Briefcast™Privacy
Last updated 5 September 2026
The short version
- Your reading stays on your iPhone. Saved articles, their summaries and the audio are created and stored on the device. We never receive them.
- No account. You can use the whole app without giving us anything.
- The app sends usage and crash data, plus the websites your saved articles come from — never the articles themselves. It helps us find pages the app reads badly. You can turn it off.
- If you give us your email to join the beta, we use it to send you the TestFlight link and occasional beta updates. That is all.
- No advertising trackers, and no cookies on this site. We do not sell anything to anyone.
Who we are
Briefcast is made by Ludum LLC, PO Box 74, New York, NY 10018, USA. For anything on this page, write to privacy@briefcastapp.com — a person reads it.
The app
What never leaves your phone
Briefcast does its work on the device. The following are created and stored locally, and are not transmitted to us or to anyone else:
- The articles you save, including their full text
- The summaries, which are written by Apple Intelligence running on your phone
- The audio, which is generated on your device as you listen
- Your library, topics, playlists, queues and listening progress
There is no account, no sign-in, and no server doing the work. The core of the app keeps working with no network connection at all.
What the app does send
Briefcast sends usage statistics and crash reports, so we can find out that something is failing for people who never write in to tell us. Precisely, that is:
- Which features you use — around twenty specific events, such as opening the app, saving an article, playing or finishing one, changing voice, or using a time budget. There is no automatic tracking and no session recording; every event is written out by hand in our code.
- The website a saved article came from —
theguardian.com, for example. Never the web address, never the title, never the text. We keep this because article extraction can fail silently: a page that gives us only its first paragraph reports success, and the only way we find out is by seeing that everything from one publisher is coming through badly. - Technical context — app version, iOS version, whether Apple Intelligence is available on your device, which voice you chose, and how many articles are in your library as a number.
- Crash reports — the stack trace, your device model and OS version. No article content or addresses are ever attached to these.
Never collected at all: the text of your articles, their titles, anything you type into search, advertising identifiers, your contacts, photos, microphone or precise location.
How you are identified, and how far that goes
By one random identifier generated on your device and stored there. Not your name, not your email — there is no account to attach them to. It is deleted when you delete the app, so reinstalling makes you a new person as far as our data is concerned.
Individual articles are identified by a code derived from your device's own identifier, which means the same article produces a different code on every installation and cannot be looked up across users.
We would rather be precise than flattering here: this data is not linked to your identity, but it is not fully anonymous either. It is pseudonymous, which means data protection law still applies to it and every right listed below still applies to you.
Approximate location
Our analytics provider works out an approximate location — city, region and country — from the internet address your device connects from. The app itself has no location permission and never sends your location, and we never see a precise one.
While Briefcast is in beta we use this to understand roughly where our testers are: it tells us which countries to support properly, and whether the app being English-only is holding people back. We do not use it to target anything at you.
Turning it off
Settings → Preferences → Share anonymous usage analytics. Everything in this section stops, including anything already waiting to be sent. No feature is limited by turning it off. It is currently on unless you switch it off.
TestFlight
The beta is distributed through Apple's TestFlight. When you install it, Apple processes your data under Apple's privacy policy, not ours. Apple shows us aggregate tester counts, crash reports, and the email address you used to accept the invitation. We do not receive anything else about you from Apple.
This website
The email form
| What we collect | Your email address. Nothing else — no name, no company, no phone number. |
|---|---|
| Why | To send you the TestFlight link, and occasional updates while the beta runs. |
| Legal basis | Your consent, given when you submit the form. You can withdraw it at any time. |
| Who else sees it | An email service provider based in the United States, which stores the list and sends the messages on our behalf. Your address is transferred there under an approved data transfer mechanism. Nobody else receives it. |
| How long | Until you unsubscribe, or until the beta ends and we delete the list — whichever comes first. |
| Getting out | Every email has an unsubscribe link. It works immediately and removes you from the list. |
We also record which source a signup came from — for example, which link or post you arrived through — so we know which channels are worth continuing. That is attached to the signup, not to you as a person, and we do not use it to build a profile.
Analytics on this site
We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page views and see which sections people read. It sets no cookies, does not follow you across other websites, and does not build a profile of you. We see totals, never individuals.
Cookies
This site sets no cookies and uses no advertising or tracking pixels. There is nothing to consent to, which is why you were not asked.
Your rights
If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, the GDPR gives you the right to:
- Ask what we hold about you, and get a copy
- Have it corrected if it is wrong
- Have it deleted
- Take it elsewhere in a portable format
- Object to how we use it, or withdraw your consent
- Complain to your data protection authority if we get it wrong
In practice, for almost everyone, the only thing we hold is an email address, and the unsubscribe link deletes it. If you want anything else done, email privacy@briefcastapp.com and we will do it within 30 days.
Children
Briefcast is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. If you believe a child has given us their email, tell us and we will delete it.
Changes to this page
If we change what we collect, we will update this page and change the date at the top. If the change is significant and we have your email, we will tell you rather than quietly editing.