Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 2026

Overview

ntrl is built on the principle that your attention belongs to you. We collect the minimum data necessary to operate the service, and we never sell your personal information or share it for advertising.

What we collect

Waitlist

When you join our waitlist, we collect your email address. We'll send you a welcome email and a small number of emails about what we're building. After that, we'll email you when ntrl launches, and if we make a significant change to this policy. Every email includes an unsubscribe link. We use Resend to send email; no tracking pixels are used.

App usage

When the ntrl app launches, we may collect basic, anonymous usage analytics to improve the product (e.g., which sections are most read, average session length). We will never track individual reading behavior or build user profiles for advertising.

Location preference

When our city picker launches, you can choose a home city, and up to two additional cities to follow, so we can show you local coverage for the places you care about. We store these city choices as a coarse-location preference associated with your app installation or account, so we can serve the local coverage you selected.

  • We do not use GPS or device location. ntrl never requests access to your device location and never reads your device's Location Services. Your city choices come only from what you select in the app, never from a location sensor. We do not collect precise location at any time. If a screenshot you attach carries hidden location tags, we remove them when we receive it, as described under Screenshots you attach.
  • City demand is counted only in aggregate. If your city is not covered yet and you tell us you want it, we add that to an aggregate count of how many people have asked for each city. We keep no per-person record of these requests. The count is a running total we use only to decide which cities to add next.
  • We do not use your city choices for advertising, marketing, or tracking. Your home and followed cities are used only to serve the local coverage you asked for and, in aggregate, to plan which cities to add. We do not sell your city choices, share them with data brokers, or link them with third-party data, and we run no advertising, marketing, or tracking on them. Service providers that operate the app on our behalf may process this data only to deliver the service, under the terms in our third-party services section.

This is the only location preference ntrl collects, and we never use GPS or ask for precise location. It describes your approximate area at the level of a city, never a precise position.

Feedback and error reports

When you report a problem or send feedback through the app or by email, we collect what you write, the article or screen it concerns, and, where we have one, your email address. If you gave us one with your report we use that; if you are signed in and did not, we use your account email. We use it to respond to your report, to recognize your reports if you send more than one, and to honor your contact preferences and any privacy request you make. Feedback is reviewed by our editorial systems and by a human. We do not use any of it for advertising or profiling, and we do not sell it.

Screenshots you attach

Signed-in readers can attach one screenshot to a feedback report. We re-process every screenshot on our servers, which removes hidden metadata such as location tags, and store it in private file storage. At ntrl, only our staff can open it: we do not publish it and do not give it a public web address. Like everything else we store, it is held for us by the hosting providers named under "Third-party services", on the terms described there. After 90 days a screenshot can no longer be retrieved through ntrl. If you are signed in, you can ask us to stop making a screenshot available sooner.

Crashes and errors

When the app crashes or something goes wrong, it sends us a report about the failure: what the app was doing at the time, which version you are running, and what kind of device you are on. We use these to find and fix bugs. We configure these reports to leave out your personal information.

Your account

If you create an account, we collect your email address and basic profile details such as a display name. If you sign in with Apple, you can choose to hide your email address, in which case we receive a forwarding address rather than your real one. We also keep your settings and the articles you save, so they are there when you sign in on another device.

What we don't collect

  • We don't track which specific articles you read (a report you send us names the article it is about, because we could not act on it otherwise)
  • We don't build behavioral profiles
  • We don't use cookies for advertising
  • We don't sell data to third parties
  • We don't use engagement optimization or A/B testing on content

Third-party services

We use a small set of service providers that process data on our behalf, under contract and only on our instructions. Each one receives only what it needs to do its job:

  • Cloudflare and Railway for hosting, content delivery, our database, and private file storage.
  • Supabase for account sign-in.
  • Google Workspace for the mailboxes you contact us at and the replies we send.
  • Resend for waitlist and product email.
  • Sentry for crash and error reports, so we can find and fix what breaks. We configure these reports to leave out your personal information.
  • AI model providers (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) that process article text to produce our neutral briefs, and that process the text of your feedback to summarize it for our staff. We never send them your screenshots.

These providers act for us, not for themselves: none of them may use your data for their own advertising, and we do not sell your data to anyone.

If you sign in with Apple, Apple handles that sign-in and passes us only what you agree to share. Apple is acting on its own account there, not on ours.

Data retention

Waitlist emails are retained until you ask us to delete them. Unsubscribing stops the email but keeps a record that you unsubscribed, which we keep for as long as we run the waitlist, because that record is how we know not to email you again. Ask us to delete it and we delete it. Anonymous analytics data is retained for up to 12 months. A screenshot you attach runs on its own clock: 90 days from the day you attach it, as described under "Screenshots you attach".

Your rights

You have the right to access, correct, or delete the personal data we hold about you, including feedback you have submitted and screenshots you have attached. If you are signed in, or you gave us an email address with your report, we can find those records. If you sent feedback without signing in and without giving us an email address, there is no identifier attached to it, so we may have nothing we can link to you and nothing we can act on. Contact us atprivacy@ntrl.news and we will act on your request promptly.

Changes

We'll notify you of significant changes to this policy via email (if you're on our waitlist) or by posting a notice on this page.

  • July 2026: added feedback and screenshot collection disclosures.
  • August 2026: clarified which email address we use to reply to feedback.
  • August 2026: added the location preference disclosure for the city picker.