Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-06-18

What we collect

  • Account info you provide when you sign in with Google or email/password (name, email, and profile photo when available).
  • Your saved posts and collections, followed topics, subscription tier, and language preference.
  • Your daily-digest preferences — delivery time, timezone, email/push channels, the categories it covers, and the AI model that writes it.
  • If you use CloudBot, your chat messages and the assistant’s replies, saved to your account so you can revisit them.
  • On mobile, an Expo push-notification token if you opt into push.
  • Anonymous usage telemetry (referrer, user agent, viewport size, and pseudonymous product events) via Firebase logs and Google Analytics.

What we don't collect

  • We never see or store your full payment-card details — subscription checkout and billing run through Lemon Squeezy, our payment provider.
  • We don't sell or share personal data with third parties for advertising profiling, and we don't use your CloudBot chats to train AI models.

Cookies and similar technologies

We use a session cookie issued by Firebase Authentication to keep you signed in. We don't set advertising cookies, and we don't currently use any third-party ad network. The promotional placements we show are served by merge.news itself and involve no cross-site tracking.

Advertising

For users on the Free tier, merge.news shows a single first-party promotional placement — our own offers (such as upgrading to Pro or Max) or a direct sponsor. These are served by merge.news, with no third-party ad network and no cross-site tracking. Pro and Max subscribers see no promotions.

How we use your data

  • Display the feed, your saved articles, and topics you follow.
  • Send the daily digest email when you're on Pro or Max and have at least one followed topic.
  • Send push notifications to your mobile device when you opt in via the mobile app.
  • Answer your CloudBot questions and save the conversation to your account.
  • Aggregate anonymous metrics to improve performance.

Third-party services we use

  • Google Firebase / Google Cloud — authentication, database, storage, hosting, and the functions that run the product.
  • Google Vertex AI (Gemini), Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI — generate the article summaries and power CloudBot. The text we send (article context, or your CloudBot question) is used only to produce a response, not to train their models.
  • SendGrid (Twilio) — delivers transactional and digest emails on our behalf.
  • Expo — delivers mobile push notifications when you opt in (mobile app).
  • Lemon Squeezy — processes subscription checkout, payments, the customer billing portal, and one-time credit-pack purchases (we never see your full card details).
  • Google Analytics — pseudonymous usage metrics in production only; we never send your name or email.

These providers process the minimum data needed to perform their function (e.g. your email address to deliver a digest) and are bound by their own privacy terms.

Retention

Account data is retained until you delete your account. Saved posts, follows, and CloudBot chats are retained until you remove them or delete your account. Email/push delivery logs are kept for up to 90 days for operational debugging.

Your rights

You can request a copy of your data, correct it, or delete your account at any time by contactinghello@merge.news. Deletion removes your user document and all subcollections (saved posts, collections, chat history, push tokens) within 30 days.

Children

merge.news isn't directed to children under 13. We don't knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has provided personal data, contact us and we'll delete it.

Contact

Questions? Reach out at hello@merge.news.