Privacy Policy

This policy explains what the Informed iPhone app collects, why, and what you can do about it. Informed is made by Synapse Labs Pty Ltd, Australia (ABN 82 691 794 064). Questions go to support@synapselabs.com.au.

The short version

• We use your reading activity to personalise Informed, to improve our recommendations and, if we show ads, to make them more relevant. We never sell your personal information or track you across other companies’ apps or websites. You can opt out of personalised ads and marketing at any time (see “Ads and marketing”).
• We don’t use third-party advertising or analytics SDKs. Our website counts visits without cookies through our host, Vercel, and can’t tell who you are (see “Website visit statistics”).
• From version 1.0.1, if you install Informed after seeing one of our ads in another app, Apple may tell that ad network, anonymously and after a delay, that an install happened and roughly how far you got in your first days, for example whether you read a story. Apple, not Informed, sends this. It identifies no one and isn’t used to track you. It stops if you turn off “Share anonymous usage”.
• For You learns from what you read. We keep that with your account so it follows you to your other devices, and we use it to personalise Informed and to improve its recommendations for all readers. You can pause it, or delete your reading history, at any time.
• You can delete your account and its data from the app at any time.

Your account

The first time you open Informed, it creates an anonymous account: a random ID, with no name or email attached.

If you choose to use Sign in with Apple, Apple gives us your email address (or Apple’s private relay address, if you choose to hide yours). We request your email only, not your name. We use it to restore your account and sync your settings.

What we store with your account

• Your region, topics, the interests you pick, and notification settings (briefing time and breaking-news topics).
• Your For You reading history, as described under “For You and your reading” below.
• Stories you save.
• This week’s free full report, so you can reopen it for free. Kept for 8 weeks.
• Reports you send about a story, and any note you type with them. Kept for up to a year.
• Reports you send about an answer (“What was wrong?”): the question, the answer and any note you type. Kept for 90 days.
• Your “Ask” questions, and the last two question-and-answer turns for each story, so follow-up questions make sense.
• Counts used to apply the free and paid limits, including when you opened full reports (the time only, not which report) and how many questions you asked.
• Feedback you send from Settings > Send feedback: the category you select, your message and the app version. It is linked to your account and kept for up to 365 days, or until you delete the account.
• Purchase records.

Purchases

Apple takes payment. To verify subscriptions, we receive transaction details from Apple (product, dates, price and currency, storefront country and transaction ID), plus Apple’s renewal, refund and billing notices. We never see your card details.

Preventing abuse

• Apple App Attest and DeviceCheck: an app-specific key, which we keep with your account, and two yes/no flags stored by Apple. No hardware identifiers.
• For limits on questions, free full reports and usage statistics, our app database keeps a one-way hash of your IP address rather than the raw address for up to two days (for an IPv6 address, of its network parts). Many people can share one address, for example customers of the same mobile network, so these limits apply to a whole network, not to you. For free full reports and usage statistics the hash is made with a secret key that changes every day and is then deleted. We also count, per day, how often these limits are reached; those counts are only numbers and are not linked to you or your network.

Notifications

If you turn notifications on, we store your push token, time zone, app version, iOS version and language and region setting so we can send them.

For You and your reading

For You is the feed that learns what you like. It works out what to show you on your iPhone, from what you read. We also keep the following with your account:

• Your For You profile: a summary of what For You has learned, such as the topics and kinds of stories you read more or less of, and stories you asked to see more or less like. It is replaced each time it changes.
• Your reading activity: a record of what you do with stories: opening one, how long you read or listen, saving, sharing, asking about it, tapping a source, thumbs up or down, and “show more or less like this”. Each entry has the story, the time, and where in the app it happened. Scrolling past a story is not recorded. When you tap a source, we record only that you tapped a source of that story, never the link or anything you do on the publisher’s site.
• The stories you have opened, so stories you have already read leave your feed on all your devices until there is news.

We use this to:

• personalise your For You feed and the notifications you get;
• keep For You the same on your other devices and, when it launches, on the web; and
• improve Informed’s ranking, recommendations and how important an alert is, by looking at what readers read across Informed. For example: which stories readers of one story also read, which topics are rising, and which stories people finish; and
• if we show ads, make them more relevant to you (see “Ads and marketing”).

Ranking is automatic: the app puts stories in order for you from your profile, the news and what readers read across Informed. We never sell your reading activity, and we don’t share it with other companies to track you across their apps or websites.

Your choices. In the app, Settings > Privacy has “Personalise using my reading history”, on by default. Turning it off pauses For You on all your devices: we stop collecting your reading activity and stop using your profile to personalise Informed, but we keep what is already there, so turning it back on picks up where you left off. “Delete reading history” deletes your For You profile and your opened stories, on your devices and our servers, and removes your reading activity from your account (see “How long we keep data”). “What For You has learned” lists what it has learned, with a remove control for each. Deleting your account deletes all of it the same way.

