Privacy

Who holds it

The controller is Serious Gourmet Limited, registered in England and Wales. Contact hello@onesymbol.app about anything on this page. This policy is written to the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.

Reading without an account

Today's entry and the last seven days can be read signed out, and nothing about you is recorded when you do. The one thing counted is an arrival: when an entry is opened from the link in our daily email, from a daily email someone forwarded, from a link someone shared, from the link under one of our videos or from a link in one of our own posts, we add one to a single number for that entry, that day and that source. Nothing else goes with it: no account, no cookie, no address, nothing about your device, so the count cannot be traced back to anyone. Your choice of light or dark stays in your own browser.

What an account holds

• Your email address.
• The entries you have saved, and when.
• The entries you have liked.
• Which entries you have opened, and when.
• What you do in the app, as a list of moments with the time and, where there is one, the entry: opening the app, opening an entry, reaching the end of a long essay, opening the archive or the graph, running a search (that you searched, never what for), sharing an entry, and seeing or closing the subscription offer.
• Your settings: theme, time zone, the hour you want the daily email, and whether you want it at all.
• Whether your subscription is free or paid, and how many archive searches you have used this month.

That is the list. No advertising identifier, no device fingerprint, no location, no third-party analytics of your reading. Nothing is sold, rented, or shared with advertisers or data brokers, and nothing here makes an automated decision about you.

Why we are allowed to hold it

Your email address, saved entries, settings and subscription status are held to perform the contract you entered by creating an account — without them there is no account. Which entries have been opened, and the search counter, are held on the basis of legitimate interests: knowing which entries are read to the end is how the publication is edited, and the counter is how a free allowance is enforced. What you do in the app is held on the same basis, and is only ever looked at as counts and rates across all readers — how many reached the end of an essay, not whether you did. It is never used to target you, never shown to anyone outside One Symbol, and goes with the rest when you delete your account.

The daily email goes to everyone who creates an account, because it is the publication itself and not an advertisement for it. The sign-up form says so and lets you decline before you finish; the lawful basis is our legitimate interest in sending readers the thing they came here to read. You can object at any time and it stops at once — the unsubscribe link in every email, or the switch in Settings. Objecting does not affect anything else about your account.

Who else touches it

Our hosting provider stores the data above on our behalf and does not use it for its own purposes. Our email provider handles the daily email unless you have turned it off. If you subscribe inside the iPhone app, our subscription provider is told your account's id and the status of that subscription — not your email address, and nothing you have read or saved. Hosting and email are in the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area; the subscription provider is in the United States, under the standard contractual clauses and the Information Commissioner's international data transfer addendum.

How long, and deleting it

Data is kept while the account exists. Delete it yourself at any time in Settings → Delete account: it goes immediately and permanently, with everything we hold. No reason has to be given. If you subscribed in the app, the subscription provider keeps its own record of that purchase, which carries your account's id and not your email address. Saved symbols can be exported to a file first, from Settings.

Your rights, and complaining

You have the right to ask for a copy of your data, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict or object to how it is used, to receive it in a portable form, and to withdraw consent. Write to hello@onesymbol.app and it will be done.

You also have the right to complain to us if you think your data has been handled in breach of data protection law. Send it to hello@onesymbol.app with "complaint" in the subject. We will acknowledge it within 30 days and tell you the outcome without undue delay. You can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk at any time, whether or not you come to us first.

Children and changes

One Symbol is written for adults and accounts are not knowingly created for under-13s. If what is held here changes, this page and the date at the top change with it.