Privacy Policy

The short version

Briefly is a small app made by two people, Camden Brown and Kasen Afflerbach. We collect what the app needs to work, and nothing else.

No ads. No analytics. Nothing in the app follows you around or reports back on what you looked at. We have never sold anyone’s information and we are not going to start.

You can delete your account, and everything attached to it, from inside the app whenever you want. It takes under a minute and there is no "are you sure you want to lose all this" guilt trip.

The rest of this page is the detail. It is longer than the summary because being specific is the only way to be honest, not because there is a catch buried in it.

Who we are

Briefly is run by Camden Brown and Kasen Afflerbach, based in Texas, in the United States. Write to us at hello@brieflysite.com — it reaches both of us, and the same address is on the You tab in the app.

We decide what happens to your information, which also makes us the two people responsible for it. There is no team behind us and no support desk. If something is wrong, you are emailing the people who can fix it.

What you give us

When you make an account:

• Your email address — so we can send you a sign-in code, let you reset your password, and reach you if something about your account needs saying.
• A password, which we never see. It is stored as a cryptographic hash by our sign-in provider. We could not tell you what it is, and neither could anyone who got hold of our database.
• Your name, as you type it. This shows on your profile, your comments and your posts, so pick something you are happy for other people to read.

The questions before you make your account. The answers stay on your phone until you tap Create my account; if you quit before then, nothing is sent.

• Your age range. We ask so that nobody under 13 makes an account, and that is all it is used for. It cannot be changed afterwards.
• What you are chasing, and the version you typed yourself if none of the options fitted.
• Roughly where you are with it.
• What is holding you back, if you answer. You can skip it.
• Where you heard about Briefly, if you answer. You can skip it.
• Your phone’s time zone, so the app knows when your day starts.

When you create the account:

• That you ticked the box agreeing to the Terms of Use and this Privacy Policy, which version of them it was, and when.

If you choose to add them:

• A short bio.
• A profile photo.

As you use the app:

• Comments you write.
• Posts you like, and people you follow.
• People you block, and reports you send us.
• If your account is allowed to post: the posts — the photos and clips, a still taken from the first frame of a video, the caption, the tags, and the date the card runs.

And created automatically as you go:

• An account number, so your rows can be told apart from everyone else’s.
• The date and time things were made.
• A flag recording whether an account is one of the two administrator accounts.

What happens without you doing anything

Two things are worth naming even though we do not use them for anything, because "we collect nothing else" would not be quite true.

Our hosting and email providers keep ordinary server logs — the kind every service on the internet keeps. Those include the IP address your phone connects from and what it asked for. They exist so that outages can be debugged and abuse can be stopped, they are kept for a limited period set by those providers rather than by us, and we do not use them to build any picture of you. We do not connect them to your account for any purpose of our own.

That is the whole of it. We do not know where you are — the app never asks for your location and there is no code in it that could work it out. We do not read your contacts, your calendar, your photo library beyond the files you pick, or anything else on your phone.

What Briefly keeps on your phone

A few small things live on your device rather than on our servers:

• A sign-in token, so you are not asked for your password every time you open the app.
• Whether you turned on the "One a day" switch in the posting form.
• If someone answered "Under 13" on this phone, a note of that, so signup stays closed. Nothing else about them is kept or sent.
• Copies of images the app has already shown you, so it does not download them twice.

None of that is sent anywhere. Signing out clears the token, and deleting the app clears the lot.

Who can see what

Anyone signed in to Briefly can see your name, your photo, your bio, your comments and — if your account is allowed to post — your posts. Treat all of that as public, because it is.

Your email address is never shown to another user. Your password is never shown to anyone, us included. The answers you gave when you signed up are not on your profile: only you and the two of us can see them. We look at them added up across everyone (how many people are stuck on money, how many came from TikTok), not to single anyone out.

None of it is visible without an account. There is no public web page with your profile or your posts on it, and search engines have nothing of yours to find.

The companies that help us run it

We use a handful of services to run Briefly. Each one gets only the part it needs, is not allowed to use it for anything of its own, and is required by its agreement with us to protect it at least as well as this policy promises.

