Privacy Policy

• Subscription data: your email address, your chosen voices (Dark / Neutral / Light), and your chosen news desks. Stored in our database so we can send you the daily briefing and let you update your preferences. That’s the full extent of account data.
• Log data: standard server logs (IP address, user agent, timestamps) retained for up to 30 days for security and debugging, then rotated.
• Email delivery metadata: our Postal mail server records delivery events (sent, bounced, opened if your client fetches tracking pixels, clicked). We use this only to diagnose deliverability problems and retain it for up to 90 days.

We use two bits of browser-local storage, both gated by the consent banner on your first visit:

• Your chosen voice(Dark / Neutral / Light), so you don’t have to re-pick it every time you land.
• Voice-blind quiz stats — plays, correct guesses, day-streak. Stored only in your browser, never sent to us.

Your consent decision itself is remembered in a single first-party cookie (arc_consent), which is strictly necessary to respect that choice across visits.

• No third-party analytics (no Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, etc.).
• No advertising trackers. The site is not ad-supported.
• No cross-site or third-party cookies.
• We do not sell, rent, or share subscriber data with third parties.

For the newsletter, our legal basis is your explicit consent (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(a)), given when you complete the double-opt-in flow. For site logs, our legal basis is legitimate interest (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) in keeping the service secure and running.

• Active subscribers: while your subscription is active.
• Unsubscribed: we keep the row with unsubscribed_at set so the address can’t be silently re-added. You can ask us to delete the record entirely (see §6).
• Server logs: 30 days.
• Delivery metadata: 90 days.

The Site’s editorial layer is built on third-party AI APIs. We send these providers content from public news sources we aggregate; we do not send them your subscriber data, email address, or browsing history.

• Tavily— news search index. Receives our search queries, returns article URLs and excerpts.
• DeepSeek— large language model. Receives article excerpts (already public) for editorial summarisation, classification, and clock reasoning.
• OpenAI— image generation (gpt-image-2) for the daily cartoons on /cartoons. Receives our cartoon prompts, returns PNG bytes which we store on our own infrastructure.
• Cloudflare— CDN, edge cache, and the scheduled-task worker that triggers the daily agent run. Receives standard request headers.
• Coolify / Hetzner— the hosting provider for the application server and our self-hosted Supabase cluster. Located in Germany.

One exception worth flagging: the /rendertool, where you can paste any article URL or text to have it run through the three voices, sends your pasted input to DeepSeek so the model can read it. Don’t paste anything sensitive there.

All subscriber data is stored on a self-hosted Supabase (PostgreSQL) cluster in Germany (Hetzner). Email is dispatched through our self-hosted Postal server in the same region. No data is transferred outside the UK/EEA by us. Data may transit the public internet when delivered to your mail provider, which is outside our control.

Under UK / EU GDPR you have the right to access, correct, erase, restrict, or port your personal data, and to object to processing. You can exercise most of these directly:

• Edit your preferences — use the preferences link in any briefing email, or visit /preferences.
• Unsubscribe — one click in any email footer.
• Full deletion — email [email protected] and we will erase the record within 30 days.
• Complaint— you may complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk.

Subscriber tokens are HMAC-signed with a server secret; session state is not stored. The subscribers table has row-level security enabled and is accessible only via server-side service role credentials. Traffic is HTTPS end-to-end.

The service is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from children.

Material changes to this policy will be announced on this page and dated above. For active subscribers we will email a notice before changes take effect.