Privacy Policy

• Account data — your email address; the name you want the hosts to use, if you give one; the city you type in for the weather desk (a typed city, never your device location); and the topics and desks you choose. On the web a session cookie keeps you signed in; in the iPhone app a sign-in token is kept in your phone’s Keychain.
• Content you provide — links you share or paste, notes, questions and uploaded files, the text we extract from them, the scripts generated from them, the audio produced, and the reactions you leave on a segment while listening.
• Usage data — the briefings and episodes you make and play, so we can apply your plan and show you your usage. Your listening position is kept on your phone.
• Operational logs — request and error logs containing IP address and user agent, kept for a short window for debugging and abuse prevention.
• Billing data — subscriptions bought in the iPhone app are handled by Apple through your Apple ID; we receive the subscription’s status, never your payment details. On the web, payments are handled by Stripe; we store a customer id and subscription state and never see your card number.
• Device data — if you allow notifications, a push token from Apple so we can tell you when your briefing is ready.

Your feed is served from a URL containing a random token. We log feed requests in aggregate to keep the service running; we do not build a listening profile from them, and we do not know which app on which device fetched an episode beyond what an ordinary web server sees.

To run the service you asked for: to convert your documents, to keep your feed serving the episodes it has already published, to bill you for metered work, and to fix the service when it breaks. We do not sell personal data, we do not run advertising, and we do not use your content to train models.

Content leaves our systems only to reach the providers that do the generation, hosting and payment work:

• Google (Gemini) — script generation and text-to-speech. Receives extracted source text and the scripts generated from it. Every episode the platform currently produces is written and voiced here.
• OpenAI — used for page enrichment when you capture an article with the browser extension, and available as a fallback for script generation and text-to-speech. Receives the same kind of content as Google does.
• Cloudflare (R2) — object storage. Holds your uploads, extracted text, scripts and MP3 files, and serves the audio to your podcast app.
• Fly.io — application hosting. Runs the web app, the API and the generation workers, so your content passes through it in memory while a job runs.
• Neon — managed Postgres. Stores account, job and episode rows, including titles, descriptions and script text.
• Stripe — subscriptions, payments and tax. Receives billing identity, not your documents.
• Resend — transactional email: sign-in links and codes, failure notices, billing receipts. Receives your email address.
• Firecrawl — fetches the web pages you save so we can read them. Receives the page addresses.
• Perplexity — web research for the sports, news and weather desks and for questions you ask us to look into. Receives the topic or question and, for weather, the city you typed.
• Apple — App Store subscriptions and push notifications for the iPhone app. Receives what the App Store and notifications need, not your content.

We used ElevenLabs for text-to-speech until 24 September 2026. It no longer receives any customer content: every pipeline that can produce an episode today voices it with Google (Gemini), and the remaining ElevenLabs code is reachable only from our internal operator console, on text we write ourselves.

These providers may process data outside your country. Each is used under its own data-processing terms; the current list lives on this page and material changes are announced before they take effect.

• Uploads and extracted text — kept while the episode exists, so you can re-run or re-review a job.
• Scripts and edit history — kept with the episode. Edit history exists so the audio can be traced to the text you approved.
• Audio — kept while the episode is published to your feed.
• Logs — 30 days.
• Encrypted backups — 30 days, then overwritten.
• Invoices and payment records — as long as tax law requires.

Delete your account in the app: in the dropHear iPhone app, open Account and choose Delete account. Your account and its data are deleted at once, and your feed and audio links stop working. If you subscribed through the App Store, also cancel the subscription in your Apple ID settings, because Apple bills it and we cannot cancel it for you.

Export your data in the app: in the dropHear iPhone app, open Account and choose Export data. You get a zip of your own content — your captures, your scripts, your settings, and a manifest of exactly what the zip holds. Export is offered before deletion, so you can take a copy of everything before your account goes.

You can also write to support@drophear.com from your account’s email address to delete your account, delete an episode, or ask for a copy of your data if you cannot use the app. We will confirm what we did. Where the law sets a deadline for responding — one month in the EU and UK, 45 days in California — we work to that deadline and we apply the same handling to everyone, wherever you live.

What deletion means in practice: we remove your rows from the database, revoke your sign-in sessions and feed tokens so nothing can reach your content. The stored files can no longer be reached by anyone, and are removed from storage within 30 days. Two things survive it, and both are deliberate — invoices and payment records we are required to keep for tax purposes, and operational logs and encrypted backups, which age out on the schedule in section 4 rather than being rewritten on request.

You can also ask for a copy of what we hold or for corrections, by the same route. If you are in the EU/UK or California you have these rights by statute; we do not treat them as a tier.

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Feed tokens are stored hashed, are at least 128 bits of entropy, and can be rotated at any time from the app, which invalidates the previous URL immediately. Treat your feed URL like a password: anyone holding it can listen to your episodes.

No system is perfect. If we discover a breach affecting your data we will tell you and the relevant authority within the timeframes the law sets.

On the web, one session cookie keeps you signed in. There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and the iPhone app contains no advertising, analytics or tracking code. We do not track you across other companies’ apps or websites. Any product analytics used to measure signup and activation are limited to aggregate counts.

dropHear is not intended for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their data.

For any privacy request, write to privacy@drophear.com or support@drophear.com. For help with the product, see support. The terms of service explain the rest of the arrangement.