Cookie Use

Policy Overview

Effective September 6, 2026

Goodbye App sets no cookies of its own. Nothing we wrote puts a cookie on your device, on the website or in the app. What keeps you signed in and remembers your settings is local storage, which is a different thing and is listed in full below. The cookies that can appear on this site are set by other companies whose code runs on some of our pages, and they are named here too. No cookie here serves you an ad, because there is no advertising on the site or in the app. The advertising-related cookies that can appear are Google's, set by the tag described below. What that tag tells us is whether an advertisement we paid for brought somebody here, and that is the whole of what reaches us from it; what Google's own cookies hold, and what Google does with them, is governed by Google's policy, linked below, and not by this page. There is no Google Analytics.

In short, these technologies are used on Goodbye App to:

  • Keep you signed in.
  • Remember your language and your theme.
  • Remember your place in the feed and which posts you have already seen.
  • Let Google's reCAPTCHA tell an automated submission from a person on the forms that need it.
  • Let Google offer place suggestions in the three location fields.
  • Let YouTube show previews of our videos on the home page.
  • On the website only, let a Google tag tell whether advertising we bought elsewhere brought you here.

Nothing here decides what you are shown. There is no recommendation system, and nothing on your device ranks your feed or suggests accounts to follow. Nothing stored on your device measures how you use the service, and nothing else measures it for any purpose of ours beyond the two things named in our Privacy Policy: error logs, and the tag that measures our advertising, which is on the website only. The service itself does record the things it is made of, such as your likes, your comments, whom you follow and block, and the count of people who have played a post's video or audio. What it records, and what it does not, is set out in that policy.

What are cookies, pixels, and local storage?

Cookies are small pieces of data stored on your device by your web browser. They are used to remember information about your visit to a website, such as your login status, preferences, and other settings. Cookies can be either temporary (session cookies, which are deleted when you close your browser) or persistent (stored on your device until they expire or are deleted).

Pixels (also known as tracking pixels or web beacons) are tiny images placed in a page or an email so that loading them tells a server the page or email was opened. We place none of our own. Nothing we build into an email reports back when it is opened, so we cannot tell whether you have opened one, and no page here carries a pixel that reports to us. One page carries somebody else's: the donate page on the website, where PayPal's donate form holds a one-pixel image that loads from PayPal's servers as the page opens and tells PayPal that it was opened. There is no donate page in the app.

Local storage is a place in your browser where a site can keep small amounts of data. Unlike a cookie it is not sent to the server with each request, and other sites cannot read it. It stays until you or the site remove it. It is what we use.

What we keep in local storage

This is the whole of it, on the website and in the app alike:

  1. Your sign-in: your sign-in token, your account id and your username. These are what keep you signed in between visits, and they are removed when you sign out.
  2. Your language: which language the app is in, and whether you chose it yourself or we took it from your device.
  3. Your theme: day or night.
  4. Your place in the feed and the posts you have seen, so that coming back does not start you at the top.
  5. Where you stopped in a video, so that it resumes there.
  6. Your best score in the dove game.
  7. Which blog posts you read recently, so that a reading is counted once rather than on every refresh.
  8. A crash reference, if the app has crashed, so that a bug report you file afterwards can be matched to it.

For a single visit, and cleared when the tab closes, the browser also holds where to send you after you sign in, whether a Google sign-in is in progress, and the name Apple sent once so that the sign-up screen can show it. Firebase Authentication, which checks your sign-in, keeps its own session record in your browser's storage in the same way, not in a cookie of ours.

None of it is a profile of you. Nothing you have written is in it, none of it is read by anything but the app on your device, and none of it is sent to us as such. Signing in on another device shows you the same account, because your language and your notification settings are stored on the account itself, not because anything on one device is linked to another. Your theme is not: it is kept on each device.


Cookies set by other companies

These are the companies whose code runs on some of our pages and may set cookies of their own. Each one's cookies are governed by its own policy, linked here, not by this page.

  1. Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise (Google LLC)
    • Where: the sign-up, sign-in, forgotten-password, contact, bug-report and feature-request forms, on the website and in the app.
    • Why: to tell an automated submission from a person. Google's code makes that judgement and may set cookies to do it.
    • Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy
  2. Google Maps Platform (Google LLC)
    • Where: the three location fields, which are your profile location and the address and asset-location fields of a letter.
    • Why: to offer place suggestions as you type. What you have typed so far is sent to Google to fetch them, and Google's code may set Google's cookies while it does.
    • Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy
  3. YouTube (Google LLC)
    • Where: the home page, which shows previews of our videos.
    • Why: the preview is looked up through noembed.com and the image comes from YouTube's servers, so both see the request. Pressing play loads YouTube's player, which may set YouTube's cookies. Nothing about your account is sent with it.
    • Cookie Policy: https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies?hl=en-US
  4. Google Ads and Google Tag Manager (Google LLC), website only
    • Where: the pages of the website. Not in the iOS app, which strips the tag out when it is built.
    • Why: to tell whether advertising we bought elsewhere brought you here. It reports that the home page was opened and that an account was created, and the account-created event carries the username you chose, which is the one thing you typed that either event carries. Nothing you have written in a letter, a post or a comment is sent with them. Google's tag may set Google's cookies on this site to link a visit to an ad click; which cookies is decided by Google's code, not by ours.
    • Advertising Policy: https://policies.google.com/technologies/ads
  5. PayPal, on the donation page only
    • Where: the donate page on the website. There is no donate page in the app.
    • Why: the page is a PayPal form. It holds a one-pixel image that loads from PayPal as the page opens, and pressing the button takes you to PayPal, which handles the payment end to end under its own policy.
    • Privacy Statement: https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/privacy-full
  6. Firebase (Google LLC)
    • Where: everywhere. Firebase is the database, the file storage and the sign-in behind the service.
    • Why: it keeps your sign-in session on your device, in your browser's storage rather than in a cookie.
    • Privacy Policy: https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy

Two other requests carry your network address to a company outside this service but set nothing of ours. The copyright page loads a DMCA badge from images.dmca.com. And if you record a voice message in a browser that cannot record the format we need, the recording is converted on your own device using code fetched once from unpkg.com; the recording itself is never sent there.

Nothing of ours runs on anyone else's pages. We do not offer embeds, there are no Goodbye App timelines on other people's sites, and we publish no API for other sites to build on. If you follow a link out of Goodbye App , the site you arrive at sets its own cookies under its own policy.

Cookie settings through web browsers

Because we set no cookies, blocking cookies in your browser does not sign you out of goodbyeapp.com or break anything of ours, though it may affect reCAPTCHA, the Google Maps suggestions or the YouTube previews on the pages that use them. Clearing your browser's site data removes local storage too, which signs you out. If your browser blocks local storage entirely, you cannot sign in.

What we collect, and what we do with it, is set out in our Privacy Policy.