real people, families or addresses, and they are no one's personal data. The release's privacy audit and its sample-match figures are on the quality page.

"Use my location", in the parish search, runs only on your device: the browser asks for your position, the nearest parish is worked out right there from the public list of parishes, and nothing is sent to estimador.pt or to anyone else. In audience measurement, a parish or region page counts only as /en/populacao/freguesia/ or /en/populacao/regiao/, without the place's code.

This page describes the site. The privacy properties of each published dataset are described in that product's methodology, not here.

Contact

For questions about this page, or to have a record from Beat the Model's old leaderboard removed now, write to info@estimador.pt.