Privacy Policy

What we collect

When you sign up, we store your name and email address from your Google account. We use this solely to identify your account and communicate with you about the service.

We do not request access to your email account. Newsletters reach us in one of two ways: a public RSS feed you select from our directory, or by being delivered to a unique forwarding address we issue you. Either way, the only messages we ever see are the ones you explicitly route to us. Your inbox stays private.

How we use your data

• Newsletter content is sent to our AI language-model providers for summarization. Only the extracted newsletter text is sent — no email addresses, headers, or metadata.
• Summaries are sent to our text-to-speech providers to generate audio. The resulting podcast episodes are stored and served only to you via your private RSS feed.
• Payment information is handled entirely by Stripe. We store only your Stripe customer ID, never your card number or billing details.

Data we share

We share data only with the service providers necessary to operate the product:

• Google: OAuth authentication (sign-in only; we do not access Gmail)
• Cloudflare: delivers our website and receives the email sent to your forwarding address. It sees your IP address and the pages you request.
• Resend: sends our service emails, such as your welcome email.
• AI and text-to-speech providers: newsletter text and summaries, used solely to generate your audio. Some of these providers are located outside the European Economic Area.
• Stripe: payment processing. On the payment step, Stripe’s script also collects device and browser signals to prevent fraud.

We do not sell, rent, or share your personal data with anyone else. We do not use your data for advertising. We do not train AI models on your data.

Playback analytics

When you press play, pause, or finish an episode in the Harkwire web player, we record the event with the episode ID, the position in seconds, and the total duration. We use this to spot which editions land and where listeners drop off — nothing more. We do not record what you say, what the audio contains, or any per-second listening trace; only the discrete events.

This is on by default for signed-in users. You can turn it off any time from your settings — the toggle is “Playback analytics”. Anonymous events from the landing-page sample player (no user attached) are always recorded as basic funnel data.

We never share playback events with any third party.

Marketing attribution

Harkwire records which page you first visited and which campaign link you used, in first-party storage only, to understand which marketing works. No third-party trackers. We count page visits with Plausible Analytics, which we run on our own server; it sets no cookies and does not identify individual visitors.

Data retention

Episode audio files are deleted 15 days after they are published. Episode titles, transcripts and a text summary of each day’s newsletters stay in your account, where they power your transcripts and archive search, until you delete your account. Newsletters you forward to your Harkwire address are stored in full, so we can make your episodes from them. They are deleted one year after they arrive, or sooner if you delete your account. Newsletters that reach us through an RSS feed are not stored in full; we keep only the summary. Your account data is retained as long as your account is active.

Account deletion

You can delete your account at any time from your billing page. Deletion immediately and permanently removes your account, episodes, newsletter list, forwarding address, the newsletters you forwarded to it, and cancels your subscription. This action cannot be undone. Our backups, including an archive taken at the moment of deletion, are erased within 30 days.

Security

Session tokens are signed with HMAC-SHA256. CSRF protection is enforced on all state-changing requests. Inbound webhooks are authenticated via HMAC shared secret. All connections use TLS.

Your rights

You have the right to access, correct, or delete your personal data at any time. You can download a copy of your data at any time from your account export, and delete your account from your settings. To exercise other rights, contact us at [email protected].

Changes

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be communicated via email or a notice in the app.

Contact

The controller responsible for your data is Black Amber Consulting Ltd., 30 Amber Road, 439874 Singapore. Questions about this policy? Email [email protected].