Privacy Policy

Who is responsible

Readbird is an individual, non-commercial project run by Sergei Rozum (Germany). There is no company behind it and no data-processing on behalf of third parties. For any privacy question you can write directly to the address at the bottom of this page.

What data is stored

Readbird stores only what the app needs to work:

• Account: your email address. If you sign in with Google, Google also passes your name and profile picture — nothing else. Readbird never receives your Google password.
• Your library: feed subscriptions, folders, saved articles and links, read/unread state, labels, highlights, notes and any images you attach to notes.
• Settings: reading preferences, theme, language, sorting, filter rules — synchronised between your devices so the app looks the same everywhere.
• Article content: titles, summaries, publication dates and, for articles you open, the extracted full text. This is public content of the sites you subscribe to, stored once and shared by all readers of that feed.
• Technical data needed to deliver the service: your IP address is seen by the hosting providers listed below while a request is being served, as it is for any website.

What Readbird does NOT do

• No advertising, no ad networks, no advertising identifiers.
• No analytics or tracking products are integrated — there is no measurement of what you read for statistics.
• Your reading data is never sold, rented or shared for marketing.
• No public profiles or share links: saved articles, notes and highlights are private to your account.
• No third-party cookies. Readbird stores a session token and your settings in your browser, and nothing else.

Where the data is stored, and who processes it

Readbird uses a small number of providers, each for one clearly defined job:

• Supabase (database and authentication) — project hosted in the EU (Frankfurt). Stores your account, library and settings.
• Cloudflare (website hosting, CDN and R2 object storage) — serves readbird.app and stores extracted article texts.
• Google — only if you choose “Sign in with Google”. Google tells Readbird your email, name and profile picture.
• Microsoft Azure Translator — receives the text of an article only at the moment you press “translate”, translates it and returns the result. Nothing is sent automatically.
• Google Gemini — only if you add your own Gemini API key in Settings and open the “Transcript” tab of a video. Your device then asks Google to transcribe that public YouTube video. The key stays on your device, and the request does not pass through our servers.
• Sentry (error diagnostics, EU region) — receives a technical error report when something breaks. Session Replay and performance tracing are switched off, so the contents of your screen are not transmitted.
• YouTube — when an article contains an embedded video, the player is loaded from YouTube and YouTube sees that request, exactly as on any site with an embedded video.

Legal basis and purpose (GDPR)

• Performing the service you asked for — Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR: account, subscriptions, saved articles, notes, synchronisation of settings.
• Legitimate interest — Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR: keeping the service secure and diagnosing errors.
• Consent — Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR: optional features you switch on yourself, such as translating an article with an external service.

How long data is kept

Your account data is kept until you delete it. Deleting your account removes your library, notes, highlights, settings and the account itself immediately and irreversibly.

Article records from public feeds are cleaned up automatically after a retention period, independently of individual accounts.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can access, correct, export, restrict or delete your data, and object to its processing. Two of these are built into the app and need no request:

• Export: Settings → “Download my data” gives you everything in JSON and Markdown.
• Deletion: Settings → “Delete account”, or the public page /delete-account.
• You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority in your country.

Children

Readbird is not directed at children under 16.

Changes to this policy

If the way Readbird handles data changes, this page is updated together with the change, and the date at the top of the page changes with it.