• Supabase — runs the database, the sign-in system and the file storage. It holds everything listed above. The data sits in the United States, in Amazon Web Services’ Oregon region.
• Resend — sends the account emails. It gets your email address and what is in the message, such as a sign-in code.
• Cloudflare and GitHub — host the web pages for this policy, the terms, support and brieflysite.com, and Cloudflare forwards mail sent to our address to our inbox. If you open those pages in a browser, they see your IP address like any website does. They get nothing from the app.
• Expo — the tools we build the app with. It does not get your account data.
• Apple and Google — distribute the app through their stores. Apple also takes the payment when you buy Briefly, so your card and payment details go to Apple and never to us. What they collect as the shop you downloaded it from is covered by their policies, not ours.

That is the complete list. Nobody else gets your information: no advertisers, no data brokers, no "partners". We do not sell it and we do not trade it.

If Briefly is ever sold or handed on, whoever takes it over would be bound by this policy until they told you otherwise, and we would tell you before it happened.

We do not track you

Nothing in Briefly links what you do here to anything you do anywhere else. There are no advertising identifiers, no tracking pixels, no analytics tools, and no data brokers involved at any point.

That is why the app never shows you the "allow tracking?" prompt. There would be nothing to ask about.

Where your information lives

On servers in the United States. If you are using Briefly from somewhere else — the United Kingdom, the European Union, anywhere — your information is being sent to and stored in the US, where the privacy laws are not the same as the ones at home.

To protect it on the way, our providers’ data processing agreements include the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK’s addendum to them), which bind them to European levels of protection. Where a provider is certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, that applies too. Email us for a copy of the relevant terms.

Why we are allowed to hold it

If you live somewhere that asks this question — the European Union, the UK and a growing list of other places — here is the answer, with the legal name for each reason in brackets:

• Your account, profile, posts, comments, likes, follows and the account emails: because you asked us to run the app for you, and we cannot without them (performing our contract with you).
• Your age range: to keep children off an app not built for them (our legitimate interest, and the law where you live).
• Reports, blocks, the word filter and server logs: to keep the app safe and working, which you have an interest in as much as we do (legitimate interests).
• The record of you agreeing to the Terms and this policy: so either of us can show what was agreed (legitimate interests, and our legal obligations).
• What is holding you back, where you heard about us, your bio and your photo: because you chose to give them (your consent). You can withdraw it whenever you like — change or remove the bio and photo under Edit profile, or email us to clear the other two. Withdrawing does not undo what was done before it.

Giving us your email address, a password, a name and your age range is required to make an account. Everything else is optional or comes from using the app.

Nothing about you is decided automatically. The feed is the same for everyone, picked by two people, and none of your answers change what you are shown.

How long we keep it, and how to make it go away

We keep your information for as long as your account exists. A report is kept until one of us has dealt with it, then deleted. There is no separate archive and no analytics copy.

To delete it: open the You tab and choose Delete my account. It asks you to type a word first, because there is no undo.

Deleting your account removes:

• The account, and your ability to sign in.
• Your profile — name, bio, photo, time zone and the answers you gave when you joined.
• Every comment you have written.
• Your likes, the people you follow, the people you blocked, and the reports you sent.
• If your account is allowed to post: every post, and its place in the feed.
• The files you uploaded.

Nothing is kept afterwards. If a file will not delete for some technical reason we still remove the account, and that file is then unreachable — no account, no profile and no post point at it.

You do not have to go that far, either. You can delete a single comment or post, and change your name, bio and photo any time, under Edit profile. Withdrawing your consent to any of this means deleting the thing, or the account.

The exceptions, and we would rather say them than have you find them: server logs at our hosting providers age out on their own schedule, which those providers set and we do not control, and our database provider may keep short-term backups for disaster recovery that are overwritten within days. We cannot reach in and edit either, we never restore a backup to bring a deleted account back, and the logs contain none of your posts, your profile or your messages.

