Plainly — what Settled collects, and what it doesn't.
Settled doesn't use Google Analytics, Firebase, Mixpanel, Crashlytics, or any other third-party analytics or advertising SDK. There are no trackers in the app.
No identifier at all. Settled stores nothing on your device that identifies it — no account, no UUID, no device id, not even a session id. Earlier test builds generated a random UUID; it was removed in August 2026 and the app deletes any left over on upgrade.
What the app does send is a short list of things that happened, with nothing attached to say who they happened to: "app opened", "story opened", "spent 90 seconds reading", "tapped through to the publisher", "changed a setting". We read them as totals and proportions — which stories people read, whether our excerpts are long enough, how far down the feed anyone gets. Because there is no identifier, we cannot tell whether two events came from the same phone on two different days, and we have deliberately given that up.
Apple gives us separate, aggregate numbers about downloads and sessions if you have Share With App Developers turned on in Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements. That's Apple's own measurement, under your control, and it never identifies you to us either.
Our server sees your device's IP address, the way any server does when you connect to it. It keeps the beacon from being flooded and it appears in ordinary access logs; it is never stored next to the events themselves.
settled.news counts page views, and nothing else. Each view sends the page
path — /privacy, never a query string — and, if you
arrived from another site, that site's domain. There is no cookie, nothing is
written to your browser's storage, and no identifier is attached, so we cannot
tell whether two page views came from the same person. It goes to the same
server as everything else here.
There is no Google Analytics on this site and no third-party tag of any kind. Even the fonts are served from our own server rather than from Google, so loading this page does not tell anyone else that you visited it.
On a server we run, hosted by Hetzner in Germany. All traffic is TLS-encrypted. We don't share the data with anyone, don't sell it, and don't use it for advertising.
The stories in Settled come from public sources — Wikipedia, NASA (APOD), Futurity, ScienceDaily, Atlas Obscura, Smithsonian Magazine, Good News Network. When you tap "Read full story", you leave the app and visit the source's own website; their privacy policy applies from that point on. Settled doesn't pass any information about you to those sources.
The support page has a form. If you use it we receive your message, and your email address if you chose to leave one — that's the only place on this site where you can hand us anything about yourself, and it only happens if you type it in. We use it to answer you and for nothing else: no mailing list, no profile, and it is never passed to anyone. Messages are kept while they're being dealt with and deleted once they're not needed.
Settled is made by Vaultmade Ltd, company number 17322820, registered in England & Wales, registered office 124 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX. Vaultmade Ltd is the data controller for anything described on this page. Write to contact@settled.news with any question about it, including a complaint — and if we don't resolve it you can raise it with the Information Commissioner's Office.
If this policy changes in a way that materially affects what's collected, we'll update this page and note the change. Use the support form or write to contact@settled.news if anything here is unclear. We can't delete "your" events on request, because there is nothing in them that says which ones are yours — that's the point. Everything is deleted after 90 days regardless.