Privacy Policy

Updat3 ("we," "us," or "our") operates the Updat3 news platform available at www.updat3.ai and any associated applications (collectively, the "Service"). This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and your rights regarding that information.

Who is responsible for your data. The controller of the personal data described here is Updat3. Contact us about privacy at updat3news@gmail.com.

Reading news on Updat3 does not require an account. Most of what follows applies only if you create one, follow a situation by email, or contact us.

2.1 Information you provide directly

• Email address — when you create an account or sign in with email and password.
• Name — if you provide it during sign-up or via a connected OAuth provider.
• Email address for situation alerts — if you follow a situation to get an email when new stories are added. This works without an account; alerts start only after you click the confirmation link we send, and every alert contains a link to stop them.
• Messages you send us — for example an email to our support address, or an issue report you choose to send from a story page. These arrive in our email inbox and contain whatever you write, plus the story link the report form fills in.

2.2 Information from third-party sign-in

If you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address, and profile picture from Google as part of the OAuth flow. We use this information solely to create and manage your account.

2.3 Information we collect automatically

• Saved stories — stories you bookmark are stored and associated with your account.
• Topic and region preferences — settings you configure on your account page.
• Abuse protection — to rate-limit requests and to count one upvote per visitor, we store a salted one-way hash derived from your IP address, never the address itself.
• Email delivery records — when we send you a digest or alert we keep a record of what was sent and when, so the same email is not sent twice.
• Server logs — our hosting and database providers record technical request logs (such as IP address, browser type, the page or API route requested, and timestamps). We use them for security monitoring and debugging. They are not sold.

2.4 Product analytics

We use Vercel Web Analytics to understand how the Service is used, so we can tell which features help readers and which do not. It records page views and a small set of product events — for example that a story was opened, that a search returned no results, that a bookmark was saved, or that someone started or finished signing up — together with coarse context such as which part of the site the action came from, a result-count range, or whether the reader was signed in.

These events are deliberately limited. They never include your name, email address, account ID, password or login token, the words you search for, anything you type into a feedback or report form, or the text of the stories you read. Counts and lengths are recorded as ranges, not exact values. Vercel Web Analytics does not use cookies, and we do not use it to build advertising profiles or share it with advertisers.

• To create and maintain your account.
• To personalise your news feed based on your topic and region preferences.
• To send email digests and situation alerts you have opted into (you can unsubscribe at any time).
• To detect and prevent fraud, abuse, and security incidents.
• To improve the Service — the product analytics described in Section 2.4 tell us which features are used and where readers get stuck.
• To read and act on issue reports and other messages you send us.
• To comply with legal obligations.

We do not sell your personal information to third parties. We do not use your data to serve you third-party advertising.

3.1 Legal bases (EEA, UK and similar laws)

• Performance of a contract — your account, sign-in, saved stories and preferences.
• Consent — email digests and situation alerts (confirmed by you; withdraw any time with the unsubscribe link or on your account page).
• Legitimate interests — security, abuse prevention and rate limiting; cookieless, aggregated product analytics; answering messages you send us. You can object to processing based on legitimate interests.
• Legal obligation — keeping records we are required by law to keep.

3.2 People mentioned in the news

Our stories are syntheses of published reporting and may name public figures and other people who appear in the news. Source material processed to write those stories may itself contain information about people reported in the news. We process it for the purpose of news reporting and summarisation. If you are mentioned in a story and want a factual error corrected or have another concern, email updat3news@gmail.com.

Your account data is stored in Supabase, a cloud database provider, in the United States. If you use the Service from outside the United States, your information is transferred to and processed in the United States. The providers listed in Section 6 offer data processing terms that include the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses for such transfers. Supabase uses industry-standard encryption at rest and in transit (TLS).

We implement reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your personal information. However, no method of transmission over the internet or electronic storage is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

You are responsible for keeping your password confidential. If you believe your account has been compromised, contact us immediately at updat3news@gmail.com.

Updat3 is currently free. We do not sell subscriptions, and we do not collect or process payment card or bank details.

If we introduce a paid plan in the future, we will update this policy before taking any payment to explain which payment processor is used and what information it receives.

The Service uses the following third-party providers who may process your data as part of delivering the Service:

• Supabase — database and authentication infrastructure.
• Vercel — hosting, edge delivery and the product analytics described in Section 2.4.
• Google OAuth — optional sign-in method.
• Resend — delivery of account, digest and alert emails.
• Cloudflare — DNS for updat3.ai and forwarding of email you send to our updat3.ai addresses.
• OpenAI — AI-assisted news synthesis. We do not intentionally send Updat3 account identifiers, email addresses, authentication credentials, or other user-account information to our AI providers as part of news synthesis. Source material processed for news synthesis may itself contain information about people reported in the news. Under OpenAI's API terms, data sent through the API is not used to train OpenAI's models by default, and OpenAI may retain it for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring.

Each of these providers has its own privacy policy and data processing terms. We encourage you to review them.

We use browser cookies and local storage for: keeping you signed in; remembering display settings such as theme and text size; remembering that you have dismissed the first-visit introduction or already read a story; and, if you start signing up, remembering which page you signed up from so we can count sign-ups by page. That last item holds only a page label, stays in your browser, and is cleared once your sign-up completes or after 7 days.

We do not use advertising cookies or third-party tracking cookies. Our product analytics (Section 2.4) does not use cookies.

You can clear cookies through your browser settings at any time, which will log you out of the Service.

Depending on your location, you may have the following rights regarding your personal information:

• Access — request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Correction — request that inaccurate data be corrected.
• Deletion — request that we delete your account and associated data.
• Portability — request your data in a machine-readable format.
• Objection and restriction — object to processing based on legitimate interests, or ask us to restrict processing while a request is resolved.
• Withdraw consent — for digests and alerts, at any time, without affecting earlier processing.
• Opt-out of email — unsubscribe from digest emails and alerts at any time via the link in any email or through your account settings.
• Complain — to the data-protection authority where you live or work.

You can download a copy of your data and delete your account yourself from your account page. To exercise any other right, email us at updat3news@gmail.com. We will respond within one month.

The Service is a general-audience news service and is not directed at children. Accounts are for people aged 13 or older. We do not ask for dates of birth. If we learn that an account belongs to a child under 13, we delete it and its data. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete it promptly.

We retain your account data for as long as your account is active. When you delete your account from your account page, your account, saved stories, preferences, email-delivery records and situation alerts are deleted from our application database immediately. Copies can remain in our database provider's encrypted backups until those backups expire (daily backups are kept for up to 7 days on our current plan), except where we are required to retain information for legal or compliance purposes.

Unconfirmed alert sign-ups and alerts you unsubscribe from are deactivated and no longer emailed. Email-delivery records are kept only to prevent duplicate sends. Providers keep their own logs under their own retention settings, which we do not control.

Server logs are kept by our hosting and database providers for a limited period under their own retention settings, and are used only for security and debugging. Messages you email us stay in our inbox until we delete them.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the effective date at the top of this page. For material changes, we will notify you by email or via a notice on the Service. Your continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes your acceptance of the updated policy.

If you have questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please contact us:

Updat3
Privacy requests: updat3news@gmail.com
Everything else: updat3news@gmail.com