Privacy Policy

Brief builds a personalised local news feed. To do that we need to know roughly where you live and what you're interested in, and we watch which stories you read so the feed gets better. This page explains exactly what we collect, why, who it goes to, and how to get rid of it. We don't sell your data and we don't run advertising or third-party analytics trackers.

Who we are

Brief ("we", "us") operates the Brief website at itsbrief.com and the Brief app. If you have a question about this policy or about your data, email admin@alencie.com.

What we collect

Information you give us

• Your email address. This is your account. We use it to sign you in (we email you a one-time link — there are no passwords), to contact you about your account, and — unless you turn it off — to send you one email a week with the top story where you live.
• Your name and age range. Collected during onboarding. Your name is used to address you in the app; the age range (under 25, 25–39, 40–59, 60+) is used to pick which version of a story headline you see.
• Where you live. The suburb or town you type, plus the approximate latitude and longitude, country and state we look up for that place name. This is a place-level lookup of text you typed — we do not use your device's GPS or request location permission from your browser.
• Your interests. The topics you pick or type, and the answers you give in the onboarding quiz.
• Passkeys, if you create one. We store the public key and an identifier for the credential. The private key never leaves your device, and we never see your fingerprint, face or device PIN.

Information we collect as you use Brief

• Which story cards you saw. A card counts as seen when it has been at least half visible on your screen for a second. We record the story, its position in your feed, and the date — once per story per day.
• Which stories you opened, and which you liked, bookmarked or hid.
• Your IP address, briefly. We record a rate-limiting counter keyed to your IP address on sign-up, sign-in and location-search requests, to stop automated abuse. These counters are deleted once their time window (an hour at most) has passed. We do not keep server access logs of your reading beyond what our hosting provider retains.

Information we derive

We turn your interests into numerical representations ("embeddings") and combine them with your reading behaviour into a personal profile vector that decides how your feed is ranked. It's derived from the things above and is deleted with your account.

Why we use it

• To give you an account and sign you in — your email, and passkeys if you set one up.
• To build and rank your feed — location, interests, quiz answers, age range, and what you've seen and read.
• To send you the weekly email — your email address, your name, and your suburb, which is what decides which story you get. You can turn it off at any time; see below.
• To improve Brief — engagement data in aggregate tells us which stories and which ranking settings work.
• To keep the service secure and available — rate limiting and abuse prevention.

If you're in a place with laws that require one, our legal basis is performance of our contract with you (running the service you signed up for) and our legitimate interest in keeping it secure and improving it.

Who we share it with

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We use a small number of service providers to run Brief, and they only handle your data to provide their service to us:

• Supabase — our database and authentication provider. Your account and all the data described above is stored there, and the sign-in emails we send go out through it.
• Cloudflare — hosting and content delivery for the site. Requests to Brief pass through their network, and the weekly email is sent through their mail service, which means your email address passes through it too.
• OpenAI — used to generate your onboarding quiz and to turn your interests into embeddings. Your interest text and the name of your suburb are sent to their API for this. Your email address, name and reading history are not. Data sent to the OpenAI API is not used to train their models.
• OpenStreetMap (Nominatim) — turns the place name you type into coordinates. Our server makes this request, so your browser and IP address are not exposed to them.
• Open-Meteo — the weather shown at the top of your feed. We send the approximate coordinates of your suburb, rounded, and nothing that identifies you.
• Google or Apple — only if you choose to sign in with them. They tell us your email address; we tell them nothing about your reading.

Everything a Brief page needs — fonts, styles, images — is served from our own domain, so simply loading the site doesn't hand your IP address to anyone else. The only exceptions are the providers above, which act on our instructions.

We may also disclose information if we're legally required to, or where it's necessary to protect our rights or someone's safety.

Where your data is stored

Our providers operate globally, so your information may be stored or processed outside the country you live in, including in the United States. We only use providers that commit to appropriate safeguards for that transfer.

Cookies

We use cookies only to make the site work. There are no advertising or analytics cookies on Brief:

• Session cookies that keep you signed in.
• A short-lived cookie during passkey setup and sign-in, to verify the exchange.

Your browser also holds your in-progress quiz answers in its own session storage so a refresh doesn't lose them. That never leaves your device except when you submit the quiz.

Links to news publishers

Brief summarises and links to stories published elsewhere. When you follow a link to a publisher's site, you're on their site under their privacy policy, not ours.

How long we keep it

We keep your account data for as long as your account exists. Reading history (impressions and clicks) is kept while your account is active, because it's what keeps your feed tuned. Rate-limiting records are deleted within an hour. When you delete your account, everything described in this policy is deleted along with it — profile, location, interests, embeddings, passkeys and reading history — with no retained copy, subject only to short-lived backups that age out.

Your choices and rights

• See and change your data. Your name, location and interests are editable any time in Settings, along with your email address and passkeys.
• Delete everything. The Danger zone in Settings deletes your account and all associated data immediately. You don't need to ask us.
• Ask us for a copy, a correction, or a deletion. Email admin@alencie.com and we'll action it. Depending on where you live you may also have the right to object to or restrict certain processing, or to complain to your local data protection authority — in Australia, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au).
• Emails. Sign-in links and account notices are transactional — you get those as long as you have an account. The one email that isn't is the weekly story email, and you can stop it either from the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of any one of them (no sign-in needed) or from the Emails switch in Settings. We send no other marketing, and we never send email on anyone else's behalf.

Children

Brief isn't intended for children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we'll delete it.

Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect or who we share it with, we'll update this page and change the date at the top. If the change is significant, we'll tell you in the app or by email.