The short version: we run a newspaper with a house band, not a data operation. We don’t know who you are and would prefer to keep it that way.
Nothing personal. The Daily Buffoon has no accounts and no sign-up, so we have no name, email or profile for you and never will. Your reader settings — starred tunes, mute preference, absurdity filter, notification choices — are stored on your device only. Deleting the app deletes them.
The one exception is the press run. So the paper can restock itself quietly in the background, our server keeps a single row for each copy in circulation: the anonymous push token your device is issued, your time zone (so the morning edition arrives at 7 a.m. where you are, not where we are), and which alerts, if any, you have switched on. That row is created the first time you open the paper, whether or not you ever ask for a notification — the silent nudge telling the app a new edition has gone to press needs the token and nothing else, no permission and no prompt. No name, no account, no reading history — the token is the only thing identifying that row, and it identifies a device, not a person. Registrations we haven’t heard from in 90 days are deleted automatically.
The paper carries one modest advertisement per page, served by Google AdMob, which may collect device identifiers and approximate location to serve and measure ads under its own privacy policy. On iOS we ask permission before any ad tracking (App Tracking Transparency); decline it and you’ll get non-personalized ads, which frankly suit the paper better anyway. When no paid advertisement is available, the space runs a house notice of our own, which collects nothing at all. The web story pages at dailybuffoon.com carry the same single advertisement, served by Google AdSense under the same privacy policy; readers in the EU and UK are asked for consent first, and may decline.
Headlines summarize real reporting and link to the original outlets. Photographs are free-use images from Wikimedia Commons or official U.S. government public-domain photographs, credited in the article. Music is by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) and Alexander Nakarada (creatorchords.com) under CC BY 4.0, plus public-domain recordings. Fetching that content involves ordinary web requests to those services; we send them nothing about you beyond what any web request carries.
Five-clown alerts and the morning digest are strictly opt-in, off by default, and can be silenced in Reader Settings or your system settings at any time. Switching them off stops the alerts at once. The anonymous registration described under “What we collect” stays on file so the paper can go on restocking itself quietly, and lapses on its own after 90 days of silence.
The app is not directed at children under 13. We knowingly collect no personal information from anyone, children included.
Every story reports real events from cited sources, straight. The clown ratings and musical accompaniment are opinion — ours. The Daily Buffoon is commentary and satire, not an original news organization.
Questions, corrections, complaints about the tuba: support@friedgrouper.com. We read everything, usually while the band rehearses.