Ads and marketing

Informed shows no ads today and sends no marketing. Free readers may see ads in future. If they do, we may use your reading activity in Informed to make those ads more relevant to you, and we may use it to tell you about Informed features and offers.

You can opt out of personalised ads and marketing at any time, free of charge. When ads or marketing begin, the app will have a setting to opt out that takes effect straight away, and every marketing message will tell you how to opt out. Opting out of personalised ads does not turn ads off: you would see ads that are not chosen from your reading. We will update this policy before any of this starts.

Anonymous usage statistics

Informed sends anonymous usage statistics, which you can switch off in the app under Settings > Privacy.

• They record which features are used, tagged with a random installation ID that is not linked to your account.
• They never include which stories you read. (Your reading activity is kept separately, as described under “For You and your reading”, and the Share anonymous usage control does not change it.)
• They are kept for 90 days, then only as daily totals per kind of event, not linked to an installation. These de-identified totals are retained.
• With usage sharing on, limited subscription diagnostics record whether loading plans, checking prices, purchases and restoring purchases worked. They include the app build, iOS version, outcome and technical error codes, using the same installation ID. They do not include receipts, transaction identifiers, account details or error messages.
• Switching sharing off stops new usage and diagnostic reports and deletes unsent reports on your iPhone. Reports already received remain under the retention period above.
• Thumbs up and thumbs down votes are sent as anonymous per-story counts, not linked to you.
• Thumbs up and thumbs down on an answer are sent as anonymous counts per AI model, not linked to you, the story or your question.

AI

• Story summaries are written by AI models from publishers’ articles. We do not attach your account details when generating these summaries. Publishers can read how their work is used on For publishers.
• Before your first question of your own, the app asks your permission to send it to our AI provider. If you continue, that choice is kept on this iPhone only. It is not synced to your Apple account or other devices. Choosing Not now, or dismissing the notice, sends nothing. Suggested questions with an answer already stored in the app send nothing and do not need permission.
• When you ask a question, your question, the story’s sources and recent questions and answers about that story are sent through OpenRouter to an AI model provider, which writes the answer. Our AI providers include OpenAI, Google and DeepSeek; Anthropic has also processed questions previously. The provider depends on the task and can change. We request providers that do not use this data for training; this is not a promise of zero retention. Your name, email and Apple Account are not sent. OpenRouter receives a stable, keyed code derived from your account ID to detect abuse, rather than the account ID itself. Please leave personal details out of questions.
• Recorded briefings send the news script to Google Gemini to create speech. Listening to a story sends the story’s text through OpenRouter to its voice model, with Google Gemini as a backup. Neither sends your typed Ask questions.
• If the story’s sources don’t answer your question, a web search based on your question may also be sent through OpenRouter to Exa, a web search provider.

Support and feedback

If you email support, we receive your email address and the message you choose to send, so we can respond. In-app feedback uses the account-linked form described above. Please avoid including sensitive personal information in feedback or support messages.

Where your data is stored, and who handles it

Our primary account database is hosted by Supabase on Amazon Web Services in Sydney, Australia. Informed also uses OpenRouter and its AI model providers, Exa, Google Gemini and Apple for the services described in this policy. Vercel hosts our website and shared-story pages; requests to these pages reach its hosting infrastructure. News and story pages on our website show publishers’ photos, which your browser loads directly from the publisher without telling it which page you came from; the publisher receives your IP address and browser details under its own privacy policy. Cloudflare R2 stores our encrypted off-site database backups and copies of public audio and notification media, as described below.

Hosting and authentication services keep operational and security logs. These can include your IP address, approximate location inferred from it, device or browser information, request details and response codes. Some app request and sign-in logs are linked to your account ID. These provider logs are separate from the app database’s short-lived rate-limit hashes and the optional usage statistics. They are not switched off by the Share anonymous usage control. Provider log retention follows the service’s configured retention period.

Website visit statistics

On readinformed.com, our host Vercel counts page views for us with Vercel Web Analytics, so we can see which pages are useful and how people find them. It records the page address (without anything after a “?”, except campaign tags such as utm_source), the site you came from, your country, and your browser, operating system and device type. It uses no cookies and stores nothing in your browser. Visits on the same day are grouped using a short-lived value worked out from your request, which is discarded within 24 hours, so it can’t follow you across days or across other websites, and we never receive your IP address from it. We see only totals. The Informed app doesn’t use it.

Data sent outside Australia

Some data leaves Australia so the service can work:

• Your questions and the story’s sources go to OpenRouter and the AI model provider that writes the answer, and web searches go to Exa. These companies may process the data in the United States and other countries where they operate.
• Apple handles Sign in with Apple, purchases, App Attest and DeviceCheck, and push notifications, and may process that data in the United States and other countries.

