Privacy Policy

ArticleFM is an iPhone and iPad application published by AM Partners LTD, a company registered in England and Wales.

AM Partners LTD is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. That means we decide why and how your data is processed, and we are accountable for it.

• Controller: AM Partners LTD
• Registered address: 124 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom
• Privacy contact: privacy@articlefm.io
• General support: support@articlefm.io

We are not required to appoint a Data Protection Officer, so privacy enquiries are handled directly by the company at the address above.

This policy covers the ArticleFM app (bundle identifier com.am-apps-abrarm.articlefm) and the articlefm.io website.

Information you give us.

• Account details— your email address and authentication credentials when you create an account. If you sign in with Apple and choose to hide your email, we only ever receive Apple's private relay address.
• Article content — the URLs you submit and the article text extracted from them, or text you paste directly.
• Preferences — your default narrator voice, playback speed, and other in-app settings.
• Correspondence — the content of emails and support requests you send us.

Information created by your use of the app.

• Generated audio and transcripts produced from the articles you convert.
• Library and listening data — which articles are saved, playback progress, and offline downloads.
• Subscription status — whether you have an active ArticleFM subscription, its renewal state, and an anonymised purchase identifier. We never receive your card number or Apple Account password.

Information collected automatically.

• Usage data — screens opened, features used, and in-app events, so we can see what works and what breaks.
• Diagnostics — crash reports, error logs, device model, operating system version, and app version.
• Identifiers — an internal user ID, an app-instance identifier, and, if you allow notifications, a push token.

We do not collect your precise location, your contacts, your photos, your health data, or your financial details.

Under UK GDPR and EU GDPR we must have a lawful basis for each purpose for which we process your data. Ours are:

• Creating and running your account — so you can sign in, keep a library, and use the app across devices. Lawful basis: performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b)).
• Converting articles into audio — extracting the text you submit, sending it to a text-to-speech provider, and storing the resulting audio and transcript for you. Lawful basis: performance of a contract.
• Managing subscriptions and entitlements — confirming whether you have paid access and restoring purchases. Lawful basis: performance of a contract.
• Providing customer support — answering your emails and investigating problems you report. Lawful basis: performance of a contract, and our legitimate interests in supporting our users (Article 6(1)(f)).
• Keeping the app working, secure, and free of abuse — diagnostics, crash reporting, rate limiting, and fraud prevention. Lawful basis: legitimate interests in operating a reliable and secure service.
• Understanding how the app is used — aggregated product analytics to decide what to build and fix. Lawful basis: legitimate interests in improving our product. We use analytics at an aggregate level and not to build advertising profiles.
• Sending push notifications — for example, telling you that a conversion has finished. Lawful basis: your consent (Article 6(1)(a)), given through the iOS notification permission prompt. You can withdraw it at any time in iOS Settings, with no effect on anything else.
• Meeting our legal obligations — keeping accounting and tax records and responding to lawful requests. Lawful basis: legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c)).

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered the impact on you and concluded that the processing is proportionate and not something you would find unexpected. You can object at any time — see Your rights.

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not use it for advertising or cross-app tracking. We do not use your article content to train our own machine learning models.

We use a small number of service providers to run ArticleFM. They process personal data only on our documented instructions, under written data processing agreements. They are:

• Google (Firebase Authentication, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, Cloud Messaging) — Google Ireland Limited / Google LLC. Receives and stores your account identifier and email address, your article URLs and extracted text, your transcripts and generated audio files, your preferences and library data, and — for notifications — your push token. This is the core infrastructure the app runs on.
• Google Crashlytics — receives crash reports and diagnostic logs: device model, OS version, app version, stack traces, and an app-instance identifier.
• Google Analytics for Firebase — receives in-app event and usage data together with an app-instance identifier and your user ID, so we can understand how features are used. Configured for product analytics, not advertising.
• RevenueCat, Inc. — receives your user identifier and the purchase receipt data Apple issues, in order to tell the app whether your subscription is active. It does not receive your payment card details.
• Third-party AI text-to-speech providers — receive the text of the article you asked us to convert, in order to return synthesised speech. They are contractually prohibited from using that text for their own purposes, including model training, and from retaining it beyond what is needed to generate the audio. They do not receive your name, email address, or account identifier.
• Apple Inc.— processes your purchase as the merchant of record when you subscribe, and provides Sign in with Apple where you use it. Apple's handling of that data is governed by Apple's own privacy policy, not ours.

