Privacy.
Effective May 20, 2026.
The short version: Spool collects nothing. No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs. Reading is anonymous. Signing in is optional and talks directly to news.ycombinator.com. AI summaries run on your device using Apple's on-device model. There is no Spool server. There never will be.
What Spool collects about you
Nothing. Spool has no analytics SDK, no telemetry, no crash reporters, no advertising IDs, no third-party tracking scripts. The privacy manifest (PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy) declares NSPrivacyTracking: false.
Reading Hacker News
When you browse stories and comments, the app fetches data from Hacker News's public APIs directly from your device:
- Firebase Realtime Database — the official HN API, for stories and comments.
- Algolia HN Search — for keyword search and Best-of windows. Operated by Algolia under Hacker News's contract.
Neither of those endpoints requires authentication, and Spool sends no identifying information beyond what your iOS device sends to any web service (IP address, standard HTTPS request headers). Spool does not proxy these requests through any intermediary server.
Signing in (optional)
Signing in unlocks voting, posting, and replying. The sign-in form in the app posts your username and password directly to https://news.ycombinator.com/login, exactly as the HN website would. The session cookie HN returns is stored in URLSession.shared.httpCookieStorage — iOS's encrypted system cookie storage. Spool does not write it to disk and does not transmit it to any server other than news.ycombinator.com.
You can sign out at any time from the sidebar; signing out clears the cookie from device storage.
On-device AI summaries
Tapping Summarize or playing audio in the Spool runs Apple's Foundation Models language model entirely on your device. The article text and comment thread you're summarizing never leave your phone. No data is sent to Apple, OpenAI, Anthropic, or any other LLM provider. The feature requires Apple Intelligence to be enabled in iOS Settings; when it's off, the summary surfaces are hidden.
Text-to-speech for the audio queue uses iOS's built-in AVSpeechSynthesizer, which is also entirely on-device.
What's stored on your device
Spool keeps a SwiftData store on your device to remember:
- Stories you've Saved.
- Stories you've added to your Spool audio queue, and which ones you've archived.
- Stories you've read (so they can be dimmed in the feed).
- Users you've Followed.
- Mentions you've already seen.
- Score snapshots from feeds you've visited (so the Trending tab can compute velocity).
- Any customizations you've made to AI prompts.
All of this lives in your app's sandbox on your device. It's backed up by iCloud only if your iCloud Backup setting includes app data — Spool itself never uploads any of it.
Notifications
If you opt in to Mentions notifications in Settings, Spool schedules a background task that periodically polls HN's website (when you're signed in) for replies to your comments. The check runs on your device; the result drives a local notification. Nothing is sent to any third party.
Children
Spool is not designed for children. Hacker News comments are not moderated for child-appropriate content and may include profanity, links to external sites, and discussions of mature topics. The App Store age rating reflects this.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the effective date at the top will update. Material changes will be called out in release notes. There is no email list because Spool has no email list.
Contact
Questions, concerns, or "wait, you really don't have analytics?" → open an issue at github.com/ctaloi/spool/issues.