The Sydney database location does not mean that every service request is processed only in Australia.

What we don’t do

• Sell your personal information.
• Track you across other companies’ apps or websites.
• Use third-party advertising or analytics SDKs.

How long we keep data

• Account data: until you delete your account.
• Your For You profile, reading activity and opened stories: until you use “Delete reading history” or delete your account. Pausing “Personalise using my reading history” keeps them. When you delete them, we keep a de-identified copy of your reading activity to improve Informed: it has no link to you, your account or your device, gives the day rather than the time, and is only added to what we keep in a batch from at least 10 readers, so it can’t be traced back to you (if a batch doesn’t reach 10 readers within 30 days, it is deleted instead). Totals made from many readers that do not identify anyone (for example how many readers opened a story) are also kept.
• Anonymous accounts with no activity for 30 days are deleted automatically, unless they have saved stories or still receive notifications.
• Usage statistics: 90 days, then only daily totals per kind of event, not linked to an installation. These de-identified totals are retained.
• Notification logs: 90 days.
• Reports about an answer: 90 days, and deleted with your account.
• Reports about a story and in-app feedback: 365 days, and deleted with your account.
• This week’s free full report: 8 weeks.
• The times you opened full reports: 400 days.
• Daily counts of how often a limit was reached (numbers only): 90 days.
• Purchase records: as long as tax law requires.

Deleting your data

In the app, go to Settings > Delete account (called Delete my data if you never signed in), or email support@synapselabs.com.au. This deletes your account and its data, including your For You profile and reading activity (your reading activity is kept only in de-identified form, as described under “How long we keep data”). To delete only your reading history, use Settings > Privacy > Delete reading history; turning off “Personalise using my reading history” only pauses it. The exceptions are purchase records that the law requires us to keep, and the cost and date of questions you asked (our spending records), which are no longer linked to you. The IP hash and device key on those records are removed within two days and 35 days, so deleting an account cannot be used to get round the question limits. Provider operational and security logs may remain until their configured retention period ends.

Backups

Database backups can contain information that you have since deleted from the live service. Supabase keeps daily backups for 7 days. Our off-site backup system encrypts database copies before storing them in Cloudflare R2. We keep up to 30 nightly copies and 12 month-end copies. The three-day cache of full publisher article text is excluded. We also copy public audio and notification media for recovery. Cloudflare’s Oceania location preference is not a guarantee that all backup data stays in Australia.

We restrict access to backups and use them for recovery. Deleting an account or reading history does not individually remove it from an existing backup; it remains until that backup expires. To prevent recovery from bringing deleted information back, we keep a restricted record of the account ID, the type of deletion and its time for 13 months. This record contains no email address, reading history or question text and is used only for recovery. If we restore a backup, we reapply deletion requests before returning restored personal data to service. If we cannot verify the current deletion record, we do not return that personal data to service.

Your rights

Australia

We handle personal information under the Australian Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles.

United Kingdom, European Union and Ireland

Under the GDPR and UK GDPR you have the right to:

• access your personal data;
• correct it;
• delete it;
• receive it in a portable form;
• object to how we use it; and
• complain to a data protection regulator.

We use personal data on these legal bases:

• To provide the service you asked for (contract): your account, settings and saved stories, personalising your For You feed, answering your questions, and subscriptions.
• Our legitimate interests: keeping Informed secure (App Attest, DeviceCheck and the IP address hash), improving it with anonymous usage statistics, which you can switch off, and improving its recommendations from readers’ reading activity, and, if we show ads or send marketing, making them relevant. You can object to the first by turning off “Personalise using my reading history” (which stops it) or using “Delete reading history”, and to personalised ads and marketing by opting out (see “Ads and marketing”).
• Your consent: notifications, and sending your own questions to our AI provider. Withdraw notification permission in Settings. In Informed, choose Settings, Privacy, Withdraw AI permission to withdraw permission on this iPhone. We will ask again before another question is sent. This does not recall questions already sent. Deleting your account removes the stored conversation history.
• Legal obligation: purchase records that tax law requires us to keep.

Your data is stored in Australia and some is processed in the United States (see “Data sent outside Australia”). Supabase handles our stored data under its Data Processing Addendum, which includes the Standard Contractual Clauses. When you ask a question, sending it to OpenRouter and the AI provider is necessary to answer the question you asked.

United States and Canada

We don’t sell or share your personal information.

To use any of these rights, email support@synapselabs.com.au.

Children

Informed is not directed to children under 13 (under 16 in the EU and UK).

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy we update the date at the top. If a change is material, we also tell you in the app.

Contact and complaints

Contact Synapse Labs Pty Ltd at support@synapselabs.com.au. If you are in Australia and not satisfied with our response, you may also contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) at oaic.gov.au.