What we collect
Nothing. Jacobian's App Store privacy label is Data Not Collected. There are no analytics, no trackers, no ads, and no third-party SDKs that phone home. The app has no server of ours to phone home to.
Your HN credentials
If you sign in, you type your Hacker News username and password into the app yourself. They are stored only in the iOS Keychain on your device, with the WhenUnlockedThisDeviceOnly protection class: they never sync to iCloud, never leave the phone, and are unreadable while it is locked.
Credentials are sent to exactly one destination, news.ycombinator.com, over HTTPS, to perform the actions you take: signing in, voting, replying, submitting, favoriting. Logging out purges them from the Keychain.
Where content comes from
Stories and comments are fetched directly from the official Hacker News API. Search queries go directly to hn.algolia.com. Article thumbnails are fetched from each story's own site, the same as if you opened the link in a browser.
In every case your device talks to those services directly. Nothing is proxied through us, and we cannot see any of it.
No account with us
There is no Jacobian account, no sign-up, no email list, and no database of users. Your HN account belongs to Y Combinator's Hacker News; your votes and favorites live there, not with us.
Bug reports
Shaking the device during the beta composes a bug report for you to review. You decide whether to send it, and you can read every word before it goes. Nothing is ever reported automatically.
This website
jacobian.news uses PostHog to count page views and see which pages people read, so we know whether anyone wants the app. That is the only place analytics exist in this project: the website, never the app. If you block it, the site works exactly the same.
Questions
If any of this is unclear, or you think the app is doing something this page does not describe, write to contact@brandonbarker.me. That would be a serious bug, and we treat it as one.