Privacy & Delivery Telemetry
Earpocket delivers your articles as a private podcast feed. To keep that feed working well and to understand how episodes are delivered, we record a small amount of per-feed delivery telemetry when your podcast app fetches an episode. This page states plainly what is and is not collected.
Your feed URL contains a secret token. Treat it like a password - anyone who has it can see your queue. Do not submit it to public podcast directories.
What we collect
When your podcast app downloads or streams an episode, we record:
- Which app made the request (e.g. Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts), derived from the app's User-Agent.
- Fetch patterns - whether the request was a full download, a byte-range (seek/stream), a HEAD probe, or a not-modified check, and which byte ranges were requested. This is how we estimate delivery vs. listening.
- A hashed IP - your IP address is passed through a one-way keyed hash (HMAC) using a secret that rotates monthly. This lets us de-duplicate requests within a month without ever storing your address.
- Timestamp of the request.
What we never collect
- Your raw IP address. It is hashed before storage and never written down.
- Cross-user identity. Delivery telemetry is scoped to your feed only; it is never joined against other users or used to build a cross-site profile.
- Listening content. We do not inspect audio you play; we only see that a byte range of an episode file was requested.
How the data is used
- To keep delivery reliable and debug playback issues in specific apps.
- To produce cohort-level aggregates (e.g. "how many subscribers use Overcast"). Publisher-facing analytics only ever show aggregates - never per-subscriber rows.
RSS-side delivery signal is coarse: many podcast apps auto-download episodes overnight, which looks the same whether or not you ever listen. We label these "delivered" rather than "listened" and never present an estimate as a measurement.
Retention
Raw delivery-telemetry rows are retained for a rolling window (currently 90 days) and then deleted. Aggregated cohort counts may be retained longer.
Opting out
You can opt out of delivery telemetry entirely. When you opt out, your episodes are still delivered normally - we simply record nothing for your fetches. Opt-out controls will be surfaced in your player/settings; until then, contact [email protected] to opt out.