Effective 12 September 2026 · Last updated 22 September 2026
The short version
Briefcaster has no accounts, no sign-up, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking, and no server of its own. Everything it remembers about you — which sources you have switched on, the order you put them in, which bulletins you have already heard — is stored on your own device and goes nowhere else.
The only network connections Briefcaster makes are to the broadcasters whose public podcast feeds it plays, and to Apple or Google for purchases. It does not send your information to me or to anyone else, because there is nowhere to send it to.
Who this is from
Briefcaster is made by James McChesney, trading as JEM Studios. If you have a question about this policy or about anything the app does, write to james@harborviewholdings.group. I read that address myself.
This policy covers both versions of Briefcaster:
- iPhone, iPad and Mac — bundle identifier
com.jamesmcchesney.briefcaster - Android — application ID
app.briefcaster
The two are the same product and behave the same way. Where a platform differs, it says so below.
What Briefcaster does not collect
To be specific, because “we value your privacy” is not specific:
- There is no account and no way to create one. No email address, no username, no password, no phone number, no social sign-in.
- There is no analytics of any kind. The app does not measure what you listen to, how long you use it, or whether you opened it at all.
- There is no advertising and no advertising identifier. On iOS the app does not touch the IDFA and shows no App Tracking Transparency prompt; on Android it does not read the advertising ID. It has nothing to track you with.
- There is no crash or diagnostic reporting operated by me.
- Briefcaster runs no server. There is no backend to hold a profile, no database with your name in it, and no logs of your listening.
About third-party code
The iOS app is built entirely on Apple’s own frameworks and has no external dependencies at all.
The Android app is built on Google’s own Jetpack libraries — Compose for the screens, Media3 for playback, DataStore for settings — and on Kotlin’s standard libraries, because on Android those are the platform. When purchasing is enabled it will also use Google Play’s billing library. None of them is an advertising SDK, an analytics SDK or a crash reporter, and none of them sends anything about you anywhere. I would rather name them than claim a round number that is not quite true.
What is stored on your device
Briefcaster keeps your settings in the standard preferences store on your device — user defaults on iOS and macOS, DataStore on Android. None of it is transmitted anywhere. In full, it is:
- Which sources you have switched off or hidden — so your queue stays as you left it
- The order of your sources and language folders — so your queue plays in your order
- Which languages you picked at first launch — so you are not asked twice
- Episode identifiers for bulletins you have finished — so the same bulletin does not repeat. Capped at the most recent 1,500 and then discarded oldest-first
- Playback speed, sleep and autoplay preferences — so the app behaves the way you set it
- Any custom feed you add yourself — so the feed you added is still there next time
- Whether your purchase is active — so the app does not have to ask the store before it can start
The “episode identifiers” are the identifiers the broadcaster publishes in its own feed — a URL or a GUID for the bulletin. They describe the broadcast, not you.
All of it is deleted when you delete Briefcaster. There is no copy anywhere else to delete. If iCloud Backup or Android Backup is switched on in your device settings, your device’s backup may include these preferences; that backup belongs to Apple or Google, is encrypted, and is governed by their privacy policy rather than this one.
Location — optional, and used once
Briefcaster has one feature called Local First. If you allow it, the app looks up which country you are in so that the news in your country’s language plays first instead of English, and so the nearest weather bulletin is switched on. That is the entire purpose.
Here is exactly what happens:
- The app asks for foreground location permission — “When In Use” on iOS, approximate location on Android. If you decline, nothing happens and the default order is kept. You can decline forever and lose nothing but that one convenience.
- If you allow it, the app requests a single, deliberately coarse fix — accurate to about a kilometre, which is all that is needed to tell one country from another.
- That coordinate is turned into a country by the operating system’s own geocoder — Apple’s on iOS, Android’s on Android. That request is handled by Apple or Google under their own privacy policies. I do not receive it.
- The app keeps the two-letter country code just long enough to reorder your list, then discards it. The coordinate is never written to disk, never stored, and never sent to me or to any broadcaster.
Briefcaster never requests background or “Always” location and never tracks your movement. On Android it does not ask at all until you press Set From My Location in Settings yourself. You can switch Local First off in Settings, and you can revoke location permission at any time in your device’s own settings.
