Privacy Policy

Last updated: 18 October 2026

SumThePod watches the podcasts you choose, transcribes new episodes, summarises them and emails you every morning. This page says which data that involves, what we use it for, who else receives it, how long we keep it and what your rights are.

1. Who is responsible

Jonas Link, Karlstr. 26, 79104 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Email: hello@sumthepod.com

2. Which data we process

Your account: your email address, a name if you give one, your language, when you signed up and last signed in, and when we last sent you a morning email.

Your podcasts: which podcasts you have added and the public details of their episodes, that is title, description, publication date, the address of the audio file and the cover. For each episode we store the transcript and the summary.

Technical records of the service: which episode was processed when and whether it failed, what processing it cost us, and sign-in links, which we store only as a checksum from which the link cannot be recovered.

When you open our pages, our hosting provider keeps server logs with the time, the page, your browser and your IP address.

Your email address is the only detail we need: without it there is no account and no morning email. A name is optional.

3. What we use the data for

To provide the service you use: checking your podcasts for new episodes, transcribing and summarising them, sending you the morning email and the sign-in link. The legal basis is our contract with you (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). The same applies to the two emails you request when you try SumThePod on the landing page: the confirmation of your address and the summary.

To run the service safely: error reports, limits against abuse (for example how many sign-in links one address can request a day) and the server logs. That is our legitimate interest in a working service (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

We do not sell data, show advertising, build profiles or make automated decisions about you.

4. Cookies

We set two cookies, both necessary for the service: access_token keeps you signed in for 90 days, lang remembers your language for 365 days. Neither needs your consent, which is why there is no cookie banner. There is no analytics, no tracking and no third-party script on our pages.

5. Who receives the audio and the text

Transcription and summarisation are done by DeepInfra (Deep Infra Inc., USA). DeepInfra receives the episode's audio file, as the podcast publishes it, and then the text of the transcript. Your email address and other details about you are not sent. DeepInfra does not keep audio or text after processing and does not use them to train models. We delete the audio file from our server as soon as the episode has been processed.

6. Shared transcripts

Podcast episodes are public recordings, and many people follow the same podcasts. When an episode has already been transcribed, by you or by somebody else, we reuse that transcript instead of processing the same recording again. A shared transcript belongs to the audio file, not to a person, and contains nothing about you. That is why it remains when you delete your account. What is deleted then is your link to that episode, with your summary.

7. Who else receives data

These companies process data on our behalf and on our instructions:

• Railway (Railway Corp., USA) runs our servers and the database. Everything in section 2 is stored there, in its data centre in Amsterdam.
• Resend (Plus Five Five Inc., USA) sends our emails and receives your address and the content of each email for that.
• Sentry (Functional Software Inc., USA) receives error reports when something goes wrong in our software: technical details, your account's number and the title of the episode concerned. We remove email addresses before a report is sent. The reports are stored in the EU.
• Apple (Apple Inc., USA) receives the search text you type into the podcast search, so we can show you matching podcasts. Your email address is not sent.

8. Data outside the EU

DeepInfra processes the audio files and texts in the USA. Railway, Resend, Sentry and Apple are US companies. Railway, Resend and Sentry are certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, an agreement under which certified US companies may receive data from the EU. With DeepInfra, the EU Commission's standard contractual clauses apply; we send you a copy on request. Apple receives only your search text.

9. How long we keep data

We keep your account and everything that belongs to it until you delete it, which you can do at any time on your account page. Deletion is immediate and final: your account, podcasts, episodes, summaries and every detail about you are gone, and we cannot restore them. Shared transcripts remain (section 6).

If you try SumThePod on the landing page, we create a provisional account for it. If you do not confirm your address within 7 days through the link in the first email, we delete it with all its data by ourselves. If you confirm it but not the account through the link in the email with the summary, we delete it after 30 days. Until then we send you no further email.

Sign-in links expire after 15 minutes, the two links in the trial emails after 7 days. We delete audio files after processing, server logs after at most 30 days and error reports after at most 90 days.

10. Your rights

You have the right to access your data, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict its processing and to receive it in a common format (Art. 15 to 20 GDPR). Your right to object is in section 11.

Two of these you do yourself: on your account page you can download all your data as a file and delete your account. To delete it you must have signed in shortly before, so that nobody can delete your account from a device that is not yours.

For anything else, write to hello@sumthepod.com. You can also complain to a data protection authority, for example the State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information of Baden-Württemberg.

11. Right to object

Where we process data on the basis of legitimate interest (section 3), you can object at any time on grounds relating to your particular situation (Art. 21 GDPR). Write to hello@sumthepod.com. We will then stop processing the data unless we can demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests.

12. Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. We will tell you about material changes by email.