We keep almost nothing.

If you sign up for the morning email

We store:

• your email address;
• which regions you want (empty means all of BC);
• whether you've confirmed or unsubscribed, and when you signed up and confirmed;
• two random codes that make your confirm and unsubscribe links work.

That's it. No name, no location, no record of which emails you open or which links you click. We use your address only to send you the morning email and the one message that confirms you asked for it. We don't sell it, rent it or share it with anyone else.

If you use the app

If you turn on the morning notification, we store your phone's push token (a random code from Apple or Google that lets us send it), whether it's an iPhone or Android, and the region you picked. Nothing links it to your email address. Your region choice is also kept on your phone. Turning notifications off in your phone's settings stops them. Uninstalling the app removes the token from our list once Apple or Google tell us the app is gone, usually within a few days (see below).

Who handles it

• Resend sends our emails, so it receives your address and the email we send you. Resend is a US company, so your address may be processed outside Canada.
• Vercel hosts the site and Neon hosts our database, which is stored in the United States (Amazon Web Services, Oregon). Like any web host, Vercel keeps short-lived request logs, which include IP addresses, to run and protect the site.
• Apple and Google deliver the app's notifications, so they receive your phone's push token and the notification we send.
• Anthropic's Claude groups headlines into stories, checks that a story is about BC, writes story titles, and writes and checks the AI summaries. It receives only what outlets publish in their feeds: headlines, feed descriptions (up to 1,000 characters), and outlet names and home towns. Never full articles, and nothing about you. It runs every 15 minutes, on new or changed stories. Anthropic is a US company, so this text may be processed outside Canada; we use Anthropic's standard API terms. Outlets whose robots.txt blocks Anthropic's crawlers are never sent to Claude.
• OpenAI turns the headlines and short feed descriptions (up to 200 characters) of every outlet we track, including ones that opt out of AI, into numeric embeddings through its API, so we can group stories. Nothing about you is sent. OpenAI doesn't use API data to train its models and keeps it for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring; it may be processed outside Canada. See OpenAI's API data-usage policy. We're moving this step to a model we run ourselves after the election.

Cookies and analytics

We don't set tracking or advertising cookies. We count page views with Vercel Web Analytics, which doesn't use cookies and doesn't identify you: it tells us how many people read a page, not who they are.

Deleting your data

Morning email. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing stops the emails straight away. We keep your address marked as unsubscribed so we never email it again by mistake. To have it deleted entirely, email hello@thespread.ca from that address and we'll delete everything we hold about you within 30 days. You can also ask us what we hold.

App. Uninstalling the app removes your device's push token from our database the next time we try to send it a notification after Apple or Google tell us the app is gone, usually within a few days. Turning notifications off in your phone's settings stops them but doesn't remove the token. To have it removed now, or for anything else, email hello@thespread.ca.

Who we are

The Spread News is run by NovelLogic Ventures Inc., an independent BC software company. Questions about privacy: hello@thespread.ca.