What we publish, and what we keep.

When a report you filed goes live, all of this is public: the headline, the story text, the photo, the photo credit, the section you filed it under, the date it was filed, and how many times it has been read.

It appears on its own page on this site, in its section, in the RSS feed, on most read, and in the app's feed. The link works for anyone who has it — no app, no account, no login. Pasted into a chat or a social post, the preview card will show the headline and the photo.

We ask search engines not to index report pages. Every report page is served with a no-index instruction, so it should not turn up in Google results. That is a request that search engines honour and a wall it is not: anyone with the link can read the story, and link-preview fetchers ignore it by design so that shared links still unfurl. Treat a filed report as visible to the whole internet.

Photos have public addresses of their own. An uploaded picture is served as a file from this site, so a person who has the image address does not need the story link to see the picture.

We do not strip the metadata out of your photo. The picture is published as the file we received it. If your camera wrote information into that file — the make of the phone, the time, and on some cameras GPS coordinates — it is published with the image. Nothing else in this product touches location: the app asks for no location permission on either platform and there is no location field anywhere in it. If your camera tags photos with a location, turn that off before you shoot a picture you intend to file.

Not published, ever: your IP address, your device id, and who reported what. Those are stored, are used for moderation and abuse prevention, and are deliberately kept out of every page, feed and API response the public can read.

Assume it is permanent. Reports on this site go back to 2020 and the links people shared then still resolve today, which is a promise the site intends to keep. If you want something gone, that is a request to us — see below — not something time takes care of.

• The report. Section, headline, story text, and optionally one photo with a credit line. This is the part that gets published.
• Camera and photo-library access, if you use them. The app asks your phone for permission so you can shoot or pick the one picture that goes with your story. Only the picture you choose is read; nothing scans your library, and you can revoke either permission in your phone's settings at any time.
• A flag on someone else's report. When you report a story from the app, we receive the reason you picked and nothing else — the app sends no free-text message with it.
• Whatever you write to us. The contact links on the support page open your own email app, so a message reaches our mailbox with your email address on it, the same as any email. There is no form on this site and no field anywhere that asks for your details.

• A device id. The first time you open the app it generates a random identifier and stores it on your phone. It is sent with every request the app makes, and it is the only identity in this product — there is no account behind it and it is not tied to your name, your email or your Apple or Google account. We use it to rate-limit, to attach a report to the device that filed it, and to keep a device that was banned for abuse from simply coming back. It is not an advertising identifier, we do not share it, and nothing in the app links it to any other app or website. On iPhone it is stored in the keychain and deliberately survives deleting the app, so a reinstall keeps the same id; on Android, uninstalling normally clears it, though Android's own backup may restore it.
• App version and platform (iOS or Android), sent with each request so we can tell which build a problem came from. No device model, advertising id, carrier or hardware identifier is read.
• Your IP address, in two places, and it is never displayed publicly. It is stored with each report you file and each report you flag, permanently, alongside that submission. Separately, the most recent IP your app connected from is kept against your device id and updated on every request the app makes — including simply reading the feed, not only when you post. Only the latest value is kept: it is overwritten each time, so there is no history of the networks you have used, and we cannot reconstruct one. It is there for one purpose, which is enforcing bans. Someone blocked for abuse could otherwise clear it by switching from wifi to mobile data, which changes your IP without you doing anything deliberate. Checking the last IP the app was seen on means a ban follows the install instead of the network. It is not used for advertising, analytics, or working out where you are, and it is not shared with anyone.
• Server logs. Our API writes a line per request — the method, the path, the response and your device id — to a log file on the server. If a submission is rejected by our word filter, the blocked word is written there too. These logs are not rotated or automatically deleted.
• Rate-limit records. To stop flooding, we count requests per IP and per device. Those counters store the identifier only as an irreversible hash, and they are deleted after two days. This is the only data in the whole system that expires on its own.
• A read count per story. Opening a report page adds one to that story's counter and updates the time that story was last opened. Neither is tied to you: no visitor record, no cookie and no identifier of any kind is stored by the site for reading a page. Our web server, like every web server, writes an ordinary access log entry with your IP address and browser; we do not join it to anything.
• Your draft, on your phone. While you are writing, the app saves the section, headline, story and photo credit locally so a crash or an interruption does not lose your work. It never leaves your device, the photo is not included, and it is deleted when you submit or discard.

A report filed with a photo is held and invisible until the photo has been approved. Anyone who opens the link in the meantime — including you — sees a page saying the report is being reviewed. A report filed without a photo publishes straight away.

