Privacy Policy — TDot News App

Last updated: September 8, 2026

TDot News is a news app for tdotnews.com. This policy explains what it does with your information. The short version: there is no account, no advertising network, no tracking of what you read, and almost nothing is collected at all.

What stays on your phone

Unless you turn notifications on, none of this leaves your device and we cannot see any of it:

Stories you save, and the copies kept for offline reading
What you follow — sections, cities and regions, and any custom follows you build, such as Politics in Brantford
Whether you want alerts as short cards or as full stories
Your recent searches
Your text size setting
The cached headlines that let the app work without a signal

Deleting the app deletes all of it. You can clear saved stories yourself under Settings → Storage.

What the app sends us

Only if you turn on notifications. If you switch notifications on, the app sends tdotnews.com:

a notification token — an anonymous identifier your phone’s operating system issues so notifications can reach this one device
what you follow, so we only send you news you asked for. That means the sections and the cities or regions you have chosen, and any custom follows you have built — a custom follow can combine a section, a place, a story type and a tag, so “Politics in Brantford” is stored as exactly that
whether you want alerts as short cards or as full stories, so we do not send you the form you did not ask for
the app’s version number, so we can tell which release a problem came from

We do not receive your name, email address, phone number, location, or anything about which stories you read. The token identifies a device, not a person.

My TDot. If you have turned notifications on, the app can also ask us for the stories that match what you follow, and we answer with that list. That tells us what you asked to follow — which we already hold in order to send the alerts — but it still tells us nothing about which stories you go on to open. If notifications are off, the app builds that list on your phone instead and asks us nothing.

Turning notifications off in Settings stops us sending to your device straight away: the record is marked inactive and is left out of every send from that moment. It is deleted outright when you uninstall — the next notification we try to send is rejected, and the record is removed automatically. You can also ask us to delete it sooner, at any time, by writing to [email protected].

If you never turn notifications on, the app sends us nothing beyond the ordinary requests needed to fetch the news.

Notifications, including promotional ones

When you turn notifications on, you are agreeing to receive two kinds of message from TDot News. You choose which form they take — a short card you can read in the notification itself, or a full story alert:

News alerts — breaking stories, and stories in the sections you follow.
Occasional messages about TDot News itself — our newsletter, events we are running, reader surveys, subscription or membership offers, and features produced with a sponsor. Sponsored content is always labelled as such.

We do not send notifications on behalf of other companies, and we do not sell or rent your notification token to anyone.

You can stop all of it at any time, with no explanation needed, by turning notifications off in the app under Settings → Breaking news, or by turning them off for TDot News in your phone’s own settings. Withdrawal takes effect immediately.

These messages are sent by:

TDot News
[email protected]

Email, if you choose to give it

The app does not currently ask for your email address and does not collect one.

If we later add a way to sign up for a newsletter or offers from inside the app, it will be a separate, clearly labelled choice — never bundled into turning notifications on, and never a condition of reading the news. We would tell you what we intend to send before you subscribe, and every email would carry an unsubscribe link. If and when that happens, this policy will be updated first.

Ordinary web requests

Reading the news means asking tdotnews.com for it. Those requests are logged by our web server the same way a visit to the website is, and include your IP address and a general description of your device. We use these logs to keep the service running and to detect abuse. We do not use them to build a profile of you.

When the app opens our website

Some links open tdotnews.com inside an in-app browser: “Visit tdotnews.com” in Settings, and links within a story. Once you are on the website, the website’s own privacy practices apply — including Google Analytics, which we use to understand which stories are read and how people arrive at the site. Google Analytics sets its own identifiers and is subject to Google’s privacy policy.

The app itself contains no analytics software. Reading a story inside the app, rather than following a link out to the site, is not measured or reported anywhere.

Other services the app relies on

Expo push service (Expo, United States) delivers our notifications. It receives your notification token and the text of the notification. Used only if you turn notifications on.
Google Firebase Cloud Messaging delivers notifications on Android phones; Apple’s Push Notification service does the same on iPhones. Both are part of how notifications work on those platforms.
images.weserv.nl resizes our photographs so the app uses less of your data. Loading an image sends that service the address of the image and, as with any image on the internet, your IP address. It receives nothing about you or what you are reading beyond that request.

What the app asks your phone for

Android apps must declare every permission they use, and you can check ours on the Play Store listing under “App permissions”. The app declares:

Permission	Why	Does it ask you?
Notifications	To send you news alerts	Yes — the only prompt
Internet	To fetch the news	No
Network state	To know when you are offline	No
Vibrate	The small tap when you save a story	No

That is the complete list. The app specifically blocks the file-storage permissions that some of its components would otherwise request, because it has no business reading your files — everything it saves goes into its own private storage. It also blocks the advertising ID, so it cannot be used to track you across apps even if a future component tried to.

There is no camera, microphone, location, contacts or calendar access, because the app never asks for those permissions at all.

What the app does not do

No advertising network, and no advertising identifiers
No analytics or tracking software inside the app
No account, sign-in, or password
No access to your contacts, camera, microphone, files, or precise location
Your information is never sold or rented to anyone

Children

The app is a general news service and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from them.

Your choices and your rights

Turn notifications off in the app under Settings → Breaking news, or in your phone’s settings for TDot News. This stops all sending to your device at once.
Delete everything the app has stored by uninstalling it.
Under Canadian privacy law you may ask what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Write to [email protected]. The only thing tied to your device is an anonymous notification token. Uninstalling the app deletes it, and you can ask us to remove it sooner.
If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a privacy question, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at priv.gc.ca.

Changes

If this policy changes we will update the date at the top of this page. If we begin collecting something new, we will say so in the app before it happens.