Privacy at Profound
Profound has no accounts, no advertising and no cross-app tracking. We collect the minimum needed to run the app, keep AI answers affordable and improve the feed.
What we collect
- An anonymous installation ID.A random identifier the app creates and keeps in your device's Keychain. It isn't linked to your name, email, contacts or location. You can reset it anytime in Settings → Data & Privacy.
- Reading and interaction events.For example: a story was shown, read, saved, shared or swiped; Ask Profound was opened; a suggested question was tapped. Each event includes the story, a timestamp and a session ID, tied to your installation ID. We use these to rank stories and understand which features help people.
- Questions you ask.The text of questions you type into Ask Profound, and the answers we return, stored with the story and your installation ID so follow-up questions have context and common answers can be reused.
- Saved stories and follows.So they appear across launches.
- Network information.Our servers see your IP address when the app connects. We use a one-way hash of it only for short-lived abuse and rate-limit counters, and we don't store it with your activity.
AI processing
Story summaries and many answers are generated ahead of time from publishers' headlines and short excerpts. When you ask a question that hasn't been answered before, we send your question, the story's context (headline, AI summary, source excerpts) and earlier questions in that conversation to our AI provider, OpenAI, to generate a reply. We don't send your installation ID or IP address. Under OpenAI's API terms, this data isn't used to train their models. Please don't include personal information in questions.
Service providers
Profound runs on Cloudflare, which hosts our servers and database. OpenAI generates AI text as described above. We don't sell your data, share it with advertisers or data brokers, or use it for tracking across apps and websites.
Links to publishers
When you open an original article, the publisher's website loads inside the app's browser view and its own privacy policy applies.
Retention and deletion
We keep this data only as long as we need it to run and improve Profound. To delete everything associated with your installation, email saurav@xagi.in with the installation ID shown in Settings → Data & Privacy, or tap "Reset anonymous ID" to stop new activity being associated with the old ID.
Children
Profound is a general news service and isn't directed at children under 13.
Changes and contact
If this policy changes, we'll update the date above. Questions: saurav@xagi.in.