Your data & account

What's public vs private

Scour is designed around public feeds. Your personalized feed, likes, and interests are visible to anyone.

Public (anyone can see)

• Your feed — Available at /@yourusername. Shows posts ranked by your interests.
• Your loves and likes — Available at /@yourusername/loves and /@yourusername/likes. The two public shelves of your Library.
• Your interests — Visible on posts as interest badges, showing which topics matched.
• Per-interest feeds — Each interest has its own RSS feed that others can follow.

Private (only you can see)

• Email address — Used for password reset and optional email digests.
• Dislike — Unlike loves and likes, the posts you dislike aren't visible to anyone.
• Reading history — Posts you've clicked are tracked but only visible to you at /library/history.
• Seen posts — Posts that have scrolled into view (used for the "hide seen" feature).
• Saved posts — Posts you've saved are only visible to you.
• Excluded domains — Sites you've blocked from appearing in your feed.
• Filter preferences — Your default timeframe, feed settings, and other preferences.

Why public by default?

Private profiles are on the roadmap but not yet implemented. If this matters to you, please vote for it on the feedback board.

What data does Scour collect?

Scour collects data to personalize your feed and improve the service. Here's what's stored:

• Interests — Topics you add, including related terms.
• Followed feeds — Sources you've chosen to follow.
• Reactions — Love, like, and dislike actions on posts.
• Clicks — When you click a post link, that's recorded to power your reading history.
• Seen posts — Posts you scroll past in your feed are marked as seen.
• Posts shown to you — Scour records the posts it shows you, where they ranked, and how long they stayed on your screen. This is kept while your account exists and is used to improve ranking.
• Interest recommendations — Topics Scour thinks you might like, based on your reactions and reading activity.

Scour uses self-hosted, privacy-respecting analytics to understand how the site is used. There's no cross-site tracking, no advertising, and your data is never sold.

Like most websites, Scour also records standard server logs (your IP address, browser user agent, and referring page) when content is requested. These are used for abuse prevention and operations.

Account management

Settings

Settings is split into panels:

• Account: your username and email address, your personal feed URLs, and account deletion
• Reading: display preferences, the languages you speak, filter defaults, paywalled content, and excluded domains
• Email: digest preferences (see Email digests)

Data export

You can export your data at any time:

• Feeds — Download the feeds you follow as an OPML file from the Feeds page (look for the download icon).
• Interests — Download your interests as OPML from the Interests page.

For more on using your Scour data in other tools, see Export & integration.

Account deletion

You can delete your account from Settings → Account. "Delete account" is at the bottom of that panel.

Deletion is immediate and permanent. All your data is removed, including:

• Your interests and followed feeds
• All reactions (loves, likes, dislikes)
• Your reading history and seen posts
• Interest and feed recommendations
• Your user account and email

There's no grace period or way to recover a deleted account. If you want to keep your data, export it first.

Still have questions? Or feedback on these docs? Please let me know!