privacy policy

who we are

brief.computer is a swipe file for advertising. You save a public ad, we catalogue it with our own notes about it, and you can share it with a link. Advertising creatives you save come from public ad transparency surfaces — we start with Meta's Ad Library.

“We” and “us” on this page mean the operator of brief.computer. The contact for every question on this page is help@brief.computer.

what we collect

The account you make. Your email address, your handle, your occupation, your age, your gender, and an avatar if you upload one. Along with those: when the account was created, and when you accepted the terms of service. Age is required to be 18 or over; gender has a “rather not answer” option and neither age nor gender is ever shown publicly.

The ads you save. The ad's platform id, the page you saved it from, the media address that page already exposed, and the ad text and advertiser details that were visible on the card. If you file it into a collection, we store that too. If you save from the Chrome extension, that is the same payload — plus, when the page already offers it, a poster frame and the video's own duration.

The things you write. Collection names, the comments you post, and who you follow or who follows you.

Our own notes about an ad. Analysis is part of saving: our models read the media and write frames, transcripts, on-screen text, tags, a design read and a score. Those are our observations about an ad, not facts, and they can be wrong.

What it costs us to run. A credits ledger — every grant, spend and top-up — and one row per model call (which model, how many tokens, what it cost). We keep this so a balance can be explained rather than asserted.

Sign-in and security. Your sessions (IP address and browser), the sign-in events we log, and the emails we send you.

Payments, if you subscribe. Our payment processor gives us your customer id, which plan you are on, and the status and dates of the subscription. We never see or store your card number — you type it on the payment processor's own checkout page, and it stays there.

what we don't collect

• Your Facebook password, cookies, or session tokens. We don't want them and the extension cannot send them.
• Your browsing history. The extension reads the ad card on the page you are looking at, and nothing else.
• Your card number. Our payment processor holds it, not us.

what we do with it

• Run the service. Show you your library, your collections, and the ads you saved.
• Analyse ads. Send the ad's media to third-party AI analysis providers and store what they return.
• Train our models — from the catalogue, never from your own words. There is a whole section below, because this is the one you should read.
• Bill you honestly. Meter credits, take payments, and keep the ledger true.
• Email you. Sign-in links, receipts, and — rarely — something genuinely important about your account.
• Keep it working. Abuse, fraud and security.

training, in plain words

Saving an ad puts that ad in our training set. It is on by default and it is not a secret. We say it here, we say it at signup, and each ad you save carries the consent on its own row.

What we use: the creative and its media, our analysis of it, ranking and quality signals, tag ids, and aggregate save signals. That is how the catalogue gets useful.

What we do not use: your collection names, your comments, or anything else you type. We do not train on your words.

You can turn the training consent off for an ad when you save it. That stops new inclusion; it cannot un-train a model that already ran. We do not sell, license or publish a dataset, and the consent is not a licence to do so — that would be its own decision, disclosed separately, and it has not been made.

cookies and analytics

Cookies. Ours are first-party, and they exist so that signing in works: the one that keeps you signed in, plus a couple of short-lived ones that carry a single sign-in attempt (a beta invite code, an OAuth round trip) from one step to the next. The signed-in app also remembers two small UI preferences in your browser's local storage — whether the collections sidebar is open, and an announcement you dismissed. No advertising cookies, no third-party cookies, no tracking pixels.

Analytics. We use a cookieless analytics provider on our own pages. It is built to be aggregate-only: no cookies, no cross-site tracking, and no way to follow you from one site to another. It records the page path you visited, the page you arrived from, a coarse location (country and region), your device and browser type, and when it happened. It identifies a visitor by a hash of the incoming request and throws that hash away after 24 hours.

That is the whole list: no advertising analytics, no social-media pixels, no session replay, and no ad network anywhere on brief.computer. Inside the signed-in app our numbers come from our own database.

who else touches your data

A few categories of third-party providers, each of which sees only what it needs to do its job. They are processors, not owners, and none of them may use your data for their own purposes.

• Hosting and infrastructure providers — host the site, store the ad media, and run the database. They are US-based.
• Email service providers — send our email.
• A third-party payment processor — takes payments and holds your card details; we never see them.
• Third-party AI analysis providers — read the video and image media of the ads you save, during analysis.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for anyone's advertising. We share it when the law requires it, and when someone has to fix the service — nothing else. If we are ever acquired, we will say so before your data moves.

your rights, and how to use them

If you live in California, or in another US state with a similar law, you can ask us to show you your personal information, correct it, delete it, or opt you out of its sale or sharing. We don't sell or share it, so that last one is already done. Email help@brief.computer and we will do the rest.

Two of those you can do yourself, right now, if you are signed in:

• Export your data. Settings → Export user data. You get your account details, the things you wrote, and a list of the names of the ads you saved.
• Delete your account. Settings → Delete account. It erases your account, your library and your collections.

What the export contains, and what it deliberately does not, is worth being exact about: it is personal information about you, not our product. It is not a download of ad media, our analysis, our ranking, our tags, or the ad copy we read — and it is not a copy of the catalogue. You get your stuff and the names of what you saved.

What deletion contains is the same kind of limit: an ad you saved is in the shared catalogue, and other people's libraries and any share links you made may depend on it, so it stays after your account is gone. What goes is everything that was yours.

If you have a live paid plan, cancel it in the billing page first — we will not cancel a subscription for you from the delete button, and we would rather you kept the month you paid for than lose it by accident.

children

brief.computer is for people 18 and over. We ask your age at signup and we do not knowingly keep an account for anyone younger. If we find one, we delete it.

the chrome extension

The extension exists for exactly one thing: to save the ad you chose. It runs on Meta's Ad Library pages, reads the ad card in front of you, and sends that to us. It does not read your Facebook account, your feed, or your messages, and it never handles a Facebook cookie.

The use of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Concretely: we don't sell data, we don't use it for personalized advertising, we don't use it for credit or lending decisions, and no human reads your saves except to fix a bug or answer you.

how long we keep it

Your account and your library stay until you delete them. The catalogue — the ads and our analysis of them — stays, because it is shared. Backups and logs age out on a schedule. We keep what the law or a genuine dispute requires, and nothing longer.

changes to this policy

If this changes, we post the new version here with a new effective date. If the change actually matters, we email you about it. Using brief.computer after we post it means you accept it.