What we collect, and what never leaves your phone.

The short version

You can read everything we publish, in the app or on the site, without telling us who you are. There is no sign-up, no login, and no reader account to create. The only personal information we ever hold is an email address, and only if you type one into the newsletter form yourself.

The safety tools run on your phone

This matters more than anything else on this page, because people use those tools when something has gone wrong.

When you paste a message into Check a money request, the app examines it on your own device. The message is not uploaded, not logged, and not seen by us. The same is true of Check your situation: the four answers you give are held in memory on your phone while you use the tool, the result is worked out there, and nothing is transmitted. Close the screen and it is gone.

The app has no “report this message” submission switched on. If that is added later, it will be something you have to tick, it will strip account numbers, BSBs, card numbers, emails, phone numbers, tax file numbers and crypto wallet addresses before anything is sent, and this page will say so before it ships.

What the app stores on your device

Stories you save, and the four notification switches in Settings. These sit in the app’s own storage on your phone. We cannot read them, they are not backed up to us, and uninstalling the app deletes them.

Notifications

The app does not use Firebase, or any other push service, and it has no device token. If you turn a switch on, the app itself checks our public feeds every so often and raises the notification locally. Nothing about you is registered anywhere to make that work, and no third party is involved. Turning every switch off stops the checks.

The newsletter

If you enter your email address to get the Morning Briefing, that address goes to our server and then to beehiiv, who run the mailing list and send the emails. They hold your address and the usual delivery record — whether a message was opened, whether a link was clicked. We use it to send the newsletter and nothing else. Every issue carries an unsubscribe link, which removes you from the list.

We do not sell, rent or share the list, and we do not add anyone who has not typed their own address in.

Reading the site

Our own server records the ordinary things a web server records when a page is requested: the address requested, the time, your browser’s user agent, and your IP address. We use those logs to keep the site running and to see when something is broken or being attacked. They are not used to build a profile of you.

For audience figures we run Umami, on our own server rather than someone else’s. It sets no cookies, assigns no identifier that follows you between visits, and cannot track you across other websites. If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, it is respected. We do not use Google Analytics, and there are no advertising or social media trackers on any page.

If you turn on browser notifications on the website — a separate thing from the app — your browser gives us an address to send them to, along with which topics you chose. That is stored so we can send them, and deleted when you turn them off.

What we never do

No advertising network, no affiliate links in any tool result, and no data broker. No bank, insurer or security vendor pays for coverage or receives anything about our readers. The app contains no advertising code and no analytics code at all.

Children

This is a news service for adults and we do not knowingly collect anything from children. The app asks for nothing that would identify a child, or anyone else.

Your rights, and how to use them

We are an Australian publisher and handle personal information under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. In practice that will almost always be one line in a mailing list.

Write to the desk through the contact details on our about page. If you are not satisfied with how we handle it, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

Changes

If what we collect changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. We do not make a change here quietly and start collecting something new the week before.