Privacy

The things every account needs:

• Your email address. It's how you sign in, and where editions go unless you pick somewhere else.
• Your nickname. Shown in the app and on your editions.
• Your timezone and temperature unit. So editions arrive at your 7am and the weather reads the way you're used to.
• Your publications. Their names, sources, schedule and any weather place you picked, plus the editions we've sent and when they went out. On the free plan an edition's contents are cleared after 90 days; on Plus they stay so you can reread them.
• A few small cookies. One keeps you signed in for up to 60 days. The others guard our forms against forgery and carry a note like "Saved" to the next page. None of them track you.

The things you can add, skip, or remove any time in Settings:

• A Kindle address, to send editions to your Kindle.
• An Instapaper connection, to save editions to your reading list. We keep your Instapaper username and a key Instapaper gives us. Your Instapaper password is used once to connect and never saved.
• A Google Calendar connection, to put your upcoming events in an edition. We keep a key Google gives us, which Google account you used, and your calendars' names. Events are read when an edition is built and live only inside that edition.
• Your Bluesky or Mastodon handle, plus a copy of who you follow there, so we can suggest accounts when you add one. Both are public anyway, and we never need a password.

If you joined the waitlist on this site, we keep that email address and when you signed up, so we can tell you when Tidings opens.

No passwords: you sign in with a link we email you. No card numbers. No analytics profiles, no reading habits sold or shared, no ads. Like every website, our servers see your IP address. We use it only to stop abuse, counting requests for 15 minutes before the count is thrown away, and our hosts' logs keep it for a short while.

We use what's above for one thing: running the service you signed up for. That's our agreement with you, and it's the legal ground for keeping it. Stopping abuse, like rate limits on sign-in links, is the other: a legitimate interest in keeping Tidings safe for everyone.

We keep it until you delete your account, or remove the item in Settings. Copies in our database backups clear on their own within 7 days, and in our email provider's logs within 45. Tidings is for people 16 and over.

A few companies handle data on our behalf, only to do the job named here:

• DigitalOcean hosts the app and its database, in Frankfurt, Germany.
• Cloudflare runs this website, keeps the waitlist, and sits in front of the app to keep it fast and fend off attacks.
• Postmark sends our email: sign-in links and editions.
• Sentry tells us when something breaks on our side. It hears what went wrong and where, never who it happened to.

Some of these are US companies. When your data leaves the EU, it's covered by the EU's standard data-protection contracts.

The files that style our pages come from jsDelivr, a free public file host, so it sees your IP address when they load.

Connections you choose get only what they need to do what you asked: an edition for Instapaper or your Kindle (through Amazon), a request for your events to Google, a lookup of public follows to Bluesky or your Mastodon server. For weather, MET Norway gets the spot you picked, never who asked.

Paying, once Plus arrives. Paddle will sell Plus for us. It's the seller on your receipt, not a helper working for us: you pay Paddle, it handles the tax, and it looks after your card and billing details under its own privacy policy, keeping the records tax law asks for even after you leave. We'll see your email, country and plan, never your full card number.

It's your data, so it's your call:

• Disconnect Instapaper, Google Calendar, Bluesky, Mastodon or your Kindle any time in Settings. Disconnecting Google also cancels our access on Google's side.
• Change your email address in Settings.
• Delete your account in Settings. Everything in your account goes at once, along with any private feed address you added that no one else reads, and it can't be undone.
• Leave the waitlist by writing to us, and we'll take your address off.
• Ask for a copy of what we keep, or for a correction, by writing to [email protected]. We'll answer within a month, usually much sooner.

If you think we've got something wrong, tell us first, and we'll fix it. You can also complain to your local data protection authority.

If we ever change this in a way that matters, we'll email you before it takes effect. Small fixes just update the date at the top.

Tidings is made by Hesymind. Write to [email protected] about anything here; a person reads every message.