Two things happen while it is held. First, the image file is sent to Google Cloud Vision for an automated safety rating (adult, violent and related categories). Google receives the picture itself and nothing else — not your device id, not your IP address, not your headline, not the file's name. A photo the scan rates adult or sexually explicit with high confidence is never published and never reaches a person.

Second, everything that clears the scan is emailed to our moderation mailbox with a link to the picture, and a person looks at every one and approves or rejects it. That email is sent through Microsoft 365 and lands in a Google-hosted mailbox; it contains the link to the photo and nothing about you.

Story text is read by people, not by an automated classifier — a submission is rejected outright if it contains a word from a list we will not publish, and that is the whole of it.

This website carries Google AdSense. Google's ad script loads on every page of Breaking News Maker — this one included, even though no ad is shown on it — and ad units appear on the front page, the section pages, most read, the post-your-story page and report pages.

When that script runs, Google receives your IP address, your browser's user-agent string, the address of the page you are on and the page you came from, and it sets its own cookies and identifiers in your browser to select and measure ads. That data goes to Google directly, on Google's terms; this site does not receive it, cannot see it and does not pass Google anything about you.

We set no cookies of our own. There is no login, no session and no tracking pixel on this site — every cookie you receive here comes from Google's ad script.

There is no cookie consent banner on this site, and we do not ask for consent before Google's ad script loads. Saying so plainly is more useful than implying a choice that is not offered. If you want control today, the practical routes are your browser's cookie settings, a content blocker, or Google's own ad settings at myadcenter.google.com, which work regardless of what this site does.

The app shows no ads at all and contains no advertising or analytics code of any kind.

Every company we deliberately send data to is named below, with what it actually receives. The one place we cannot give you a fixed list is the row of real headlines at the foot of a report page — see that entry for why.

• Google — advertising (website only). Receives your IP address, user-agent, page URL and referrer, and sets advertising cookies, as described above. How Google uses advertising data, Google Privacy Policy.
• Google Cloud — photo safety scan. Receives the uploaded image file, and nothing else about you or your device. Google Privacy Policy.
• Microsoft — the photo review email. Receives the review message we send ourselves: a link to the unreviewed photo and the buttons that approve or reject it. It carries no information about the person who uploaded it. Microsoft Privacy Statement.
• News publishers, on report pages only. A report page ends with a row of real headlines. The thumbnail in each row is loaded from that publisher's own servers, so your IP address and browser reach them the same way they would if you visited their site. We send the request with no referrer attached, so they are not told which report you were reading. We cannot give you a closed list of who those publishers are. New headlines come from four feeds — the BBC, NPR, ESPN and Ars Technica — but the rail also draws on an archive of headlines collected from a news aggregator over several years, which spans many more outlets than those four. If you would rather not load them at all, blocking third-party images in your browser stops it; the rest of the page works normally without them. Nothing about your report or your device is sent to any of them. BBC, NPR, ESPN, Ars Technica.
• Facebook, X and WhatsApp — only if you tap share. There is no share pixel, widget or SDK on this site or in the app; the share buttons are ordinary links. Nothing reaches those companies unless you tap one, and what reaches them then is the public link and the headline, handed to their own share screen.

And what is not here. No analytics, no crash reporting, no session recording, no attribution or advertising SDK — not in the app and not on this site. No payment processor, no login provider, no mailing list, no customer-support widget. The app talks to our own API and to nothing else.

Indefinitely. Published reports, uploaded photos, the device rows, the stored IP addresses, the flags people file and the server logs are all kept with no expiry date, and there is no scheduled purge. The only thing that deletes itself is the two-day rate-limit counter. We would rather say that than imply a retention schedule we do not run.

There is no delete button in the app, and deleting the app does not remove anything you have already published — on iPhone, it does not even clear the device id. Removal is a request to a person:

Email support@breakingnewsapp.net with the link to the story or the photo. Because there are no accounts, there is no login that proves a report is yours, so write from the device you filed it on if you still have it and tell us anything that identifies the submission. We do not require a legal filing to act.

When a report is removed it stops resolving everywhere at once, including on every link to it that has already been shared. The support page covers the other reasons to get in touch — a story that breaks the rules, a photo that is not the filer's to use, or a picture of you that you want taken down.

One thing worth knowing about the archive: this site has been publishing reader reports since 2020, including reports filed through the earlier version of the app. Those older reports live in the same place as new ones and this policy covers them too.

Breaking News Maker is not directed at children, and it is not built for them: everything filed here is published on the open web, permanently, and reports are unverified accounts written by strangers. We do not knowingly collect anything from a child under 13. We also do not ask anyone's age — there is no account and no profile — so we cannot detect it ourselves.

If you believe a child has filed a report or appears in a photo on this site, email support@breakingnewsapp.net and we will remove it.