Privacy
The Spine collects as little about you as it can. Reading is anonymous: anyone can browse the site and read story previews without an account. Becoming a member takes an email address and a payment, and that is the extent of what we hold about you.
What we collect from readers
Almost nothing. The site doesn't set tracking cookies, doesn't use Google Analytics, doesn't use Facebook Pixel, and doesn't embed third-party social widgets. You can read story previews with no account at all. If you become a member, we store your email address and a Stripe customer reference so we can give you access and manage billing. Your card details go to Stripe, never to us. Standard server logs (IP address, user-agent, requested URL, timestamp) are kept by our hosting provider for about 30 days for operational reasons; they're not analyzed for any reader-tracking purpose.
What we store
We store the news that the pipeline ingests and synthesizes. For each article one of our source outlets publishes, we keep the URL, headline, RSS publication date, and (where extraction succeeds) the article body text — used as input to the synthesis step. The synthesized stories themselves are stored in our database and shown on the site. None of that is reader-specific data.
Article body text is held only as long as needed for synthesis and quality review; older articles can be aged out. The synthesized stories are kept indefinitely as part of the public archive.
Third-party services
- Vercel hosts the site and runs the daily pipeline.
- Supabase stores the synthesized stories, the article metadata, and the run logs.
- Anthropic provides the Claude models used for synthesis and cluster verification.
- Voyage AI provides the embedding model used to cluster related coverage.
- Jina AI Reader, Bing News, archive.ph are used during article ingestion + extraction. They never see reader traffic.
- GitHub Actions triggers the daily synthesis run.
- Stripe processes membership payments. They store your card details and a customer record; we keep only a reference to it.
- beehiiv delivers the daily email to members who opt in. They store the email address used for the newsletter.
Apart from the membership email, payment, and newsletter data described here, these vendors don't receive reader-identifying information.
The newsletter
The daily email is part of membership. The only data collected for it is your email address, used solely to send the newsletter. You choose whether you want it when you join, and you can change that anytime in your account. Every email has an unsubscribe link. No selling, no sharing, no ads-targeted segmentation.
Contact
Privacy questions can be sent to timothy.s.bolger@gmail.com. The site is operated by an individual, not a company.