Privacy
Privacy is structural, not promised.
Most privacy policies describe what a company promises to do with your data. This page describes something different: how SocialWeb is designed so that the privacy properties hold whether or not you trust us.
How it works
Five structural guarantees.
Your subscriptions stay between you and SocialWeb.
When you subscribe to a source, SocialWeb's servers fetch that feed on your behalf. The publisher sees a request from SocialWeb — not your IP address, not your account, not your identity. A publisher on SocialWeb cannot build a reading profile on you because they never see you.
Web search goes through us, not directly to a provider.
When you search the web from SocialWeb, your query travels through SocialWeb's servers before reaching any search provider. The search provider sees a request from SocialWeb. They cannot associate your search history with you, because from their perspective, the request came from us.
Self-hosted users own and control every byte.
If you run your own SocialWeb instance, your data lives on your hardware. You can delete it completely at any time. We have no copy, no backup, no shadow profile. The self-hosting path exists precisely for people who want this level of control.
Private video streams server-to-server, never through a third party.
Video shared on SocialWeb travels directly from the host server to the subscriber's client. No corporate intermediary holds the stream. No CDN profile is built. The model mirrors how podcasts have always worked: a URL, a direct download, nothing more.
AI is opt-in. Cloud AI runs under terms that exclude training.
SocialWeb does not apply AI to your content without your consent. If you enable cloud AI, it runs through Baseten under terms that explicitly prohibit using your data for model training. The self-hosted path supports local models entirely — the AI never leaves your machine.
Plain facts
What we don’t do.
- We don’t show ads.
- We don’t rank or algorithmically reorder your feed.
- We don’t profile your reading habits.
- We don’t sell data. No data product exists to sell.
- We don’t use third-party trackers on this website. Verifiable in the page source.
- We don’t load any fonts, scripts, or assets from external domains.
The difference
Two models for getting information.
The magazine model.
When you subscribe to a magazine, the distributor delivers it. The publisher knows someone at your address subscribes. But once the magazine arrives, no one tracks which articles you read, how long you spent on page 47, or what you highlighted. The reading is yours. The publisher gets paid; they don’t get a profile.
The clerk-with-clipboard model.
Most social platforms work like a clerk at a newsstand who follows you around with a clipboard. They note every headline you stop at, how long you look, what you skip. By the time you leave, they know your reading habits better than you do. And they sell those notes — to advertisers, to data brokers, to anyone willing to pay.
SocialWeb is the magazine. We deliver your subscriptions. We don’t follow you around the newsstand.