BETAPrivacy Policy
The short version: Muuted is a small, independent feed reader — it does not sell ads, track you across the web, or build behavioral profiles. Muuted collects what is needed to provide the service, process payments, keep accounts working, and support optional features you choose to use. It is a small, independent business — the opposite of the businesses that make money studying you.
Who operates Muuted. Muuted is operated by Muuted LLC, a Virginia limited liability company based in the United States. It remains an independent, self-funded product. In this policy, "Muuted," "I," "me," "we," and "us" refer to Muuted LLC.
What Muuted collects. Depending on which features you use: your email address (sign-in, account notices, support); the feeds, sources, muted words, muted topics, preferences and saved stories you choose; subscription and transaction information received from Stripe; support messages and any attachments you send; feature activity and simple counts used to operate the service and show you your own stats; the article text and headlines needed to provide AI features when you use them; and technical information such as IP addresses, browser and device type, request logs, sign-in events and security events. Muuted does not collect your contacts, precise location, or data for advertising profiles.
Feeds, muted words, and encryption. Your feeds and muted words are private to your account. Your feed list and muted words are stored encrypted at rest, and processed only as needed to provide the service — fetching your feeds, applying your muted words, and showing you your feed. Two honest caveats: this is not end-to-end encryption (the service must process your feeds and muted words to work), and short-lived internal caches that record why a story was hidden can hold the matching word or topic in readable form for up to about 30 days.
The shared source directory. When you add a source, Muuted may record basic, non-personal information about that source — such as its public URL, title, and whether it is active — in a shared source directory. This helps Muuted recognize sources and improve source suggestions. The directory does not record which account added a source, and your personal source list remains encrypted and private to your account.
What Muuted stores and caches. To show your feed, Muuted temporarily caches feed titles, links, timestamps, and the excerpts publishers include in their public feeds (up to about 7 days). If you use optional AI features, Muuted may briefly cache the article text and summaries those features need (up to about 14 days). Publisher images may be briefly cached and recompressed (up to about 7 days) so your feed loads quickly. Cached content may be deleted, refreshed, or stop appearing if the source changes, becomes unavailable, or causes technical, legal, or abuse issues. None of this is used to profile you for ads.
What Muuted does not do. Muuted does not: sell your personal data; share it for advertising; use tracking or advertising cookies; track you across other websites; build a behavioral profile of you; or use your feed list or muted words to target ads.
Cookies and analytics. Muuted uses a small number of first-party cookies: one keeps you signed in; one remembers that you have visited before, so the website shows returning visitors the right message rather than the sign-up pitch; and one short-lived cookie carries an invite through sign-up. Muuted also stores display preferences (theme, layout, text size) in your browser, which never leave your device. There are no advertising cookies and no cross-site tracking. For basic usage understanding I use Umami (self-hosted, cookieless, aggregate) — it can tell me a page was visited, not who you are, and it doesn't track you across the web. Because Muuted doesn't do cross-site tracking, it doesn't respond to browser "Do Not Track" signals.
AI features. When you use an AI feature — today, smart filtering and source suggestions — Muuted normally processes the necessary content using a self-hosted AI model operated by Muuted on private infrastructure. Smart filtering tries the self-hosted model first. If it is unavailable, the headlines being filtered — and the wording of the mute they are checked against — are sent to a hosted AI provider (currently Groq) so that filtering keeps working rather than silently stopping. If that list of providers ever changes, this page will name the new provider before the change takes effect. Article summaries are different: they try the self-hosted model first, but if it is unavailable the article text is sent to a hosted AI provider to produce the summary (currently Groq or GitHub Models — see Service providers below for the current list). Source suggestions can fail over the same way, sending the topic you searched for. Duplicate-story detection is separate again and is described below. Only the content needed to complete the requested feature is sent for processing — for smart filtering, the headlines being judged and the muting preference you wrote; for source suggestions, the topic you searched for. If another AI feature is switched on for your account, the same rule applies: only the content that feature needs is sent. Muuted does not include your email address, account ID, feed list, or reading history in that request. Muuted does not use this content to build an advertising profile or sell it to third parties. AI results are cached by content, not by account — two people who summarise the same article share one cached result, and the cache holds no information about who asked. Summaries and the article text behind them are kept up to about 14 days. Muuted does not summarise articles it can tell are behind a paywall. Optional AI features run only when you invoke them, and can be left unused entirely. Duplicate-story grouping is the exception: it runs automatically while your feed is built, and is described next.
