Privacy Policy
Prism collects almost nothing about you, and this page is the whole story. There are no accounts, no cookies and no advertising. We count how many people visit which pages, in aggregate and without identifying anyone — and where something does get stored, it is described here in plain words.
Effective 30 September 2026. Prism is operated by the person who runs Prism.
Written by the person who runs Prism and not yet reviewed by a lawyer. Everything it says about what the site does is accurate as of the effective date — it is checked against the code — but it has not had a professional eye on the legal wording. That review is planned; this note comes down when it happens.
The short version
- No accounts. You cannot sign in. We never ask for your name or email.
- No tracking of you. No advertising cookies, no tracking pixels, and nothing that follows you to other sites or builds a profile of you. We do count page views — see how we count visits below, which explains exactly what that does and doesn’t involve.
- No advertising. Prism carries none today. If that changes, this page changes first and says so.
- Your IP address is never stored as-is. It is hashed with a secret key before anything is written down.
- What you type into the AI is not stored. It goes to the AI provider to write a reply and is not saved here.
Your IP address — hashed, never kept raw
Our servers see your IP address when you load a page, as every web server does. Before anything is written down it is combined with a secret key and put through a one-way hash, and only the result is stored. It is used to rate-limit the AI features, so one person cannot run up the bill, and to tell visitors apart if something is being abused.
Because the hash is one-way and salted with a key we do not publish, it cannot be turned back into your address, and it cannot be used to find you.
Our hosting provider sees and logs raw IP addresses as part of running the servers. That is covered by their privacy policy, not this one.
What you type into the AI
When you use “Talk it through”, a viewpoint persona, or generate a debate, your message is sent to Anthropic, which runs the model that writes the reply.
We do not store your message. What is recorded for each exchange is: which feature you used, which model answered, how many tokens it used, the estimated cost, the time, and your hashed IP. Not the text.
Anthropic handles the message as our service provider, under its own terms. Please don’t type personal or sensitive information into the chat — there is no reason to, and we would rather you didn’t.
Feedback you send
If you use a “Give feedback” or “Flag” link, we store what you wrote, which story you were looking at, the kind of feedback, your hashed IP, and the time. There is no public read access to any of it. Please leave personal information out; if you include something and want it gone, contact usetheprism@gmail.com with enough detail to find it.
How we count visits
Prism counts page views, through a tool run by Vercel, the company that hosts the site. It tells us how many people came, which pages they read, and which site linked them here. That is the whole purpose: knowing whether anyone is reading.
What it does not do matters more. It sets no cookie and writes nothing to your browser. It cannot follow you to another website, because it stores no identifier that exists anywhere else. It builds no profile, and there is no way for us to look up what any one person read. A visit is identified by a scrambled fingerprint of the request itself, which Vercel discards after 24 hours.
What gets recorded with each page view: the page address, the site that referred you, your country and city, your browser, and whether you are on a phone or a computer. Not your name, not your IP address, not anything you typed.
This changed on 17 September 2026. Before that date this page said Prism used no analytics at all, and that was true. Prism went public on 16 September, and its operator had no way of knowing whether a single person had visited. We chose the most private measurement we could find rather than the most informative one, and we are telling you plainly instead of editing the old sentence away.
What we don't collect
No names. No email addresses. No accounts or passwords. No payment information. No location beyond what an IP implies before it is hashed. No behavioural profile. Nothing is sold or given to data brokers, ever.
Who else is involved
| Provider | What it does | What it sees |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Hosts the site and counts page views | Raw IP addresses in server logs; anonymous page-view data |
| Supabase | The database | Stories, hashed IPs, feedback text |
| Upstash | Rate limiting | Hashed IPs and counters |
| Anthropic | Runs the AI model | Your chat messages; news headlines |
| GitHub | Runs the news-gathering job | Nothing about readers |
Nothing is shared with anyone else, and no advertising or data-broker code runs on the site.
How long things are kept
- Rate-limit records: about 26 hours, then they expire on their own.
- AI usage records (counts and costs, no message text): 12 months.
- Feedback: 24 months.
- Published stories, summaries and debates: kept as an archive. They contain nothing about readers.
Your rights
Depending on where you live you may have the right to know what is held about you, get a copy, correct it, delete it, or object to its use.
One honest limitation: because IP addresses are hashed and there are no accounts, we usually cannot tell which records relate to you. That is deliberate and it is better privacy, but it means a request may not be answerable beyond deleting feedback you can point us to. To ask, contact usetheprism@gmail.com.
Children
Prism is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 13. The site covers politics, war and other adult subjects. If you believe a child has sent something through the feedback form, contact usetheprism@gmail.com and it will be deleted.
Security
Data is encrypted in transit. The database enforces row-level rules so reader-submitted data has no public read path. IP addresses are hashed with a secret key before storage. The site sends a strict Content-Security-Policy and the standard security headers.
No system is perfectly secure, and this is a small operation. The main defence is collecting as little as possible in the first place — the safest data is the data nobody has.
Changes
If this policy changes, the effective date changes with it. If Prism ever starts collecting something new — accounts, email, advertising — it will be said plainly on the site before it starts, not quietly in a revision.
Contact
See also the Terms of Use and How Prism works.