The privacy stance of the GlennKessler app is fairly simple: we don’t want to have your personal data — it belongs to you and you alone. However, in the interests of transparency, we want to lay out exactly what the app does behind the scenes:

1. The app syncs your Saved Articles to all your devices using iCloud. iCloud is covered by Apple's privacy policy, but to be clear, the information we get as a result of iCloud sync is very limited. For example, we can see the number of server requests, the type of the request (saving or deleting an article), and the device model and operating system version of the originating request. We cannot, under any circumstances, access the articles you have saved. That is located on your personal iCloud account, securely encrypted. We also receive no personal information about you. If you would like to disable iCloud sync, you can go to the Settings app on your iOS device, tap into iCloud settings, and either switch off iCloud entirely, or scroll down and switch off iCloud access for the GlennKessler app. The app will work as before, you will still be able to save articles to read later, they just won’t sync.


2. The app provides push notifications through a service called OneSignal. OneSignal collects the following (a full list can be found in their privacy policy): your IP address, device type, operating system version, language setting, time zone, ad identifier, app version, country, app usage duration, the number of times you've opened the app, and the time you were last active. Their privacy policy states that they may collect the applications you have installed, your precise location information, and your email address. However, this is not true for the GlennKessler app — iOS specifically bans collecting a list of installed apps, the GlennKessler app never registers for Location Services, and we never ask for your email address. As a result, OneSignal is unable to get that information. However, the other information is collected — we are able to see it in an online dashboard, and OneSignal says they may deal it to third parties for advertising and analytics purposes. To be honest, we don’t feel great about this, and are actively looking into alternative solutions. The problem, essentially, is that this is typical of the industry. For us to be certain that a company is not doing anything nefarious with your data, we have to build the service ourselves. If you don’t want OneSignal to have this information, you may turn off push notifications. All you have to do is go to the Settings app, scroll down to the GlennKessler settings, tap on Push Notifications, and switch them off.


3. Finally, we receive some analytics from Apple, but only if you have “Share With App Developers” switched on in your device’s Privacy settings (under Analytics). This was an option presented to you when you first set up your iOS device. From this, we get some general summaries, like the number of active devices, the percentage split of iPhones and iPads, and the number of daily sessions. We also, most helpfully, get logs when the app crashes. We can see the device type and operating system version, but there’s no personally identifiable information in these logs, or across the analytics as a whole. This information, particularly crash logs, is valuable to us, since it helps identify bugs and therefore makes the app better. However, if you’d like to turn off this basic collection, you can go to that Settings pane and flip the switch.

Beyond those three services, no other information is collected. Apple’s privacy policy is pretty stringent, and the data collected through Apple’s services should likely be no cause for concern. OneSignal, while relatively limited in the amount of data they can collect through our app, still gathers some basic information and uses it as they see fit. Again, while nothing is personally identifiable, we would prefer not to use OneSignal. At this time, it’s the tradeoff we have to make to have the features we want, but we will keep looking for other solutions.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Hugo Kessler.