Privacy Policy — Orbit

Who we are

Orbit (heyorbit.io) is a personal news dashboard operated by Andrew Oh as an independent project. The contact email for any privacy question is oh.andrew2019@gmail.com.

What we collect

When you use Orbit anonymously (without signing in), we store:

Your preferences and interactions (topic filters, saved stories, thumbs, dismissals, impressions, mutes) — kept locally in your browser’s localStorage only. Nothing leaves your device.
Your approximate location, only if you grant the browser geolocation permission. Used to compute distance-to-event for the feed. Reverse-geocoded to a city name via BigDataCloud (a free public endpoint).

When you sign in, we additionally store:

Your account identifier and email from your authentication provider (Clerk, Google, or whichever method you use).
A copy of your preferences and interaction log on our server, so they sync across devices.

How we use it

To rank your news feed, suggest related stories, and remember what you’ve seen, saved, or muted. We do not sell or share interaction data with advertisers. There are no advertising or analytics trackers on Orbit.

Third parties we use

Clerk— authentication (account creation, sign-in, session management). Receives your email and OAuth profile when you sign in. Their privacy policy: clerk.com/legal/privacy.
Vercel— web hosting and serverless function execution. Sees standard HTTP request metadata (IP, user-agent). vercel.com/legal/privacy-policy.
Neon— managed Postgres database where your preferences and interaction log are stored when signed in. neon.tech/privacy-policy.
BigDataCloud— reverse-geocoding (lat/lng to city name). Only your coordinates are sent, never your account.

News articles surfaced in Orbit come from public news sources via GDELT. We do not send any user data to news publishers; we only fetch their public article metadata server-side.

Cookies

Orbit sets cookies only as needed for sign-in (managed by Clerk). No advertising or analytics cookies.

Data retention

We keep your signed-in preferences and interaction log as long as your account exists. You can delete your account at any time by emailing us; we’ll remove your records from our database within seven days.

Your rights

You can request access, correction, or deletion of any data we hold about you by emailing the address above. We’ll respond within a reasonable timeframe.

Changes to this policy

We may update this page. The “Last updated” date at the top reflects the most recent change. For material changes affecting signed-in users, we’ll surface a notice in-app.