Privacy

This reader is run by one person as a small beta, by invitation for now. This page says plainly what it keeps about you, who can see it, and how to remove it.

Reading needs no account

You can read stories without signing on. What you have read and saved, and your settings, stay in your own browser and are never sent to the server. There is no analytics, no advertising and no tracking of what you read.

What an account stores

• Your screen name, when the account was made, and whose invite link it was made through. The person who runs this reader can see how many accounts each person's link has brought in.
• Your password, as a salted PBKDF2 hash. The password itself is never stored.
• Your email address, and whether you have confirmed it. It is used for three things only: the confirmation link, password resets, and a notice when sign-in to your account is paused after repeated wrong passwords.
• Your sign-in sessions: when each started and when it expires (30 days).
• Your Gossip Column (your list of friends), your invite link, and the time you last had the page open. That time is what shows your friends a green dot.
• The group you file a friend under, if you make groups (a name you choose, such as Family). Only you see it: your friend is not shown which group they are in. Which groups are folded shut is kept in your browser only.
• Your time zone (a name such as America/New_York, as your browser reports it). Your accepted friends can see it: it sets the clock that shows a friend what time it is for you.
• Your status, if you set one: an emoji and a short line of text. Your accepted friends can see it. Clearing the box removes it.
• The people you have blocked, if any. Someone you block is not told, leaves your Gossip Column, and cannot ask to join it again.
• The feeds that were on your list before, so one you took off can be put back.
• Your list of feeds, the stories you saved (a full copy of each, so it stays readable), which stories you have read, and your Filter and Dates choices. These are kept so the reader looks the same on every device you sign on from.
• Your messages in the Gossip Column, sealed so that only you and your friend can read them (see below): comments on a shared story and replies included. Kept in the open with each one: who sent it to whom, when, when it was read, whether it carries a story, and which story or comment it answers.
• Your message key: the public half, and the private half locked with your password.

Messages are private to the two of you

A message, a shared story, a comment or a reply is sealed in your browser before it is sent and opened only in your friend's browser. The server stores the sealed form and cannot open it. Neither can the person who runs this reader: the database holds nothing readable.

How: your browser makes a key for your account. Its private half is kept locked with your password, so only someone who knows your password can open it. That has one consequence. If you forget your password and reset it by email, the messages you had before the reset can no longer be opened by you. Your friend can still read them, and everything you write afterwards is private as before. Changing your password while you still know the old one loses nothing. Signing off, or signing on from another device, loses nothing either.

What is not hidden: who wrote to whom and when, whether a message carries a story, which story or comment it answers, your friends list and the names of any groups you sort it into, your status, your time zone and your list of feeds. The server needs those to deliver messages and stories. And, as with any website, this privacy rests on the reader's own code doing what this page says.

Who else handles data

• Cloudflare hosts the reader and its database, and sees your IP address as any web host does. Your address is also counted for up to a day to limit repeated sign-up, sign-in and reset attempts.
• Resend delivers the emails described above, so it sees your email address and those messages.
• When you make an account, the person who runs this reader gets an email saying so. It carries your screen name and nothing else.
• Google serves the two typefaces, and the publishers serve the images in stories and their own pages in Site view. Each of them sees your IP address when your browser loads those.
• The National Weather Service supplies the New York weather shown above the Gossip Column. The reader's server asks for it, the same for everyone; it is told nothing about you.
• TypeSafe AI sorts stories by topic and place, and helps find an outlet when you add one. It receives the text of published news stories and, when you add an outlet, the name you typed. It is never told who you are. The AI use page has the details.

Nothing is sold or shared beyond that.

How long it is kept

• Messages and comments are kept until the person who sent them deletes them, or deletes their account. Deleting a message of yours erases its text and any story in it for both of you; an empty marker stays only if something was said under it.
• Sessions expire after 30 days, password-reset links after 15 minutes, confirmation links after 24 hours.
• Everything else is kept for as long as the account exists.

Deleting and exporting

File → My Account → Delete account removes your account at once: your email, password, sessions, friends list, invite link and every message and comment you sent. Messages other people sent to you stay in their history, attributed to "deleted user"; a comment a friend wrote under a story you shared stays with them as a plain message, since the story it was about is gone. Export my data, in the same window, downloads everything held about you as a file; your messages are in it in their sealed form, since the server cannot open them.

Cookies

One cookie, set when you sign on, keeps you signed on. It cannot be read by scripts and is sent only to this site.