Connections to broadcasters
Briefcaster plays freely published podcast feeds from public broadcasters, newsrooms and radio stations — currently 624 of them, in 124 languages. When a bulletin loads, your device connects directly to that broadcaster’s feed host and audio server. Nothing is routed through me.
That means those broadcasters and their content delivery networks can see the ordinary things any web server sees about a visitor: your IP address, the time of the request, and the file requested. This is unavoidable for any app that plays audio from someone else’s server, and it is the same information your web browser would hand over if you visited their website. What each broadcaster does with it is governed by that organisation’s own privacy policy, not this one.
Briefcaster adds no identifier of its own to those requests — no account, no device identifier, nothing that ties one request to another or to you. The requests identify themselves as a mobile Safari browser, because a number of broadcasters reject requests that do not.
It also carries no cookies. Feed requests are made with cookie handling switched off, so a cookie a broadcaster tries to set is refused rather than stored and handed back on the next fetch. Nothing persists between one request and the next that could link them together.
Two feeds — world.kbs.co.kr (KBS World Radio, Korea) and stvr.sk (STVR, Slovakia) — are published by those broadcasters over plain HTTP rather than HTTPS, and so are not encrypted in transit. Every other source in the catalogue is loaded over HTTPS. If that matters to you, switch those two off in Settings and they will never be requested.
Purchases
Briefcaster is free to use with six sources. Unlocking the full catalogue is a purchase — monthly, yearly, or a one-time lifetime unlock.
All purchasing is handled by the platform’s own store: Apple’s StoreKit on iOS and macOS, Google Play Billing on Android. You pay Apple or Google, not me. Briefcaster never sees and never asks for your card number, your billing address, or your store account password. The app receives only a yes-or-no answer about whether a purchase is active, and it attaches no identifier of its own to the transaction.
“Restore Purchases” asks the store to re-check that same yes-or-no answer. A purchase is tied to your store account, not to a device.
What I receive as the developer
Apple and Google give every developer aggregate sales and usage reports — how many downloads and purchases there were in a country on a given day, and anonymous crash reports if you have opted into sharing them with developers in your device settings. These are their reports, aggregated or anonymised by them before I see them, and they do not identify you. I have no way to connect any of it to an individual person, and no way to see what anyone listens to.
Children
Briefcaster collects no personal information from anyone, including children. There is no account to create, no profile to build, no messaging, and no user-generated content. The app is a player for public news broadcasts; some of those broadcasts cover news that is not suitable for young children, which is a matter of content rather than privacy.
Your choices
- Stop a broadcaster seeing your requests: switch that source off, or hide it. The app will not contact it.
- Stop location being used: switch Local First off in Settings, or revoke location permission in your device’s settings.
- Erase everything Briefcaster knows: delete the app. All of it goes with it.
If you are in the EU, the UK, California, or anywhere else with a right to access, correct, export or delete the personal data a company holds about you, the answer is that I hold none: there is no account, no server and no record associated with you, so there is nothing for me to look up, hand over or erase. You are welcome to write to the address above to confirm that, and I will answer.
Security
The information Briefcaster stores never leaves your device, so it is protected by your device’s own encryption and passcode. Feeds and audio are loaded over HTTPS with the two exceptions named above.
Changes to this policy
Everything above describes Briefcaster as it is on the date at the top of this page. If a future version ever changes what it does with information, this page will be updated before that version ships and the “last updated” date will change.
To name the obvious example rather than leave it to the small print: if a free tier were ever supported by advertising, that would mean a third-party ad SDK, and that is exactly the kind of change this section exists for. It would be described here first, it would appear on the store privacy label, and nothing could be used to track you across other apps without your explicit permission through the system prompt. Paid access would remain free of it.
Contact
james@harborviewholdings.group
Questions about this policy, or about anything the app does — that address reaches me, and I read it myself.
It is also the place for suggestions. If something about Briefcaster could work better, say so. And if you know a news bulletin it ought to carry and does not — your own city’s station, a language that is missing, anything published as a free public feed — send it: the feed address and the language are enough to go on. A good part of the catalogue is there because somebody pointed at something I had not found.