What Read collects about you
Nothing. There is no sign-in, no user account and no profile. Meantime Studio does not receive the articles you save, what you read or listen to, the sources you follow, your notes or highlights, or any identifier for your device.
No tracking, no advertising
Read contains no analytics, no crash-reporting service, no advertising and no third-party tracking code of any kind.
What stays on your devices and in your iCloud
Your library, reading and listening positions, highlights, notes, the sources you follow, your search index and your settings are stored on your device. When iCloud is on, your library is also kept in your own private iCloud, so your iPhone and Mac show the same articles. Only you can see it there. Nothing is sent to Meantime Studio.
Speech and translation happen on your device
Read speaks English, Spanish and French articles with natural voices that run on your iPhone or Mac, and other languages with the voices built into your device. The natural voices are not inside the app: the first time you listen, Read downloads them once (about 110 MB, more for Japanese if you ask for it) from Hugging Face and GitHub, where they are published. Those sites see an ordinary download from your device; nothing about you or your articles is sent with it. It translates with Apple's on-device translation, and Today's mix summarises stories on your iPhone with Apple Intelligence, where your iPhone supports it. The text of your articles is not uploaded anywhere to be read aloud or translated. The first time you translate from a language, your device may download that language from Apple.
Who Read talks to
- The websites you save and follow. Articles, images and news feeds are fetched directly from the publishers' own servers. Those servers see your IP address, as they would in any browser.
- News search. When you search for news, the words you search for are sent to the GDELT Project's free news search, which returns matching stories. Nothing else about you is sent with them.
- Pages you open in Read are shown with Apple's Safari view, which follows Safari's own privacy settings.
The cookie-banner extension
Read's optional Safari extension hides cookie banners using a list stored on your device. It does not see or record the pages you visit.
Children
Read is not directed at children and collects no personal information from anyone, including children.
Changes
If this policy changes, the revised version will be posted on this page with a new date below.
Contact
Questions about privacy: hi@meantime.work
Meantime Studio · Last updated 18 October 2026