Privacy
The short version: we hold your email address and the shows you chose, we use them to send you one email a day, and we do not sell or share them. The longer version follows.
What we hold
- Your email address. We need it to send you the briefing. It is the only way we identify you.
- Your name, if you signed in with Google and Google passed it to us. We do not use it for anything beyond saying hello.
- The shows you chose, and when you chose them.
- A time zone and a send time, stored with your account. You cannot set them and nothing uses them yet: everyone gets the briefing at the same time each morning.
- Which feedback button you clicked, if you click one of the links at the bottom of a briefing. That records your rating of that day's edition and nothing else about you.
That is the whole list. We do not ask for a phone number, an address, a job title or a payment method, and there is nothing on this site that quietly collects more.
What we do not do
- We do not sell, rent or share your address with anyone.
- We do not run advertising, and we do not build a profile of you to sell to someone who does.
- There is no analytics script, no tracking pixel and no third party cookie anywhere on this site. You can check: the page source is short and it loads nothing but a stylesheet, fonts from Google Fonts and the code that signs you in.
- We do not send you anything other than the briefing you asked for and the occasional message about the service itself.
Signing in
If you sign in with Google, Google tells us your email address and your name. It does not give us access to your Gmail, your contacts, your calendar or your files, and we do not ask for them. If you would rather not involve Google, you can sign up with an email address instead and confirm it by clicking a link.
Who else handles your data
We are one person and a handful of services. The services that handle your data are:
- Supabase, which stores the database and runs the sign-in.
- Resend, which delivers the email.
- Cloudflare, which hosts this site and the feedback links.
- Google, which serves this site’s fonts. Every page loads them from Google Fonts, so Google sees your IP address when you visit. If you sign in with Google, it handles that too.
Each of them keeps its own server logs, which is normal for any website and which we do not control. Nobody else gets your email address.
The podcasts
The briefing is built from podcasts published openly to the world. Most episodes come with the publisher’s own transcript; the rest we send to a model provider to transcribe. That provider then summarises the transcripts. Your address, your name and your choices are never sent to it. It sees podcast transcripts, and the audio of episodes that arrive without one, and nothing about you.
How long we keep it
While you’re subscribed, and afterwards until you ask us to delete it. Unsubscribing stops the email straight away. If you want the record gone too, say so and it goes.
Leaving
Every briefing carries an unsubscribe link that works in one click, with no questions and no retention offer. To have your data deleted outright, email [email protected] from the address you signed up with and it will be done.
Beta
The Short Read is new and free during the beta. If that changes you will be told before anything is asked of you, not after.
Changes to this page
If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who sees it, subscribers get an email about it. Smaller corrections are made here with the date below updated.
Contact
Questions, complaints and requests all go to [email protected] and are answered by a person.
Last updated 8 October 2026.