Privacy Policy
Last updated 13 August 2026
TechTok is a reading app for technology and science news. It shows short summaries of articles published by other people, and links out to the originals. This page explains exactly what the app stores about you and what you can do about it.
It is written to be read, not to be survived. If something here is unclear, ask — the whole service is open source, so the answer is always checkable against the code.
Who is responsible
TechTok is an independent project run by a single developer, who is the data controller for the purposes of the GDPR. Contact: privacy@techtokapp.eu.
What the app stores about you
You sign in with Google, and TechTok keeps one record per account. That record contains only the following.
| What | Why it exists |
|---|---|
| Your Google account identifier | Identifies your account. It is what links your reading history to you across devices. |
| Your email address and display name | Comes from Google when you sign in, so the app can show you which account you are using. |
| Your time zone | Captured once at sign-in, so that daily usage counters reset at your local midnight rather than at midnight UTC. |
| Your language, followed topics, and muted sources | Your preferences. They decide what the feed shows you and in which language. |
| Which articles you have read, and when | Stops the feed showing you the same article twice, and powers the History screen. |
| Your bookmarks | The Saved screen. |
| A per-topic read count | A ranking signal — topics you read more get a small boost in the feed. |
| Your plan and daily usage counters | Everyone is currently on the free plan. The counters exist so the service can apply fair daily limits. |
Some things stay on your phone and are never sent anywhere: articles cached for offline reading, and your light/dark theme choice.
What the app does not do
- There is no advertising, and no advertising SDK in the app.
- There is no advertising or tracking SDK, and nothing profiles you across other apps or websites. The app does send crash reports and a small amount of anonymous performance data to Sentry so that breakages can be found and fixed — see below.
- Your data is never sold, and never shared for anyone else's marketing.
- There is no access to your location, contacts, photos, camera, or microphone.
- There is no advertising identifier, and no cross-app or cross-site tracking.
- There are no push notifications, so no notification token is stored.
Who else is involved
Running the service means a small number of other companies process data on its behalf.
| Who | What they handle |
|---|---|
| Sign-in. Google confirms who you are and provides your email and name. Google's own privacy policy governs your Google account. | |
| Amazon Web Services | Hosting — the servers, file storage, and content delivery. Everything runs in eu-central-1 (Frankfurt, Germany). |
| Neon | The database. Every record described above — your account, your preferences, your reading history and your bookmarks — is stored in a Neon Postgres database hosted in the EU. |
| Sentry | Crash reporting. When the app crashes or a request fails, it sends the error, a stack trace, and technical details about the device (model, operating system version, app version) to Sentry's European servers. It does not receive your email address, your name, your reading history, or anything you type into the app. |
| Expo | Delivers app updates. When the app starts, it asks Expo whether a newer version is available; that request carries app and device version information, not your identity. |
| OpenRouter | Produces the summaries and translations. It receives article text from public news feeds only — never your account details and never anything about what you personally read. Summarising happens when an article is published, not when you open it. |
When you tap Read original, your browser opens the publisher's own website. From that moment the publisher's privacy policy applies, not this one.
Where your data is kept
All account data is stored inside the EU — application data in eu-central-1 (Frankfurt, Germany), the database in Neon's EU region, and crash reports on Sentry's EU servers. Google, Expo, Neon, Sentry and OpenRouter are US-headquartered companies, so their processing may involve transfers outside the EU under the standard safeguards those companies publish.
How long it is kept
Your account and reading history are kept until you delete them. There is no automatic expiry — if you keep using TechTok, your history keeps growing, and if you delete your account it goes immediately. Cached article content, which is not personal data, is discarded after about 90 days.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you can ask for a copy of your data, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, object to how it is used, or complain to your national data protection authority. The fastest of these is deletion, which you can do yourself, immediately, without asking anyone.
Deleting your account removes your record and your entire reading history and bookmarks. See how to delete your account — it works from inside the app, and also by email if you have already uninstalled it.
For anything else on that list, email privacy@techtokapp.eu.
Children
TechTok is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has an account, email the address above and it will be removed.
Changes to this policy
If what the app stores ever changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. Paid subscriptions are planned but not yet available; when they arrive, this page will be updated before they go live.