Privacy Notice

Opening Bell is a personal project built to follow US markets in Turkish. This page explains, under Turkey's Personal Data Protection Law No. 6698 (KVKK), which data is processed and why, where it goes, and what rights you have.

If you want the short answer: you can use the site without an account, and in that case no record identifying you is created. There are no ad networks, tracking cookies or third-party pixels on this site. Page reads are counted, but that count is anonymous and is explained line by line below.

Data Controller

This is not a commercial business; the product is free, no payment is taken and it has no affiliation with any brokerage.

Personal Data Processed

The site works in two different modes, and the difference between them matters.

Using It Without an Account

No record identifying you is created on the server. Your browser keeps only two preference cookies and, if you play the Guess the Stock puzzle, the puzzle's progress cookies:

• Theme preference (az-theme) — light or dark.
• Language preference (az-locale) — Turkish or English.
• Puzzle progress (az-bulmaca, az-bulmaca-arsiv) — the stock symbols you tried in that day's puzzle, so the game reopens where you left it. Your streak and past puzzles stay in your browser's local storage only and are never sent to the server.

None of them carries identifying information, none is tied to a user id, and none is shared with another site. Clear them in your browser settings and the site returns to its defaults.

Page Counts

Knowing how many times a page is read is what shows which parts of the product work — which guide article gets read, whether anyone reaches the English side, whether an earnings analysis finds an audience. This count uses no cookies and does not identify you. For each page read, the following is recorded:

Not recorded: your IP address, the full text of your browser signature, the full referring address, your user id. None of these appear in any column.

So that the same visitor is not counted twice in a day, your IP address and browser signature are turned into an irreversible digest together with that day's date and a secret held on the server. The digest changes every day: yesterday's record cannot be linked to today's, and the digest cannot be reversed back to an IP address. These records are deleted automatically after 180 days.

Legal basis: legitimate interest (Art. 5/2-f) — seeing which part of the product is used. Because this count serves no marketing purpose and produces no identity, it does not require explicit consent.

When You Create an Account

Your email address is stored to keep your account unique and to send you a password reset link only when you ask for one. No marketing email is ever sent to it. The weekly recap (a market summary of the week behind and the week ahead) is part of membership and goes to every member each Sunday morning; if you don't want it, turn it off in Settings or with one click, without signing in, through the link at the bottom of every email — once turned off it is never switched back on automatically. Alert emails are sent only if you turn them on in Settings yourself and confirm your address through the link in the email. A reset link is valid for 30 minutes and can be used once; the database holds an irreversible digest of the link, not the link itself.

No special categories of personal data (health, religion, biometrics, political opinion and so on) are collected in any form. National id number, phone, address, date of birth and financial account details are not requested either — the site does not act on your behalf and does not connect to a brokerage.

The positions you enter on the portfolio screen are only the numbers you type in yourself: your brokerage account, balance or account number are never requested. By default only you see your positions, and they are not used for analysis or marketing. The one exception is you opening them up: if you turn on "Show My Portfolio Weights" in profile settings, your profile page shows only weight percentages, the return rate and the month-year of your earliest purchase (the "Since" plate) — amounts, quantities, costs and day-level buy dates are never displayed, and the block leaves the page the moment you turn the switch off. Trades you enter in the tax calculator are not stored at all: the math runs in your browser and only the dates whose exchange rate is needed reach the server, never quantities or prices.

Data That Is Not Collected

This section is deliberately separate: most privacy texts state what they collect, not what they don't.

• No advertising or tracking cookies are used.
• Google Analytics or any similar cross-site visitor tracking tool is not installed.
• There are no social media pixels, heat maps or session recordings.
• No profile is built through fingerprinting techniques.
• Location data is neither requested nor used.
• The page count does not follow you from one visit to the next: the distinguishing digest resets every day.

Cookies

The site uses functional cookies only:

All of them are written with SameSite protection, and the session cookie additionally carries the HttpOnly flag; it cannot be read by JavaScript. That is why no consent banner is shown: no marketing cookie requiring explicit consent is used.

Data Transfers

The product runs on the following infrastructure and data providers. Some of these servers are outside Turkey; creating an account means you consent to that transfer.

The three data-provider rows matter: requests to data providers carry no identity of yours. When you look at a stock, the provider sees it as "a request from Opening Bell", not "a request from this user".

The hosting provider's technical logs may hold an IP address and browser information for a short period; this happens on every site on the internet and is required for security.

Retention

Your account data is kept for as long as the account exists. When you delete your account, your user record and every watchlist, portfolio position and sale, price and percent alert, notification subscription and preference, profile setting (intro and visibility preferences), notification inbox and community post — published ones included — attached to it are permanently removed from the database; copies in backups fall away when the backup cycle completes (at most 30 days).

Market data, news and articles are not personal data; they are kept whether or not you have an account.

The site's own error records (which screen failed and with which error) contain no personal data: no user id, IP address or browser information is written, and email- and IP-shaped fragments in an error message are masked before it is stored. These records are deleted automatically after 30 days.

How to Exercise Your Rights

Article 11 of the KVKK gives you the right to: learn whether your personal data is processed; request information if it has been; learn whether it is used for its intended purpose; know the parties it is transferred to inside and outside Turkey; request correction if it is incomplete or wrong; request its deletion or destruction; request that these actions be notified to the parties it was transferred to; object to an adverse outcome produced by automated analysis; and claim compensation if you suffer damage.

You can send your request by email to hello@aciliszili.com or through the GitHub repository. Requests are answered free of charge within 30 days at the latest.

You do not have to wait for an account deletion request: you can delete your account yourself from the Settings screen, and it takes effect immediately.

You do not need a request for a copy of your data either: Settings → Your Data → Download My Data immediately downloads everything your account holds (your account details, your watchlists, their symbols and notes, your portfolio and sales, your price and percent alerts, the devices you turned notifications on for and your notification preferences, your profile icon, your profile intro and visibility preferences, your community posts, your notification inbox) as a JSON or CSV file (the CSV holds only the watchlists; everything else is in the JSON).

Security

• All traffic is encrypted with TLS; the site is served over HTTPS only.
• Passwords are digested with bcrypt at a current cost factor.
• The database connection is encrypted and reachable only from the application server.
• The session cookie is written with the HttpOnly and Secure flags.

Even so, no transmission over the internet is 100% secure. If you notice a security flaw, writing to hello@aciliszili.com is enough; as long as you report it without exploiting it, you will get nothing but thanks.

Under Eighteen

The site does not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18. If you are a parent and notice that your child has created an account here, get in touch and the record will be deleted.

If This Text Changes

Changes are published on this page and the date at the top is updated. Every past version of the text sits in the project's open source repository along with its change history — so you can verify for yourself what changed and when.