We may also disclose data where we are legally required to — for example in response to a valid court order — or where it is necessary to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims. If AM Partners LTD is ever sold or merged, your data may transfer to the acquirer, who would remain bound by this policy; we would tell you before that happened.

AM Partners LTD is based in the United Kingdom. Our providers run on global cloud infrastructure, so your data is processed on servers outside the UK and the European Economic Area, including in the United States.

Where data leaves the UK or the EEA, we rely on the safeguards required by Article 46 of the UK and EU GDPR:

• the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, together with the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum (or the UK IDTA where it applies), incorporated into our contracts with each provider; and
• an assessment of the destination country's laws, plus technical measures — encryption in transit and at rest, and access controls — to protect the data on arrival.

You can request a copy of the transfer safeguards we rely on by emailing privacy@articlefm.io.

We keep personal data only as long as we have a reason to. In practice:

• Account details and preferences — for as long as your account is open, then erased when you delete it.
• Article text, transcripts, generated audio, and library data — until you delete the article, or until you delete your account.
• Inactive accounts — if you do not sign in for 24 consecutive months, we contact you at your registered email and, if there is no response within 30 days, delete the account and its content.
• Crash and diagnostic reports — 90 days.
• Analytics event data — 14 months at event level, after which only aggregated, non-identifying statistics remain.
• Purchase and transaction records — 6 years from the end of the relevant financial year, as required by UK company and tax law.
• Support correspondence — 24 months from our last reply.
• Encrypted infrastructure backups — 35 days, after which they roll off automatically.

See Delete Your Account for the full deletion process and what survives it.

If you are in the UK or the EEA, data protection law gives you the following rights over your personal data. They apply to all our users, wherever you are, as a matter of our own policy.

• Access — ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, and information about how we use it.
• Rectification — have inaccurate data corrected and incomplete data completed.
• Erasure — have your data deleted. You can do this yourself in the app at any time: Settings → Delete Account.
• Restriction — ask us to pause processing while a dispute about accuracy or lawfulness is resolved.
• Portability — receive the data you gave us in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, or have it sent to another controller where technically feasible.
• Objection — object to processing we carry out on the basis of legitimate interests, including analytics.
• Withdraw consent — turn off push notifications in iOS Settings at any time. Withdrawal does not affect processing carried out before you withdrew.

To exercise any of these, email privacy@articlefm.io from the address on your account. We respond within one month, and will tell you if we need to extend that for a complex request. Exercising your rights is free, and we will not treat you differently for doing so.

Complaints. If you think we have handled your data badly, please tell us first — we would like the chance to fix it. You also have the right to complain to the UK supervisory authority, the Information Commissioner's Office:

• ico.org.uk · helpline 0303 123 1113
• Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF, United Kingdom

If you are in the EEA, you may instead complain to the supervisory authority in your country of residence.

ArticleFM is not directed at children. It is intended for users aged 13 and over, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 13.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child under 13 has created an account, email privacy@articlefm.io and we will delete the account and its data promptly.

We protect your data with measures appropriate to the risk, including encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest, authentication handled by Firebase Authentication rather than passwords we store ourselves, server-side access rules that stop one account reading another's data, and access to production systems limited to those who need it.

No system is perfectly secure. If a personal data breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify the ICO within 72 hours and tell you directly where the law requires it.

Apple requires every app to publish an App Privacy label. Ours mirrors this policy exactly. The data we declare as collected and linked to your identity is:

• Contact Info — your email address (app functionality).
• User Content — the article URLs and text you submit and the audio generated from them (app functionality).
• Identifiers — your user ID (app functionality, analytics).
• Usage Data — product interaction data (analytics, app functionality).
• Diagnostics — crash and performance data (app functionality).

None of this is used for tracking, as Apple defines it, and none of it is used for third-party advertising. We do not share your data with data brokers, and we do not link it with data from other companies' apps or websites for advertising or measurement.

We update this policy when what we do with data changes. The date at the top of the page always shows the current version.

If a change materially affects your rights — a new purpose, a new category of data, or a new sub-processor — we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect, and where the law requires it we will ask for your consent.

Questions about this policy, or about your data:

• Privacy and data requests: privacy@articlefm.io
• Everything else: support@articlefm.io
• By post: AM Partners LTD, 124 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom