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 either 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. Early iPhone test builds generated a random UUID; it was removed in August 2026, and the app deletes any left over when it updates. The Android app never had one.
What the apps do send is a short list of things that happened, each with its time and nothing to say who it happened to:
Each batch also says which version of the app sent it, and whether that was the iPhone or the Android one.
We read them as totals and proportions — which stories people read, whether our excerpts are long enough, how far down the edition anyone gets. The app sends them in small batches, about every half minute, and the events in one batch are stored together. Nothing ties one batch to the next: 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.
A copy of the app that did not come from the App Store, TestFlight or Google Play — one of our own development builds, usually — labels its events as testing, so that our own use can be left out of the numbers. The label describes the copy, not you.
Apple and Google each give us their own aggregate numbers: how often the app is downloaded and, from people who have chosen to share analytics with developers, sessions and crashes. On iPhone that choice is Share With App Developers, in Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements. On Android it is Usage & diagnostics, in the Google section of Settings. The measurement is theirs, the choice is yours, and none of it identifies you to us.
Your IP address is seen by our server, and by Cloudflare, the network our traffic passes through, the way any server sees it when you connect. It keeps the beacon from being flooded and it appears in ordinary access logs; it is never stored with the events themselves.
Each request for an edition or an episode is also logged, without the IP address: the time, what was asked for, and how the software that asked describes itself. That description can include the phone’s system version and, on Android, its model. These lines are deleted after 30 days.
settled.news counts page views and uses of its store links, 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.
The QR code and the store buttons pass through our server on the way to the App Store or Google Play. The server notes which one was used, which store it led to (if any), and whether a button was at the top of the page or the bottom. The link then carries a tag, the same for everyone who uses it, saying it came from this site, so that Apple and Google can tell us, in totals, how many downloads started here.
There is no Google Analytics on this site and no third-party tag of any kind. Even the fonts are served from settled.news rather than from Google, so loading a page here tells no advertiser, analytics company or font service that you came. Like the apps’ traffic, it reaches you through Cloudflare. On an iPhone, the front page asks Safari to show an App Store banner at the top. Safari draws it, and there is no code of ours in it.
On a server we run, rented from Hetzner in the European Union. Everything that reaches it passes through Cloudflare, which carries and filters the traffic for us and so sees what our server sees. All of it travels encrypted. We don’t sell the data, don’t use it for advertising, and don’t give it to anyone beyond the companies named on this page, which carry or hold it for us.
The stories in Settled come from public sources — Wikipedia, NASA APOD, Futurity, Smithsonian Magazine, ScienceDaily, Atlas Obscura and Good News Network. Their words reach your phone from our server. Their pictures do not: your phone fetches each one from the publisher’s own server (Wikipedia’s from Wikimedia), the lead picture when you open the app and the rest in the background on Wi-Fi. Those servers see a request from your IP address, as they would from any visitor. When you follow “Read the full story at …”, the publisher’s own page opens, and their privacy policy applies from that point on. Settled tells them nothing else about you.
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. The message is kept on our server, and a copy is delivered to us through Telegram, a messaging service, which is how it reaches a person. We use it to answer you and for nothing else: no mailing list, no profile. Messages are kept until we delete them by hand; nothing removes them automatically.
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. Every event is deleted after 90 days regardless, and the backups that held it within a week of that.
Last changed 14 October 2026: listed every event the apps send, named Cloudflare and Telegram, described the request log and where pictures come from, said how long messages to us are kept, changed how we describe where the server is, and described how the store links are counted.