Privacy policy

Effective 11 September 2026. This policy describes the app as built. It will be updated before Podcast Filter accepts its first paying customer, and the effective date will change when it is.

Podcast Filter is run by John Higgins, an individual developer in the United States, who is the controller of the information described here. Privacy questions go to johnbhiggins7@gmail.com.

The short version: the app holds the account you create, the podcast episodes you asked it to analyse, and the choices you made about them. It does not track you, does not contain advertising or third-party analytics, and does not sell or share personal information.

What is collected

Your account

An email address and password, or a Sign in with Apple or Google identifier if you use one. If you sign in with Apple and choose to hide your email, Podcast Filter only ever sees the relay address Apple provides.

Your family

The children you add, as a display name you choose. Nothing else about a child is collected — no age, no birthday, no contact details, no photo. A child does not have an account and never signs in. A child’s iPhone holds a pairing credential that identifies the profile, and that credential is stored on the server only as a hash.

Episodes you analyse

When you request an analysis, the app records the show and episode you chose along with the information Apple’s public directory publishes about it, downloads that episode’s audio, and retains that captured copy. It produces a timed transcript and a set of flagged passages, and stores both. It also stores the rules you selected, the individual passages you kept or removed, and the approvals you granted.

The captured audio is retained because your approval is bound to that exact copy. Re-downloading an episode later can produce different audio — many shows insert advertising dynamically — which would invalidate every timestamp your decisions were based on.

Purchases

Apple processes all payments. Podcast Filter never receives your card number, billing address, or App Store credentials. It stores Apple’s transaction identifier, which pack was bought, how many credits it granted, and whether it was later refunded, so that your balance is correct and a purchase cannot be credited twice.

Notifications

If you allow notifications, the app stores the device token Apple issues so it can tell you when an analysis has finished or an approved episode is ready. Turning notifications off in iOS stops this.

What is not collected

No advertising identifier. No location. No contacts, photos, calendar, or microphone access. No third-party analytics or tracking SDK — the app has no third-party runtime dependencies at all. Nothing is used to track you across other companies’ apps or websites, and the app’s privacy manifest declares no tracking.

Who processes it

Podcast Filter uses a small number of service providers to operate. Each receives only what it needs to do its part.

• Supabase — accounts and authentication, the database, and private file storage. Audio, transcripts, findings and approvals live here.
• Vercel — the service that coordinates analysis work, and the short-lived isolated environments each analysis runs in. Those environments are destroyed when the job ends.
• Microsoft Azure Speech — converts an episode’s audio into a timed transcript.
• OpenAI — identifies flagged passages in that transcript.
• Apple — podcast directory information, App Store purchases, push notification delivery, and Sign in with Apple.
• Google — only if you choose Sign in with Google.

Episode audio and transcripts are sent to the transcription and classification providers to produce your report. They are not sent anywhere else, and no provider is given your information for its own purposes.

How long it is kept

• Your account, family, episodes, findings and approvals — until you delete your account, or delete the individual item in the app.
• Captured audio and derived copies — while the analysis and any approval based on it still exist. Derived playback caches are removed after a period of disuse.
• Purchase records — a minimal record of each transaction is kept for seven years to meet tax and accounting obligations. Apple receipt data is kept for 30 days.
• Notification tokens — until you turn notifications off, the token stops working, or you delete your account.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from inside the app, under Account. It asks for your password again, because deletion cannot be undone.

Deleting removes your sign-in, your family and children, your analyses, transcripts and findings, your approvals, and the stored audio for them. Every device paired to your family loses access, and the keys held on those devices are erased. Deletion runs as a durable job and retries until every item is gone, so it completes even if part of the system is briefly unavailable; you are given a receipt you can use to check its progress.

Two things deliberately survive: the minimal transaction records described above, which are kept for tax purposes, and any unused credits, which are removed without an automatic refund. If you want a refund for an unused pack, request it from Apple.

Children

Podcast Filter is for parents. The account holder is an adult, and only the account holder can create a family, request an analysis, or approve anything.

A child does not create an account, does not sign in, and is not asked for any information. The only thing recorded about a child is the display name a parent types. A paired child device can fetch the episodes that child has been approved for and nothing else — it cannot reach another sibling’s library, request an analysis, see the full findings or transcript, or play original unedited audio.

Podcast Filter is not directed to children under 13 as a general audience service, and it does not knowingly collect personal information from a child. If you believe a child has provided information to us, write to johnbhiggins7@gmail.com and it will be deleted.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask for a copy of what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected, or delete it. Deletion is available directly in the app; for the others, write to johnbhiggins7@gmail.com.

If you are a California resident: Podcast Filter does not sell personal information and does not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. You will never be treated differently for exercising a privacy right.

Security

Connections use HTTPS. Audio stored for your account is held in private storage that is not publicly reachable, and every request for it is authorised against a current approval rather than a link that stays valid once issued. Downloads on a child’s device are stored encrypted, with keys held in the iPhone’s keychain and marked so they cannot move to another device or to a backup. Approvals are cryptographically signed so a device can verify that the policy it is enforcing is the one you actually granted.

No system is perfect, and none of this is a claim that a deliberately modified or compromised device cannot be worked around.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects how your information is used, the effective date above will change and the app will tell you before the change takes effect.

Questions: johnbhiggins7@gmail.com