Grouping duplicate stories. To fold near-identical stories into one card, Muuted compares story headlines using an embedding model run by a hosted AI provider (currently GitHub Models — see Service providers below for the current list). This runs as part of building your feed rather than as an opt-in feature, and it currently has no self-hosted path. Only the headlines being compared are sent — never your email address, account ID, source list, or reading history — and the results are cached for up to about 14 days.
Payments. Payments are processed by Stripe. Muuted does not receive or store your full card number. Stripe may process payment, billing, subscription, tax, fraud-prevention, refund, chargeback, and transaction information under its own terms and privacy policy.
Service providers. Muuted relies on a small number of providers, used only to operate, secure, and support the app: email delivery (Brevo, with iCloud as a fallback) for sign-in and account emails; hosting and infrastructure (Hetzner); Stripe for payments; Umami (self-hosted) for cookieless aggregate analytics; Cloudflare, which sits in front of the site for security and delivery and runs the anti-bot check on the sign-in page; and GitHub Models and Groq, which run duplicate-story grouping and act as fallback providers for summaries and source suggestions. This list is current as of the effective date below and may change as the service evolves; Muuted keeps it up to date here, and will update it before a new provider begins handling your content.
When Muuted may disclose information. Only when necessary to: provide and operate the service; process payments; respond to your support requests; comply with law, legal process, or enforceable government requests; protect the security, rights, and integrity of Muuted, users, publishers, or others; or investigate abuse, fraud, or misuse. Muuted does not sell personal data.
Your choices and rights. You can export your data or delete your account from settings, or by emailing [email protected]. You may also contact [email protected] to request access to, correction of, deletion of, or export of your personal information, or to opt out of optional AI features. Deleting your account removes your feeds, muted words, saved stories, activity counters and account record. Some things tied to your earlier activity are not removed by that action: support messages you sent (including any screenshots you attached), sign-in session history, and records kept for legal, security, billing, fraud-prevention or dispute-resolution reasons. You can ask for those to be deleted too by emailing [email protected].
Data retention. Muuted keeps account information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the service. Caches expire on their own: feed metadata and excerpts after about 7 days, AI summaries and the article text behind them after about 14 days, and the caches behind smart filtering after about 30 days. Web-server logs, which record the requesting IP address and the page requested, are kept about 14 days. A record of emails Muuted has sent you (recipient, subject and delivery status) is kept for support and abuse investigation; the message text is cleared after about 180 days, and sign-in links are stripped out before anything is written down. Support messages and any screenshots you send are kept indefinitely unless you ask for them to be deleted, because they are the record of a conversation. Deleted information can persist in encrypted backups until those backups are overwritten in the normal rotation.
What you send support. When you email support or use the feedback form, Muuted receives and keeps what you send — your message, any screenshots or files you attach, and the diagnostic details the form includes. Screenshots often contain more than people intend, so send only what's needed. These are kept as the record of the conversation until you ask for them to be deleted.
Technical logs. Like any web service, Muuted's servers record ordinary request information: the requesting IP address, browser and device type, timestamps, the page requested, sign-in events, errors, and security or abuse-prevention events. This is used to run and secure the service, not to build a profile of you.
If Muuted changes hands. If Muuted is ever involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganisation, insolvency, or a sale of all or part of the business, information may transfer as part of that transaction. Muuted will require the recipient to handle it consistently with this policy, and will give you notice of material changes first.
Security. Muuted uses reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect your information. No internet service can be guaranteed completely secure.
Children. Muuted is not directed to children. You must be at least 13 to use it, or 16 where local law requires that age, matching the Terms of Service. Muuted does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone below that age; if we learn that we have, we delete it and close the account.
International users. Muuted is operated from the United States. If you use it from outside the U.S., your information may be processed in the United States and in other places where Muuted's service providers operate.
Changes. Muuted may update this policy from time to time; changes are posted here with a new effective date. If changes are material, I'll provide reasonable notice in the app or by email when appropriate. Material changes to what Muuted collects, or to who processes it, apply going forward only — information already collected stays governed by the policy that was in effect when it was collected, unless you agree otherwise.
Effective July 30, 2026. Questions or privacy requests: [email protected]