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.

And the head count. A newspaper likes to know its circulation, so from version 1.4 each copy of the app makes up a random number the first time it opens and shows it to our server when it fetches the front page, along with the date the app was installed. The number is derived from nothing — not your device, not your network, not you — is kept only as a scrambled hash, goes to nobody but us, and vanishes when you delete the app. It lets us count copies in use without counting the same phone twice; it cannot tell us who is holding one. Counts we haven’t heard from in about thirteen months 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 edition at dailybuffoon.com currently carries its modest advertising through Adsterra (banner placements only — never pop-ups), which may use cookies and device information to serve and measure ads under its own privacy policy. The story share pages carry a Google AdSense slot under Google’s privacy policy. Readers in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland are asked before any Adsterra script loads, and anyone can change their answer from the “Cookie choices” link in the site footer; decline and the space runs our house notice, which sets no cookies. Block any of it and the space simply runs our house notice instead; we hold no grudge.

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@dailybuffoon.com. We read everything, usually while the band rehearses.