Privacy
No account. No cookies. No advertising trackers. What you paste is read once, analysed, and not kept. The only things stored are a one-way hash that counts your free uses, an email address if you left one on the earlier waitlist, and each finished brief at its own unlisted link — the brief, never the article.
When you paste a link or a block of text, it goes to a server function running on Vercel. That function fetches the page (for a link), then sends the article text, together with the analyst prompt, to Google's Gemini API, which returns the brief.
Debrief does not save the article text, or the link exactly as you pasted it, to its own database. The finished brief is saved, at its own address, as described in the next section.
Google processes the text it receives under its own API terms. Treat anything you paste as something a third-party service will read — don't paste confidential or personal material.
Every finished brief opens at its own address, of the form debrief.digital/b/…, and the address in your browser is the link you share. To make that possible, the brief itself — the six sections, plus the headline, outlet and date the page stated, and the article's public address — is stored in Debrief's database. That address is the one the publisher gives for the article, or the page's address with everything after a "?" removed, because that part can carry gift-link codes and tracking tags. It is there so anyone reading the brief can check it against the original. The article text and the link exactly as you pasted it are not stored, and neither is anything about you.
The address is 22 random characters that cannot be guessed or listed, and the page tells search engines not to index it. Even so, anyone who has the link can read it, so treat every brief as public. It stays up until it is taken down: anyone can ask for that by writing to hello@debrief.digital with its address, or through the Report link on the page.
Only a brief Debrief itself produced can be published. Pages are written by the server as it finishes a brief, so there is no way to put other text on a Debrief page.
Debrief gives everyone a small number of free debriefs. Enforcing that in the browser alone would be meaningless, so the count is kept on the server.
Your IP address is combined with a secret value and run through a one-way cryptographic hash. The stored key is that hash — never the address. It cannot be read back into an IP, and it is not linked to your name, your email, or anything you pasted.
The counter is deleted automatically after 30 days of inactivity. The same counter is what stops an automated script from burning through the free quota before real readers can use it, which is the legitimate interest it rests on.
Until 21 October 2026 the site had a waitlist that asked for an email address. Nothing on the site asks for one now. If you write to Debrief yourself, your message arrives in Debrief's inbox like any other email.
Addresses left on the waitlist are stored in a hosted database (Upstash). When an address was added, a notification went to Debrief's own inbox through an email service (Resend). They are used to write to you about Debrief itself. It is never sold, rented, or passed to advertisers.
The basis for holding it is your consent, and you can withdraw that at any time by emailing the address at the bottom of this page. It will be deleted, not merely unsubscribed.
Debrief measures two things: how many people arrive, and how many of them actually paste something. That is the only number that says whether the tool is useful.
Arrivals are counted with Vercel Web Analytics. It is cookieless, it is served from this same domain rather than a third-party server, and it records page-level aggregates — not a profile that follows you elsewhere.
What happens after the paste box is counted by Debrief's own tally: how many debriefs were run on a given day, how many brief pages were made and read, and roughly how many distinct visitors ran them, identified by the same hashed key described above. These are counts, not people.
The tally also notes which kind of site sent a visit (LinkedIn, a search engine, a shared brief, or none) as one word from a fixed list. The address of the page you came from is never stored.
Debrief sets no cookies. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.
The site does use your browser's own local and session storage for two strictly necessary jobs: remembering how many free debriefs you have left, and carrying a finished brief from the loading screen to the page that shows it. Both stay on your device, are never sent anywhere as an identifier, and you can clear them at any time through your browser's site-data settings. The chat bubble (see below) also keeps your conversation in local storage, so it is still there when you come back.
The typefaces are served from this domain too, so reading the site makes no request to a font provider.
Debrief is one person working alone, not a company with departments. These services do the actual processing:
Some of these operate outside the European Economic Area and transfer data under standard contractual clauses. Nobody else receives your data, and none of it is sold.
Under the GDPR you can ask for a copy of any personal data held about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, object to it being processed, or withdraw consent you previously gave.
In practice, the only thing tied to an identifiable person here is an email address you chose to leave — so in most cases the request is a single line and the answer is quick. Write to hello@debrief.digital.
Debrief is run by an individual rather than a company, and the address above reaches them directly. If you need the name of the person legally responsible for this data, ask and you will be told.
If you think your data has been handled badly, you can complain to your national data protection authority.
Debrief is an experiment and it changes often. When something changes that affects what is collected, this page is updated in the same breath and the effective date at the top moves.
Questions about any of this go to the same address: hello@debrief.digital.