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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 is private

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 support@earpocket.com to opt out.