What we collect, and what we don't.

Blindspot Report, Inc. ("we", "us") operates blindspot.report, a service that analyses publicly published political podcasts and reports how topics are covered across the political spectrum. We are the controller of the personal data described in this policy.

Questions, requests, or complaints: privacy@blindspot.report.

Information you give us

• —Account details. Your email address, and a password stored only as a bcrypt hash — we never store your password in a form we or anyone else can read. Optionally a username and a display name.
• —Preferences. The topics, political stances and regions you ask to follow, and whether you want the daily email. These drive your feed and your briefing.
• —Subscription records. If you subscribe, Stripe gives us an identifier for you as a Stripe customer, an identifier for your subscription, its status (for example active or cancelled) and when the current billing period ends. During a free trial we record the date it ends. That is all we keep about billing.
• —Anything you email us. Support, sales and press correspondence.

Information we collect automatically

• —Sign-in state. When you log in we set a single cookie, blindspot_auth_token, which holds a signed token identifying your account. It is HTTP-only, expires after 24 hours, and exists solely to keep you signed in. It is not used for advertising.
• —Server logs. Our hosting provider records IP address, user agent, and the pages and API endpoints requested, for security and debugging.
• —Email engagement. Links in the daily briefing are rewritten to pass through our own redirect so we can see which stories are read. When you click one, we record which link it was, when you clicked, your IP address and your user agent. If you would rather we did not, turn the daily email off in your settings.
• —Bot checks. The sign-up and password-reset forms use Cloudflare Turnstile to tell people from automated abuse. It processes your IP address and signals from your browser and device to make that call; we receive only a pass or fail result.
• —Product analytics. The public site loads Hotjar, which records anonymised usage — pages viewed, clicks, scrolling, approximate location from IP, device and browser. It does not run on local development builds. See §6 for how to opt out.

What we do not collect

We never see or store your card details. Payments are taken by Stripe, our payment processor: when you subscribe, you enter your card on Stripe's own checkout page, and updating your card, viewing invoices or cancelling happens in Stripe's customer portal. Stripe handles that data under its own privacy policy. We do not buy personal data from brokers, we do not run advertising or ad-tracking pixels, and we do not ask for special categories of data such as your actual political affiliation. The stance preferences you set describe what you want to read, not what you believe.

• —To run the service — authenticating you, building your feed, generating your briefing. Necessary to perform our contract with you.
• —To send account emails — confirming your email address, resetting your password, and reminding you before your free trial ends. Necessary to perform our contract with you; these are not marketing and are sent regardless of your daily-email setting.
• —To take payment for a subscription, through Stripe. Necessary to perform our contract with you, and to meet tax and accounting obligations.
• —To send the daily email you asked for, and to see which parts of it are useful. Contract, and our legitimate interest in knowing whether the product works.
• —To keep the service secure and working — logs, abuse prevention (including the Turnstile bot check), debugging. Legitimate interest.
• —To improve the product — aggregate analytics. Legitimate interest, or consent where local law requires it.
• —To meet legal obligations where they apply.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether they are outweighed by your rights. You can object at any time — see §8.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We use a small number of service providers who process data on our instructions:

We may also disclose data if we are legally required to, or to protect our rights, our users, or the public. If we are ever involved in a merger or acquisition, personal data may transfer as part of that transaction; we will say so before it takes effect.

The bulk of what we analyse is not personal data about our users at all. It is publicly published podcast audio and its transcripts, together with what public figures said on them. We quote limited excerpts for analysis, commentary and criticism, and we attribute every quote to its source episode.

Transcripts are analysed automatically, including by a large language model operated by Anthropic. Only podcast content is sent for that analysis — never your account details, your preferences, or your reading history.

If you are a podcast host or publisher and want to discuss how your show is represented, write to press@blindspot.report.

We keep this deliberately small. There is one cookie the site cannot work without — the sign-in cookie described in §2 — and it is set only after you log in. There are no advertising cookies.

Hotjar sets its own cookies and identifiers to measure usage. You can opt out for every site that uses it via Hotjar's do-not-track page. We also honour the browser Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control signals where your local law gives them effect.

If you generate a personal podcast feed, its URL contains a signed token that identifies your account. Anyone holding that URL can read that feed, so treat it like a password and do not post it publicly.

If a feed URL leaks, ask us to rotate it — that invalidates every existing link for your account and leaves other users untouched. Write to support@blindspot.report.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, receive a portable copy, object to or restrict certain processing, and withdraw consent. If you are in California, you also have the right not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights — and since we do not sell or share personal data for advertising, there is nothing to opt out of on that front.

You can change your preferences and turn the daily email off yourself in your account settings. Account deletion is not yet self-service — email privacy@blindspot.report from the address on the account and we will delete it, along with your preferences and email-engagement records. We aim to respond within 30 days.

If you are in the UK, EU or EEA and you think we have got this wrong, you can complain to your local supervisory authority.

• —Account data — for as long as your account exists, and then deleted on request.
• —Email engagement records — pruned on a rolling basis; we keep only a recent window, not an indefinite history.
• —Server logs — kept for a short period for security and debugging, then rotated out by our hosting provider.
• —Podcast analysis — kept indefinitely. It is a record of what was publicly broadcast and contains no user data.

Passwords are hashed with bcrypt. Sessions use signed, HTTP-only cookies sent over HTTPS. Data is held in a managed, access-controlled database. No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise — but if we ever discover a breach affecting your data, we will tell you and the relevant regulator as the law requires.

Found a vulnerability? Please report it to support@blindspot.report rather than disclosing it publicly, and give us a reasonable chance to fix it.

We are based in the United States and our providers are principally in the United States. If you use the service from elsewhere, your data will be transferred to and processed there, under appropriate safeguards such as the standard contractual clauses where those apply.

The service is not directed at children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their personal data. If you believe a child has given us data, tell us and we will remove it.

We will update this page when the service changes, and move the "last updated" date at the top. If a change materially affects your rights, we will give notice by email or in the product before it takes effect.