Privacy Policy

• There is no account, no sign-up and no login.
• We do not run analytics, tracking or advertising in the app or on this site.
• Your feed selection, filters and reading history never leave your Mac.
• Most images are copied onto our servers first, so displaying them tells the publisher nothing. A minority are still loaded from the publisher directly — explained honestly below, because it is the one place your device talks to someone else.

FeedsBar is made and operated by Graeme Chard, trading as FeedsBar, an independent developer based in Ireland. Contact: hello@feeds.bar, or by post at Gable End, Ballinglen, Co. Wicklow, Y14 V048, Ireland.

There is no company behind FeedsBar — it is one person. That person is the data controller for the limited personal data described here.

These are stored locally in macOS user preferences and are never transmitted to us:

• Which feeds you have enabled or disabled, and any curated sets you have switched on.
• Muted and followed phrases.
• Which headlines you have opened, so read items can be dimmed.
• Display settings — position, size, opacity, speed, chosen monitor.

Deleting the app removes them. We have no copy and no way to recover them, which is also why they do not sync between machines.

To show you headlines, the app asks our API for the current feed catalogue and for recent items from the feeds you have enabled. That request contains feed identifiers and nothing else — no account, no device identifier, no advertising ID, and no record of what you read or click.

Our hosting provider records standard web-server information for each request, including your IP address, for security and operational purposes. We do not use it to build a profile and we do not combine it with anything else.

This is the part most privacy policies gloss over, so here it is plainly. Headlines come with thumbnail images, and feeds have icons.

• Feed icons are almost all copied onto our own storage and served from there, so showing a source icon tells that publisher nothing.
• Article thumbnails are copied onto our storage by a job that runs every few minutes. Roughly three quarters of the thumbnails you see are served from us. The rest are loaded straight from the publisher — either because the article appeared in the last few minutes and the copy has not caught up, or because the copy failed.
• When an image does load from a publisher, that publisher receives your IP address and browser-style identifier, exactly as if you had opened their website, and may log it under their own privacy policy rather than ours.
• If a feed has no icon of its own, the app falls back to DuckDuckGo's public icon service, which then sees that request. No feed we currently carry needs this.
• Clicking a headline opens the article in your own browser, at which point you are on the publisher's site under their terms.

We would rather describe this accurately than claim an isolation the app does not fully provide. The gap is shrinking as the copier gets faster, not something we have accepted.

If you use “Send feedback” in the app, we receive your rating and comment, the app version and your macOS version, plus your email address only if you choose to give one so we can reply. It is stored with our email provider. We use it to fix and improve FeedsBar.

Legal basis: your consent, given by choosing to send it. Ask us and we will delete it.

We receive the feed URL and your optional note. We fetch that URL from our server to check it is a working feed, and send the feed's own title, description and recent headlines to OpenAI for an automated check for spam, malware, offensive content and pure advertising. Only the feed's public content is sent — never anything about you.

To stop abuse we record a one-way salted hash of your IP address as a counter. It is not reversible to your IP and is deleted automatically within about a day.

If you give us your email on this website it goes to our email provider so we can tell you when FeedsBar ships. Every email has an unsubscribe link.

Payments are processed by Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd. (Ireland). Stripe collects and processes your payment and billing details under their own privacy policy. We never see or store your card details.

• Abuse-prevention counters: about one day, then deleted automatically.
• Feedback and waitlist entries: until you ask us to delete them, or we no longer need them.
• Server logs: as retained by our hosting provider in the normal course.
• Purchase records: as long as tax and accounting law requires.

Under the GDPR you can ask us for a copy of your personal data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, or receive it in a portable form. Email hello@feeds.bar and we will respond within one month.

In practice there is usually very little to give you — if you have never sent feedback or joined the waitlist, we hold nothing that identifies you.

You also have the right to complain to a data protection supervisory authority. Ours, and the one to use if you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, is Ireland's Data Protection Commission. You can also complain to the authority in your own EU country if you prefer.

FeedsBar is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16.

If we change how the app handles data we will update this page and change the date above. Material changes will be announced to anyone on our mailing list.