Privacy Policy

Updated September 26, 2026

Meridian is a news reader. It has no accounts, no advertising and no third-party analytics or tracking, and it never sells or shares data for advertising. This policy covers the website and the Meridian apps.

On your device

Your preferences (language, categories, saved stories, blocked commenters) stay on your device. When you first comment or vote, the app creates a random anonymous ID and keeps it on your device (browser storage on the web, the Keychain on iOS). It is not linked to your name, e-mail, device or Apple ID. Summaries, forecasts and translations use on-device intelligence where your device offers it (Apple Intelligence and Apple Translation on iOS, the browser's built-in AI on the web) — that text never leaves your device.

What our server stores

• Comments — the text, the time, the story, and the anonymous ID it was posted with. Others see only a generated nickname and avatar derived from the ID, never the ID itself.
• Votes on stories and comments, with the anonymous ID (one vote each).
• Reports of comments — the reason, the time, and a one-way hash of the reporter's ID.
• Commenting bans — a one-way key derived from the banned anonymous ID.
• Crash and performance reports (iOS app) — when you let iOS share analytics with app developers (Settings › Privacy & Security › Analytics & Improvements), iOS gives the app technical reports about its crashes, hangs and slow launches: the app and iOS versions, the device model and the program's state at that moment. The app sends them to our server so we can fix the problem. They carry no ID and nothing you read or wrote, and are deleted after 90 days.

Comments, votes and reports are deleted automatically after 7 days, together with the stories they belong to. You can delete your own comments at any time.

What our server does not keep

IP addresses are held in memory for up to a minute to limit abuse and are never written to disk. Usage statistics count unique visitors from IP addresses hashed with a random value that changes on every restart; only the counts are logged.

Services that see some data

• Hosting — the server runs on Railway, which processes requests to deliver them.
• Translation fallback — when your device cannot translate a story, its text (never your ID) is sent to a translation service (MyMemory by Translated, or a LibreTranslate server).
• Publishers — story images load directly from the publishers' servers, and "Source" opens the publisher's site; their privacy policies apply there. To show a story's full text, our server fetches the publisher's page on your behalf.

Children

Meridian is not directed to children under 13 and does not knowingly collect their data.

Your choices

Delete your comments from the comment menu. Reset your anonymous ID in the app's settings (on the web, clear this site's data) — older comments then stay anonymous and expire within 7 days. For anything else, write to dmytrobahrov@gmail.com.