Privacy Policy

Controller

HMZ craftsmanship GmbH
Zurich, Switzerland
Contact: hello@hmz.swiss · contact page

What we collect

Without a Bionic OS account: nothing. The app sends us no data. No analytics, advertising or crash-reporting services are built in.

What stays on your device

• Your zines, i.e. the addresses of the feeds you subscribed to.
• Downloaded articles and images as a cache, so you can read offline.
• Bookmarks, read articles and your position in each zine.
• Settings such as real photos, photos on the cover and glitch.

You can delete this data by clearing the app data in Android settings or by uninstalling the app. On iPhone, you delete it by deleting the app.

Requests to publishers and websites

Fanfold loads feeds, article pages and images directly from the servers of the respective publishers and websites, also periodically in the background to keep your zines up to date. Like any browser, the app transmits technically necessary information such as your IP address and an app identifier (user agent). The privacy policies of those providers apply to their servers. We do not see these requests.

When you enter a website in the newsstand or share a link from your browser to Fanfold, the app fetches that website to find its feeds. The newsstand catalogue is built into the app and needs no connection.

On iPhone, the share extension stores a shared link only on your device so that the app can open it in the newsstand.

Read aloud

“Read aloud” uses Android's text-to-speech on your device. The app itself sends no text to us or to third parties for this. You choose the speech engine in Android settings. On iPhone, Fanfold uses iOS text-to-speech (Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content).

Bionic OS account (optional)

You can connect Fanfold to your account at Bionic OS (bionic-os.com), which is also operated by HMZ craftsmanship GmbH. Sign-in uses “Sign in with Google”: Google confirms your identity (name, email address, profile picture) to Bionic OS; the app never sees your Google password. The app then stores a session token on the device. Connecting to Bionic OS is currently only available in the Android app.

With a connected account, the app exchanges the following with Bionic OS:

• Sync: your feeds and categories, read articles and bookmarks, so they match across your devices.
• Full text: the address of an article, so Bionic OS can return its full text.
• Summary (Friday): the title and text of an article you ask to summarise. Bionic OS creates the summary using an AI service.
• Feed search: the address of the website whose feeds you are looking for.
• Editions: your Morning Briefing and your TrendRadar topics, which Fanfold shows as zines.

Processing at Bionic OS is governed by theBionic OS privacy policy, which also lists the service providers used. “Disconnect” in the menu signs the app out and deletes the session token. Your zines and bookmarks stay on the device. You manage or delete your Bionic OS account itself in Bionic OS.

Purchase

Fanfold is sold through Google Play. Payment is handled entirely by Google; Google's terms and privacy policy apply. We only receive sales reports from Google and no payment data.

Permissions (Android)

Internet and network state, to load feeds and to detect when you are offline. For background updates the app uses Android's WorkManager, which needs permission to reschedule after a restart, to keep the device awake briefly and to run a background service. The app does not use any other permissions such as location, contacts, microphone or camera.

Security

The connection to Bionic OS is encrypted (HTTPS). Feeds and images are loaded over encrypted connections wherever the publisher supports it.

Children

The app is not specifically aimed at children and does not collect data from children.

Your rights

You have the statutory rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, data portability and objection. Without a Bionic OS account we hold no data about you, and you can delete it directly on your device. For data held by Bionic OS, write to hello@hmz.swiss. You may also lodge a complaint with the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) or the competent authority in the EU.

Changes

If the app changes, we will update this policy. The date at the top applies.