Privacy

The short version

Birchfeed is an RSS service made by Birchtree Productions, LLC. It stores your subscriptions, what you have read, and what you have starred, because that is the product. It does not store much else. There are no ads, no trackers, and no data brokers. The only analytics are usage counts we keep ourselves, described below, and nothing follows you across other sites. Nothing here is sold or rented, and nothing is shared with anyone outside the handful of services listed below that are needed to run it.

If you only read one section, read the one on deleting your account. The button does what it says.

What an account stores

When you sign up, we store:

• Your email address. It is how you sign in and the only way we can reach you. There is no password.
• Passkeys you register. A passkey stores a public key and the name you gave the device. The private key never leaves your device and we never see it. Biometrics stay on your device too: we never receive a fingerprint or a face scan.
• Sign-in records. Sessions, sign-in codes, and emailed recovery links are stored hashed or as random ids, never in a form that could be used to sign in as you if the database were ever exposed.
• API keys. A key for a reader app is stored as a hash, along with the name you gave it and roughly when it was last used, so you can see and revoke it from Settings. The key itself is shown to you once and not kept.
• Your time zone, as reported by your browser (for example "America/Chicago"). It decides when the weekly summary and the daily briefing arrive. We do not store your location.
• Your settings. Reader defaults, which emails you want, when the briefing should arrive, and whether you finished the welcome tour.

Your feeds and what you read

• Your subscriptions and folders. Which feeds you follow, what you have renamed them to, and how you have grouped them.
• Read and starred state. For each article, whether and when you read it and whether and when you starred it. This is what syncs between your apps.
• Rules. Any automations you set up, including the phrases they watch for.
• Push subscriptions. If you turn on notifications in a browser, we store the address your browser gives us to deliver them to.

Articles themselves are stored once, shared across everyone subscribed to the same feed. An article is not "yours" in the database; the record of you reading it is. We keep the newest 200 articles per feed and anything younger than 90 days. Older articles are deleted on a nightly schedule unless somebody has starred them.

Feeds are fetched by our server, not by your browser, and every request identifies itself as Birchfeed rather than as you. Publishers see one server polling their feed. They do not see who subscribes, how many people do, or what anyone reads. Site icons are fetched and served the same way, so a publisher cannot learn your subscription list from icon requests either.

What we can see

There is an admin dashboard. It shows totals across the service and, per account, the email address, when the account was created and last used, and counts: how many subscriptions, folders, read articles, starred articles, passkeys, and API keys. It does not list which feeds you follow or which articles you have read. Those are in the database and can be reached with a query if something needs debugging, but nothing surfaces them, and we do not go looking.

Email

Birchfeed sends a few kinds of email, all through an outside delivery service that receives your address in order to deliver them.

• Sign-in codes and recovery links.
• Security notices when a passkey or an API key is added or removed, so that if it was not you, you find out.
• A weekly summary of your reading, on by default. Every one carries an unsubscribe link that works without signing in, and there is a switch in Settings.
• A daily briefing, off by default. See the next section, because it involves another service.
• Rule notifications, only for rules where you asked for email.
• Billing reminders: one before a trial ends, and confirmations when a subscription starts or stops.

There is no marketing email and no mailing list.

The daily briefing

The briefing is written by a language model, so turning it on means sending some of your feed content to an outside AI provider. What goes: the titles, links, feed names, and a short excerpt of the articles that arrived in the window you chose. What does not go: your email address, your name, what you have read or starred, or anything about your account. The provider sees a batch of public articles and nothing that ties them to a person.

It is off by default and stays off until you switch it on. The most recent briefing is kept so the page can show it; each new one replaces the last.

Sharing to other apps

If you connect Quick Reads, we store a key for your Quick Reads account, encrypted at rest. When you share an article, its link and title go to Quick Reads under their privacy policy. Disconnecting in Settings deletes the key from our side immediately. Nothing is sent to Quick Reads unless you share something.

Reader apps and API keys

A reader app you connect with an API key can do what you can do in the web reader: read your subscriptions and articles, and mark things read or starred. What the app does with that on your device is between you and the app. An API key cannot sign in to this website, change your email, or delete your account, and revoking one signs out that one app and nothing else.

Cookies and local storage

Signed in, there is one cookie that matters: the session, so you stay signed in. It expires on its own and is cleared when you sign out. A few short-lived cookies exist only during a sign-in or a connection to another app and are gone within minutes. There are no advertising cookies and no cross-site tracking, which is why there is no cookie banner.

The web reader keeps a copy of recent articles in your browser so it works offline. That copy lives in your browser and nowhere else, and signing out clears it.

Payments

Subscriptions are handled by an outside payment processor. Your card details go to them and never touch our servers: we never see or store a card number. What we keep is their id for you, their id for your subscription, whether that subscription is active, and when the current period ends. They handle the rest under their own privacy policy.

Where it all lives

The app and its database run on a cloud hosting provider in the United States. If you are somewhere else, your data is processed there. The host keeps ordinary request logs, which include IP addresses, for a limited time for debugging and abuse handling. Our own logs strip cookies and API keys before anything is written.

Hosting, email delivery, payments, the AI provider behind the briefing, your browser's push service if you turn on notifications, and Quick Reads if you connect it: that is the whole list of outside services, and each one sees only the part described above.

We may also disclose information if the law genuinely requires it, and we will say so publicly where we are allowed to.

How long we keep things

Account data is kept for as long as your account exists, because it is the product: a starred article from last year is still starred. Sign-in codes and recovery links expire within minutes and are single use. Sessions expire on their own and expired ones are purged nightly. Articles follow the 200 per feed, 90 day rule above.

Deleting your account

There is a Delete account button in Settings, under Danger zone. It really deletes: your email address, your subscriptions and folders, your read and starred history, your rules, your passkeys, your API keys, your sessions, your push subscriptions, and any connected Quick Reads key all go with it, immediately and permanently. There is no soft delete and no way for us to bring it back, so export your OPML first if you want your feed list.

Two things sit outside that button. The payment processor keeps its own billing records, which it has to for tax and accounting reasons. And the articles themselves stay, because they were never about you: they are the same rows every other subscriber to that feed reads.

You are welcome to ask for a copy of what we hold, or to have anything corrected, and we will help regardless of which laws happen to apply where you live. Just email us.

Children

Birchfeed is not aimed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will update the date at the top and, for anything significant, say so in the app. We will not quietly start collecting something new and leave you to notice.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or a request about your data: matt@birchtree.me.