Sbeak — Privacy Policy

מדיניות הפרטיות מופיעה כאן באנגלית. מחיקת החשבון: בדף הזה. שאלות: יצירת קשר.

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Effective date: 2026-10-16 Provider: Sbeak's developer (an individual) Contact: privacy@sbeak.app

Sbeak ("the app", "we") lets you open any web page and discuss it with other readers of the same page. This policy explains what we collect, why, how long we keep it, and your choices — including deleting your account from inside the app.

What we collect

Account. When you first open the app you get an anonymous account (a random identifier). Nothing else is needed to read, post, vote or follow. An anonymous account exists only in the app on that device: if the app is removed or the device is lost, the account and its username cannot be recovered.
Username. When you first post, vote or follow, you choose a username. It is shown with your comments.
Email (optional). If you register an email address and password (Profile → Create account, or Add email), they are linked to the same account, so your username and activity stay the same and you can sign in on another device or reset a forgotten password. We store your email address and an authentication record (managed by Firebase Authentication; we never see or store your password). Firebase Authentication sends password-reset messages, and a verification message when you use Add email.
Recovery email (optional). When you confirm an email added with Add email, a copy is kept as your recovery email in a private record that only you and our servers can read, never shown publicly, and used only to help you get your account back.
Profile picture (optional). A preset avatar, or a photo you choose from your gallery. It is stored with your profile and shown next to your name and comments.
Your contributions. Your comments (including the page passage you quote, and whether a reply is For or Against), when you posted and edited them, your likes and dislikes, the people you follow and who follow you, people you blocked (muting is stored only on your device), your bookmarks, and your notification settings.
Pages you discuss. To show a page's discussion, the app sends the page's address to our servers. We keep the address of a page only when someone comments on it, suggests it for Discover, or it appears in Discover. We do not keep a history of the pages you read.
Words typed in the address bar that are not a web address are sent to the DuckDuckGo search engine to show search results (DuckDuckGo's privacy policy applies: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy). A search results page is never a discussion.
Moderation records. If you report a comment, a page, a person or a profile picture, we record the report, its reason and the moderator's decision; the person you report is never told who reported them. For a reported profile picture we keep a copy of the picture until a moderator decides. If a comment of yours is held for review, concealed, restored or removed, or a moderator removes your profile picture or suspends your account, we record that decision and the rule applied. Automated checks on comment text are deterministic word and link rules; no artificial-intelligence service reads your comments.
Community rules. Which version of the community rules you accepted, and when.
Abuse protection. Short-lived counters of how often an account performs an action (rate limits), and fingerprints (hashes) of recent comment texts to detect duplicates and coordinated spam.
Device. A push-notification token (Firebase Cloud Messaging) if you allow notifications, and the app language for notification texts.

We do not sell your personal data, show advertising, or use third-party tracking or analytics SDKs. There are no private/direct messages in Sbeak.

How we use it

To run your account and the discussions; to show who wrote what; to deliver the notifications you allow (replies, For / Against replies, new followers, and the outcome of moderation of your own comments); to keep discussions civil (reports, moderation, rate limits); to let you recover your username; and to maintain, debug and secure the service.

What other people see

Your username, avatar, comments (with their time, stance and quoted passage), like counts and rank are public to other readers. Comments concealed by moderation stay in place behind a notice that readers may open; comments removed under a rule show only "Removed by a moderator". Your email, recovery contact, reports, votes and who you muted or blocked are never shown to others.

Legal bases (where applicable, e.g. EEA/UK)

Performance of our agreement with you (providing the app), your consent (notifications, microphone), and our legitimate interests in operating, moderating and securing the service.

Sharing & processors

We use Google Firebase (Authentication, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Functions, Cloud Messaging) to run the service; data is processed on Google's infrastructure under Google's terms (https://policies.google.com/privacy). We may disclose information if required by law.

Device permissions

Microphone / speech recognition — only when you use voice-to-text to write a comment. Transcription is done by your device's speech service; we do not receive or store audio.
Notifications — only if you allow them. The app offers them the first time someone answers you, not before.

Retention

Your account and contributions are kept while your account exists.
Comments you delete: their text and passage are erased at once; a "Deleted by its author" line, without your name, stays in its place so that replies by other people keep their thread.
Moderation decisions and reports are kept to handle appeals and repeated abuse. There is no automatic expiry today: they stay until we delete them. After an account is deleted they no longer name the account (see below).
Rate-limit counters (one per kind of action: a count and a start time, no content) are reused as you act and deleted with your account. The records used to spot the same text posted by several accounts hold only a one-way code of the text and the accounts that posted it; your account is removed from them when it is deleted. The short one-way codes of your own recent texts, used to stop accidental double posts, are replaced as you post and deleted with your account.

Deleting your account

In the app: Profile → Delete account. You see what will happen, confirm, and the deletion runs immediately. Email accounts confirm their password first.

Without the app: see https://sbeak.app/delete-account or write to privacy@sbeak.app from the email address on the account (or with your username and recovery contact); we complete verified requests within 30 days.

What deletion does:

your profile, email/recovery contact, settings, push token, notifications, bookmarks, follows (both directions), votes, activity, and the notifications you caused in other people's lists are deleted;
the text, passage, name and avatar of every comment you wrote are erased; a "Deleted by its author" line, not linked to you, stays in its place so that other people's replies keep their thread;
your comments waiting for review are deleted;
reports you made stay for moderation history without your identity; reports about you and decisions about your account keep the decision with your account replaced by a one-way code, as do moderation log entries;
material reported as a child-safety concern (a reported comment's text, a reported picture) is kept as evidence, without your account id;
your username stays reserved so that nobody else can use it to pose as you;
your sign-in record (Firebase Authentication) is deleted.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete or export your data, or to object to or restrict processing. Contact privacy@sbeak.app to exercise them.

Children

Sbeak is not directed to children under 18. We do not knowingly collect data from them.

International transfers

Data may be processed in countries other than yours (including via Google's global infrastructure), with appropriate safeguards where required.

Changes

We may update this policy; we will post the new effective date here and, for material changes, notify you in the app.

Contact

Sbeak's developer (an individual) — privacy@sbeak.app