We take your privacy very seriously. We are not in the business of selling or monetizing your data in any way.
1. Feed Services
In order to do its job, Feed Hawk needs to interact with your feed service account. That interaction is subject to the privacy policies of your feed service:
Feed Hawk stores your feed service account credentials securely in the iOS Keychain. Feed Hawk uses HTTPS exclusively to communicate with feed services.
1a. Web-based Login
Feedly, Inoreader, and NewsBlur have OAuth 2.0 web-based login processes.
Feed Hawk facilitates each web-based login process by opening a Safari View Controller. Feed Hawk ensures that the initial URL for the Safari View Controller is an HTTPS URL. Beyond that, Feed Hawk has no way to ensure that the entire login process happens via HTTPS.
The Feed Hawk Redirect URLs for Inoreader and NewsBlur point to a web server under our control. This can result in an authorization code being transmitted to our web server at the end of the login process. Our web servers only use the authorization code to send it back to Feed Hawk. Our web servers do not log OAuth redirect requests.
Feedly supports Redirect URLs with custom URL schemes. Therefore Feedly authorization codes are never transmitted to our web servers.
1b. Fever and tt-rss
Fever and tt-rss are both self-hosted feed services. Neither has a posted privacy policy.
Fever-Feed Hawk Adapter is a Golden Hill Software open source product that makes Fever compatible with Feed Hawk. Fever-Feed Hawk Adapter does not interact with anything other than its Fever instance and MySQL database. Any interactions with the open source project on GitHub are subject to the GitHub Privacy Statement.
2. Feed Hawk Web Service
Feed Hawk may check a web service no more than once every 24 hours to look for important announcements related to the app. Feed Hawk does not transmit any information about the customer or the customer’s use of Feed Hawk when checking for announcements.
When necessary for maintenance and security purposes, we may log requests to the Feed Hawk Web Service. Information logged may include client IP addresses. That information will be used for the sole purpose of maintaining the web service and will be stored for no longer than necessary.
Feed Hawk does not report analytics information of any kind to the Feed Hawk Web Service. Feed Hawk uses public key pinning to validate the authenticity of this web service.
3. Apple
Because Feed Hawk is distributed through the App Store and runs on iOS, use of Feed Hawk is also subject to the Apple Privacy Policy.
Occasionally, either at the request of a customer or at the request of Golden Hill Software and with consent of the customer, a customer might beta test an unreleased version of Feed Hawk. When that happens, Golden Hill Software will supply the customer name and email address to Apple. That process is subject to the TestFlight Terms and Conditions.
4. Websites
In order to locate feeds on a website, Feed Hawk issues HTTP and HTTPS requests to that website. In the same way that a website can track direct visitors, a website may be able to track Feed Hawk customers when looking for feeds. It is also possible for a website to track customers when reading articles from a feed via article URLs, links inside articles, embedded images, and other embedded content such as scripts.
5. Email Exchanged with Golden Hill Software
Golden Hill Software email is hosted with FastMail, and is therefore subject to the FastMail Privacy Policy. Golden Hill Software may retain email indefinitely in order to provide context for future conversations.
Feed Hawk contains the ability to email a customer support request to Golden Hill Software. Feed Hawk adds a small bit of information about the device and installation to customer support messages by default. This helps to provide context around customer inquiries. If desired the customer can remove that information before sending the message.
6. Beyond this Product
When necessary for maintenance and security purposes, we may log requests to our website. Information logged may include visitor IP addresses. That information will be used for the sole purpose of maintaining the web site and will be stored for no longer than necessary.
Any correspondence via social network such as Facebook or Twitter is subject to the privacy policy of the relevant social network and is beyond the scope of this privacy policy.
This privacy policy does not apply to other Golden Hill Software products.
7. Sharing of Data
We are a United States company. When legally required to do so, we will provide information to government authorities. Beyond that, we will never share customer data. We make a point of minimizing the customer information we have.
8. Personal Data
The personal data Golden Hill Software has about Feed Hawk customers is limited to email received from customers and subscriptions to the company mailing list.
Upon written request from a customer to support@goldenhillsoftware.com, Golden Hill Software will supply the personal information we have about the inquiring customer. Similarly, we will delete our copy of said data upon written request.
Any such request must include all email addresses from which that customer sent us email or subscribed to our mailing list in order for us to find that information.
9. Contact
Any questions or concerns about this privacy policy should be sent to John Brayton at support@goldenhillsoftware.com.
10. Changes to this Policy
Future versions of Feed Hawk may require an update to this policy. Any changes will be noted on the Golden Hill Software blog.
Document History
First version: April 29, 2016
Updated to reflect addition of Fever and tt-rss, updated link to NewsBlur: September 30, 2016
Updated to reflect the change that Feed Hawk will send a web page URL to the Feed Hawk Web Service when it discovers that the page has RSS feeds linked from the body but not the header: November 21, 2016
Updated to reflect change in mail hosting service: January 26, 2017
Updated to reflect Inoreader using Oauth (web-based) login: February 25, 2017
Updated to reflect that the Feed Hawk Web Service now exists only for announcements, and not as a feed search engine when no feeds are found for a web page: August 25, 2017
Updated to reflect that Minimal Reader has shut down: January 3, 2018
Updated to reflect the addition of support for Feedly and to reflect the use of Universal Links when logging in to Inoreader and NewsBlur: March 12, 2018
Updated June, 11, 2018:
- Updated section “2. Feed Hawk Web Service” to describe reduced logging of requests behind the Feed Hawk Web Service.
- Added section “3. Apple” to account for Apple’s role in distributing Feed Hawk.
- Added section “4. Websites” to describe Feed Hawk’s interaction with websites.
- In section “5. Email Exchanged with Golden Hill Software”, changed the email retention policy.
- In section “6. Beyond this Product”, noted that correspondences made via social media are outside the scope of this document. Also limited the extent of logging requests to our website.
- Added section “8. Personal Data”.
- Added section “9. Contact”.
- Updated to reflect the removal of HockeyApp for crash reporting.
- Other wording changes that do not change the meaning.
Updated February 19, 2020: Section 1a stated that web-based login processes used universal links to avoid OAuth codes going to our web servers. Universal links were removed from Feed Hawk in version 1.7.5.
