Privacy Policy

Last updated: 18 August 2026

Spin News is a news reader. It is not an advertising business, and it is not built to profile you. This page says exactly what is stored, why, for how long, and how to get rid of it. Every line matches what the app actually does — if you find a difference, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.

The short version

Spin News uses an account, because the feed and everything you save are yours. Sign-in is Apple or Google — one tap, no password.
There are no ads, no advertising identifier, no analytics SDK, no attribution SDK, and no data brokers.
We never track you across other apps or websites. Nothing is joined with third-party data.
Location is never used. The app does not link Apple’s location services at all.
You can export everything and delete your account from inside the app.

What we store when you sign in

Signing in — with Apple or with Google — adds bookmarks that follow you, comments, and settings that carry across devices. Here is everything that gets stored, and why.

What	Why	Notes
Account identifier	To know which account is which	An internal ID plus the stable subject identifier Apple or Google returns. Not usable to identify you elsewhere.
Email address	To identify the account and send service mail	Only if you chose to share one. Apple private-relay addresses work the same way. Never shown to other readers.
Display name and handle	To show who wrote a comment	You type them. Optional.
Avatar	To show next to your comments	A number pointing at one of sixteen avatars drawn in code. Not a photo — the app has no camera or photo-library access.
Region	To show under your comments	You type it. This is not your location.
What you make	To show it back to you and to others	Comments, replies, likes, reports you file, and saved stories.
Your settings	To carry them across your devices	Reading languages, followed countries, preferred and blocked sources, hidden items, blocked people, notification preferences.
Notification token	To deliver notifications you turned on	Apple’s push token for the device. Deleted when it goes stale, when you sign out, and when you delete the account.
Reading signals	To order your feed	See the next section. Can be switched off, and switching it off deletes them.

Reading signals — the sensitive one, stated plainly

To decide what to show you next, the app reports which story cards it put on your screen and how long each one stayed there. Those events are folded into scores per topic, and those scores help order your feed.

The text of what you read is never sent. Nor your location, nor any advertising identifier.
Raw events are kept 72 hours at most; in practice they are folded away within about ninety seconds.
The derived scores are kept 90 days.
You can switch it off in the app: Settings → Privacy → “Improve the feed”. Switching it off stops that device immediately, tells the server to stop using your scores on every device you sign in on, and deletes those scores.
With it off, the feed uses only what you chose explicitly — the topics you follow and the ones you excluded.

What we never collect

Health and fitness data. Financial information. Purchases. Your phone number or postal address. Your contacts. Sensitive information. Precise or coarse location. Photos or video. Audio — read-aloud synthesises speech from story text; the microphone is never used and nothing is recorded. Browsing history from outside the app. Advertising data. Crash or performance telemetry, because no such SDK is linked.

About search

Search queries are sent to our server, because that is how a search runs. Nothing links a query to you. The server caches the result for sixty seconds under a key built from the words, the country and the languages — that key contains no account identifier — and the query is never written to any table belonging to you. Recent searches shown in the app are stored on your device only.

Reading history

The list of stories you opened is kept on your device, in the app’s own storage. It is not uploaded. You can clear it at Settings → Privacy → “Clear reading history”.

Where AI is involved

Headlines, one-sentence summaries, translations and the comparison of how different newsrooms framed the same event are generated by AI models running on our backend, from published article text. The grouping of stories about the same event uses vector similarity.

No reader data ever reaches a model provider. Not your identity, not your reading signals, not your comments. Your device never communicates with them; only our server does, and only about published news text.

Who else is involved

Apple and Google handle sign-in if you use it. They tell us a stable identifier and, optionally, an email. Their own privacy policies govern their side.
Fly.io hosts our servers and database, in Europe.
Story images come from the publisher’s own feed, or from freely licensed libraries (Wikimedia Commons, Openverse, Unsplash) shown with attribution.

We do not sell your data. We do not share it for advertising.

How long we keep things

Raw reading events: 72 hours.
Reading-signal scores: 90 days, or immediately deleted if you switch signals off.
Everything tied to your account: until you delete the account.
Article text and images we index: rolling, on the order of thirty days.

Your rights, and where the buttons are

Export everything — Settings → Privacy → “Export all my data”.
Delete your account — Settings → Privacy → “Delete my account”. It cascades: bookmarks, comments, follows, preferences, notification tokens and reading-signal scores all go with it.
Turn off reading signals — Settings → Privacy → “Improve the feed”.
Clear local reading history — Settings → Privacy → “Clear reading history”.

Under the GDPR you also have the right to object, to restrict processing, and to complain to your national data protection authority. Write to us and we will help.

Children

Spin News is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13 (or the equivalent age in your country). It carries news from around the world, which can include difficult material, and it is rated accordingly.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect, we will update the date at the top and note the change in the app’s release notes. We will not quietly widen it.

Contact

Written questions get a written answer, normally within one business day: support@spinnews.app.