What you can ask us for

Wherever you live, you can ask us for:

• A copy of everything we hold about you — as a file other apps can read, if you want to take it somewhere else.
• A correction, if something is wrong.
• Deletion — of one thing, or of all of it.
• Us to stop using something while a question about it is sorted out.
• Us to stop using something we hold on the basis of our legitimate interests, if you object to it.
• Us to forget an optional answer you gave, withdrawing your consent to it.
• An explanation of anything on this page that is not clear.

The quickest way: on the You tab, tap "Your data", which opens an email to us. Or write to hello@brieflysite.com from the address on the account — that is how we know it is you, and we may ask a follow-up question if it is not. We will sort it within 30 days, usually much sooner, and it is free. We will not ask you to justify it, and we will not put a retention offer in front of you first.

If you are in the EU or the UK, you can also complain to your data protection regulator — in the UK that is the Information Commissioner’s Office, and in the EU it is the authority in your country. You can go to them without talking to us first, though we would rather you told us, because we can actually fix things.

If you live in California

California law asks for this in its own terms, so here it is again in those terms. It covers the last 12 months and the same is true for everyone.

What we collect, by the categories the law uses:

• Identifiers — your name, email address, account number, and the IP address in server logs.
• Personal records — your name and email address.
• Characteristics protected by law — your age range.
• Internet activity — your likes, follows, comments, blocks and reports.
• Audio and visual information — the photos and videos you upload.
• Sensitive personal information — your email and password together, as your sign-in. We use it only to let you sign in and keep your account secure, never to learn things about you, so there is nothing to limit.

It comes from you, and from your phone as you use the app. We use it for the reasons in "Why we are allowed to hold it", keep it for the times in the section after that, and give it only to the providers listed under "The companies that help us run it", for running Briefly.

We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we have not in the last 12 months. That includes people under 16. There is no "Do Not Sell or Share" link because there is nothing to opt out of. For the same reason we have nothing to change when your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal: nothing is tracked or sold either way.

Your rights: to know what we collect and get a copy, to have it deleted, to have it corrected, and to opt out of sale or sharing (which does not happen). Ask as described under "What you can ask us for". Someone you authorise in writing can ask for you; we will check with you that they are allowed to. We answer within 30 days.

We will not treat you differently for using any of these rights: no worse service, no different price, nothing.

We do not share your information with anyone for their own direct marketing (California’s "Shine the Light" law).

If you are under 18, you can remove anything you posted: delete a comment or post yourself, or email us and we will. Removed means gone from the app, though someone else may have seen or copied it first.

If you are under 18

You need to be at least 13 to use Briefly, and signup asks your age range before anything else. If you live somewhere that sets a higher age for signing up to something like this without a parent, that age applies to you instead.

We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 13. If we find out an account belongs to someone younger, we delete it and everything attached to it. If you think a child has an account here, email hello@brieflysite.com and we will deal with it quickly.

Links to other places

A profile can carry a website link, and posts can mention things. Tapping one takes you off Briefly and onto somebody else’s site, which has its own rules and its own privacy policy. We have no control over those and we are not responsible for them.

Keeping it safe

• Everything between your phone and our servers travels encrypted.
• Passwords are stored as hashes and cannot be read by us or by anyone who obtained the database.
• The database refuses reads and writes it has not been explicitly told to allow, row by row, rather than trusting the app to only ask for the right things.
• Only the two administrator accounts can read reports. Nobody can read another person’s email address through the app at all.

No system is perfect and we are not going to pretend ours is. If something goes wrong that affects your information, we will tell you what happened, when, and what to do about it — and we will not wait until it is convenient.

When this page changes

Last updated September 21, 2026. If we change it, that date changes and the copy inside the app updates at the same time — they come from the same file, so they cannot drift apart.

If a change actually affects what we collect or who sees it, we will tell you in the app before it applies, rather than quietly editing the page and hoping. Anything new we want to collect on the basis of your consent, we will ask for first.

Talk to us

hello@brieflysite.com. Questions, requests, or something you have seen in the app that needs looking at. It reaches both of us and we read it.