Orca is an iOS podcast player that reads the episodes in your queue and tells you which are worth your time. To do that, our servers process podcast content and a small amount of information you give us.
Podcast content. Episodes from publicly available podcast feeds are transcribed and analyzed on our servers. This is the publishers’ content, not yours, and it is not tied to you.
Your interests. The listening-interest description you type into the app, and the corrections you make to Orca’s verdicts and scores (including “too high / too low / just right” taps), are stored on our servers and used only to personalize your results. When you create a share card, we record that a card was made and count anonymous clicks on its link (a salted hash that cannot identify anyone); share records are removed with the rest of your data.
Device information. An anonymous device identifier (via Apple’s App Attest) is used for rate limiting and abuse prevention. We do not collect your name, contacts, or location.
Your account, if you make one. Signing in is optional and uses your email address only: we send a one-time link or code, and there is no password. We store the address, which devices are signed in to it, and a sign-in session for the website. Sign-in mail is sent through Postmark. Subscriptions bought on the website are handled by RevenueCat and Stripe; we never see your card. You can sign out of a phone or delete the account, and everything above with it, from the app’s settings at any time.
No advertising, no analytics SDKs, no sale or sharing of personal information, no tracking across other apps or websites.
We use cloud hosting and AI providers to process episode audio and text and generate results. Currently: Fly.io (hosting), Anthropic and OpenAI (language models), DeepInfra, fal.ai and RunPod (speech-to-text — these receive episode audio for transcription), Tigris and Backblaze B2 (encrypted backups of our database, which includes your interest text), Expo (app build and update delivery), and self-hosted Umami on our own infrastructure (privacy-respecting site analytics, no cookies). Purchases are handled by Apple on iOS and by Stripe on the website, and subscription state by RevenueCat; sign-in mail by Postmark. We never see your payment details.
Deleting your data from the app’s settings removes your profile, corrections, and device records from our servers; deleting your account removes your email address, its sessions and its device links too. Shared, non-personal episode analysis (which is not tied to you) may be retained.
Orca Pod LLC · admin@orcapod.fm