Fallow
Privacy
Last updated 23 September 2026
Fallow works with no account, and without one nothing you
read leaves your phone. No reading list, no highlights, no reading
positions, no addresses. That is the architecture rather than a setting —
there is nowhere for it to go.
An account is optional. It adds syncing between your own devices, and the
browser extension, which needs one to have somewhere to send an article to.
This page is about what an account holds and what the extension does.
We do not track you, anywhere
No analytics. No crash reporting that reports to us. No advertising, no
attribution, no session replay, no third-party SDK of any kind, in the app or
in the extension. We do not sell or share anything, because there is nothing
collected to sell.
We have no way of knowing how often you open Fallow, what you read, how far
you got, or whether you are still using it. That is a permanent commitment
rather than a current state.
What an account holds
| What | Why |
|---|
| Your email address |
To send the six-digit code you sign in with, and to know that the same
person is signing in next time. There is no password, so there is none
to leak. |
| Your reading list and shelf — an article's address, title,
source, reading time, and how far through it you are; a book's identity
and your place in it |
So the device you pick up next knows where you were. |
| Your highlights and bookmarks, including the passage itself |
So a mark made on one device is there on the other. |
| Article text and pictures, and books you brought yourself |
So an article you saved is readable on a second device. A page can
change or disappear; the copy you saved should not. |
A device kind — iPhone, Android,
Firefox, Chrome — and when each last synced |
So you can see the devices signed in and end one you do not recognise.
Not a device name, a serial, or anything identifying the hardware. |
We can read what is stored, and we do not. An earlier
design sealed it so that we could not, and that was given up deliberately
rather than quietly: it made a second device unable to read your own library
without carrying a key between phones. The honest statement is therefore that
your reading sits on our server in a form we are able to open, and the
protection is that we hold as little as possible, never look, and let you take
it all back.
What the extension does
- It reads the tab you opened it over — the address, the title, and
the page's own preview picture — and only while the popup is open. It runs
nothing on any other page, and nothing in the background.
- It sends that page to your account when you press the button. Not
before, and never on its own.
- It stores your sign-in in the browser, on your computer.
It does not read page content, form fields, passwords, or your history, and
it has no access to any tab you have not opened it over.
Saving an article contacts the publisher
When you save an article, Fallow fetches that page — once, at the moment
you ask. Opening it later contacts nobody, so reading is not reported
to the publisher or to us. If you sign in to a publisher through Fallow, that
sign-in is stored by your phone the way a browser stores one, and is sent only
to that publisher.
Who else is involved
Three companies handle data on our behalf and no others:
- Cloudflare — runs the sync service and stores the files.
- Neon — the database, in Oregon, United States.
- Resend — sends the sign-in email, and so handles your address.
Deleting your account
Deleting removes the rows and the files, not a flag on them. Nothing
is kept for later, and nothing is restorable afterwards, including by us.
Your library stays on your phone. Deleting the account is leaving
the ecosystem rather than losing your books — you keep reading, without
syncing. Export is available at every tier and always will be.
Unused sign-in codes and expired sessions are removed automatically.
Children
Fallow is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything
from anyone under 13.
Changes
If this ever changes materially we will say so here with a date. The
commitments above — no telemetry, no advertising, no selling anything, an app
that works with no account — are not the kind of thing we intend to revise.
Getting in touch
hello@fallowreader.com