Privacy policy

• Your account: your email address, and your name if you sign in with Google or Apple. If you use “Sign in with Apple” you can choose to hide your real email address; we then only ever see a private address Apple forwards from. Passwords are handled by our sign-in provider and never seen by us.
• Your choices: the topics you follow and their order, your default brief settings, your light or dark setting, your language and whether you switched analytics off.
• Your briefs: when you made each brief, what you asked for and which stories it included, so we can show your latest brief and apply the daily limits.
• Saved stories and watchlist keywords, until you remove them. To find watchlist stories, your keywords are also sent as searches to Google News, without your name or email.
• Stories you follow (Plus): the stories you chose to follow, the short name, description and search phrases written for each (by AI, from the story itself), and its timeline of developments, until you stop following it. To find new developments, the search phrases are sent as searches to Google News, without your name or email.
• Daily reminder (only if you switch it on): the technical address and keys your phone’s notification service gives us for that device (in the app, a notification token). They are used only to send you the reminder, and deleted when you switch it off or delete your account.
• Guests: no email or name. Your topics and settings stay on your device. To stop people making unlimited guest briefs, we keep a scrambled, one-way fingerprint of your internet connection’s IP address with each guest brief; the address itself is never stored.
• Emails you send us at support@readbriefly.app.
• Invite list: while Briefly is invite-only, the email addresses of people invited to try it, and whether they have Plus.
• Security records: like most online services, our sign-in provider records when you sign in, from which internet address (IP) and what kind of device, and our host keeps short-lived technical logs of requests, to keep accounts safe and fix faults.

We don’t use advertising, tracking or analytics cookies or tools (the app has none either), we don’t track you across other apps or websites, and we don’t sell or share your data for marketing.

To provide the app you signed up for (your account, your briefs and your settings), and to keep it working fairly and safely, for example the daily limits, sign-in security and stopping abuse. Under UK data protection law these are “performing our agreement with you” and our “legitimate interests”.

Briefly only uses what it needs to work: a sign-in cookie that keeps you signed in, and your device’s own storage for things like your light or dark setting and, for guests, your topics. The iPhone and Android app uses no cookies: it keeps your sign-in and settings in the phone’s own private storage. If you use “Continue with Google”, Google’s sign-in may set its own cookies, under Google’s privacy policy.

Briefly reads public news feeds and articles to write each brief. AI (Anthropic’s Claude) is given the news text to summarise, and to translate finished summaries into another language if you choose one (the translated card is kept and shared with other readers of that language); it is not given your name, email or other personal details. Briefly never stores full articles: every story links to the original and names its source.

Listening uses Google Cloud Text-to-Speech to turn a story’s headline, summary and why it matters into audio. Only that news text is sent, never anything about you, and the recording is shared by everyone who listens to that story and deleted after a few days. On the website, if it isn’t available, your device’s own voice reads instead; some browsers’ higher-quality voices (for example Microsoft Edge’s “Natural” voices) are online services, so the text being read is sent to that browser’s provider.

To see which parts of Briefly are used and which aren’t, we record a short list of key actions: for example that a brief was made, that a story was opened or saved, that the reminder was switched on, or that the app was opened. Each is tied to a random account ID, and to your plan (Free or Plus), whether you use the website, iPhone or Android, and the language you chose. It never includes your name, email address, IP address or location, what you read, a headline, a quote, your watchlist words or anything you typed.

It is sent from our own server to PostHog (a service in the EU). Nothing is stored on your device for it, so there are no analytics cookies and no tracking script. We use it under “legitimate interests” (improving a service people use), and keep it for up to a year. You can switch it off any time in You, under “Help improve Briefly”: nothing more is sent, and what PostHog holds about you is deleted. Deleting your account deletes it too.

• Supabase: database and sign-in, stored in London.
• Vercel: hosts the app, which runs in London.
• Resend: sends sign-up and password emails (servers in Ireland).
• Google: sign-in, if you choose “Continue with Google”; Google News searches for watchlist keywords (the keywords only); and Gmail, where emails to support@readbriefly.app arrive.
• Cloudflare: our web address and forwarding emails sent to support@readbriefly.app.
• Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla: whichever runs your device’s notification service delivers the daily reminder, if you switch it on. The reminder says only that your brief is ready. Apple also provides “Sign in with Apple”, if you choose it.
• Expo: for the iPhone and Android app, passes the daily reminder from our server to Apple or Google. It sees your notification token and the reminder’s wording, nothing else.
• Google Cloud: the natural voice for Listen (news text only).
• Anthropic: the AI that summarises the news (news text only, see above).
• PostHog: product analytics, hosted in the EU (key actions tied to a random account ID only, see “Product analytics”).

Some of these companies are based in the USA. Where your data leaves the UK, they use the safeguards UK law requires, such as standard contractual clauses.

• Briefs: 30 days, except your most recent one, which stays so the app can show it.
• News articles: 14 days, unless a kept brief or a saved story uses them.
• Your account, choices and saved stories: until you delete your account.
• Reminder tokens: until you switch the reminder off, delete your account, or your device stops accepting them.
• Sign-in records and hosting logs: kept by Supabase and Vercel for their standard short periods, for security.
• The invite list: until invite-only ends or you ask us to remove you.
• Emails to support: as long as needed to help you.

You can delete your account and everything Briefly holds about you yourself, at any time: in the app, go to You, then Delete my account. It happens straight away. If you used Sign in with Apple in the app, the app also asks Apple to remove Briefly from your Apple ID. (If you were invited, your email address stays on the invite list so you can come back; ask us and we’ll remove it.) You can also ask to see the data we hold about you, correct it, get a copy or object to how we use it: email support@readbriefly.app from the address on your account and we’ll respond within a month.

If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your data, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

Briefly isn’t intended for anyone under 13.

Briefly is an independent project run by Eoin Conway, who is responsible for your data (the “data controller”). The best way to get in touch is support@readbriefly.app.

If this policy changes, we’ll update this page and the date at the top, and tell account holders about anything significant.