Your account and data

Where your reading lives

When you subscribe to a publication, save an article, recommend one, or open one, that fact is written into your own account's storage — the same place your Bluesky profile and posts are kept, run by whoever hosts your account.

This is the part that makes Standard Reader different from a normal app, and it has real consequences:

• Your subscriptions and saves are yours. If you stop using Standard Reader, they stay where they are.
• Another app on the same network can read them, so your reading list is not trapped in one product.
• They are public. Not advertised, not put in a feed — but readable by anyone who goes looking, the same as who you follow on Bluesky.

What Standard Reader stores

We keep a copy of the public network — publications, articles, and who follows what — so the app can search, rank, and load quickly. That copy includes the records described above. It is a cache of things that are already public, not a second private profile of you.

Settings that have nowhere else to go — your theme and language when you are signed out — are kept in your browser. The full account is on the privacy page.

Permissions you grant

Signing in asks for permission to write only the kinds of records the app actually needs — follows, saves, recommendations, read records, and lists. It cannot post to Bluesky as you.

A few things ask for more, at the moment you first use them rather than up front: publishing a collection, and posting to the feedback board. When that happens you will see an Upgrade permissions prompt explaining what is being added. Decline it and the rest of the app carries on working.

Connected apps

The Connected apps section of settings lists anything signed in to your account through Standard Reader — the browser extension, most commonly. Disconnect ends that session without touching the others or logging you out here.

Deleting your data

At the bottom of settings, Personal data deletes categories of records outright: your reading history, your saved articles, or the publication lists you made. Each asks for confirmation and explains what will change.

These deletions remove the records from your account itself, not just from our copy — which is why they cannot be undone. Deleting your reading history, for example, makes everything look unread again everywhere.

Logging out leaves everything intact and signs you out on this device.