Privacy Policy
Last updated July 21, 2026
This policy explains what Quirl collects, why, and who we share it with. We collect only what the product needs to work, and we don't sell your data.
What we collect
- Account details — your email address and time zone.
- Your preferences — the topics and feeds you follow, any feeds or topics you add yourself, the description you write when you tell Quirl what you want to read, sub-topics you mute, and your newsletter cadence.
- Device tokens — if you use the iOS app and turn on notifications, a push token for your device, so we can send them.
- Reading activity — which articles you save, hide, or mark as read, so your feed and newsletter stay relevant.
- Billing state — your plan, subscription status, and renewal date. Card details are handled by Stripe; Quirl never sees or stores them.
- Usage analytics — pages you visit and how you interact with the site, plus standard technical details (device, browser, approximate location from your IP), collected through our analytics provider so we can improve the product. You can opt out anytime.
How we use it
To run your account, assemble your personalized feed, generate and deliver your newsletter, send essential account email (welcome, email verification, password reset), and manage your subscription. We use AI only to summarize, rank, and assemble content from the sources you choose — never to fabricate news.
What we send our AI providers. Almost all of it is public article text: the title and body of articles we're summarizing, and the excerpts we assemble your newsletter from. There is one exception worth being clear about — when you describe what you want to read in your own words, that description is sent as you wrote it to be turned into topics. If you type something personal into that box, it goes too.
What we never send: your email address, your name, your account or device identifiers, your billing details, or your reading history. Requests carry no identifier, so our AI providers are not told who is reading — only what to summarize.
Who we share it with
We don't sell your personal data or share it for advertising. These are all the service providers that process data on our behalf:
- Our payment processor, Stripe, which handles billing and subscriptions and receives your billing details under its own privacy policy.
- Our analytics provider, PostHog (US), which receives the usage data described below so we can understand how the site is used. You can opt out at any time — see Your choices. Analytics requests pass through Cloudflare, which routes that traffic to PostHog on our behalf (a first-party connection that keeps analytics working when ad blockers are present); Cloudflare acts as a network transit provider and doesn't use the data for its own purposes.
- Our AI providers, OpenRouter (which routes our summarization and newsletter-writing requests to a language model) and Google Gemini (which turns short pieces of text into the numeric vectors we use to match topics). They receive what's described under How we use it above — article text, and the feed description you write. They are not told who is reading.
- Our email provider, Resend, which delivers your newsletter and account email and therefore handles your email address and the contents of those messages.
- Our hosting and storage provider, DigitalOcean, which runs the servers and database your account lives on and stores the article images we re-host.
- Apple, if you use the iOS app — for App Store purchases (Apple handles that billing; we only receive your subscription status) and for delivering push notifications through Apple Push Notification service.
Your browser also loads a small amount of JavaScript from the jsDelivr CDN, which means jsDelivr sees your IP address as part of serving that file.
Separately, Quirl fetches articles from the RSS feeds and news sources you choose to follow — including Google News and, for some sources, X — so that we can summarize them. Those are outbound requests we make from our own servers to fetch public content: we don't share your identity, your account, or your IP address with them, and they aren't told that any particular person follows them.
Cookies
Quirl uses essential cookies plus privacy-respecting analytics cookies you can opt out of. See the Cookie Policy for the full list.
Retention
We keep your account data for as long as your account is active. When you delete your account, we remove your personal data, except where we're required to retain limited billing records for legal and accounting purposes.
One thing that isn't personal to you and does stay: feeds are shared across Quirl, so if you added a feed that other people now follow, the feed itself remains in the catalogue after you leave. It's no longer linked to you.
Do Not Track
Some browsers can send a "Do Not Track" signal. There's no shared standard for how services should respond to it, and Quirl does not currently respond to it. If you want to turn off analytics, use the opt-out on the Cookie Policy page — that we do honor.
Your choices
You can update your email, change your password, and manage or cancel your subscription from your account settings at any time. You can opt out of analytics from the Cookie Policy page (or the cookie notice). To request access to or deletion of your data, contact us.
Changes to this policy
If we change how we handle your data, we'll update this page and revise the date above. For significant changes, we'll give you notice.
Contact
Quirl is operated by Quirl LLC, a California limited liability company. Questions about this policy? Email [email protected], or write to us at Quirl LLC, 2108 N St, Ste N, Sacramento, CA 95816, USA.