Your Data & Account

By the end of this page, you'll understand exactly what data Scour collects, what's visible to others, and how to manage your account.

What's Public vs Private

Scour is designed around public feeds. Your personalized feed, likes, and interests are visible to anyone. Here's the full breakdown:

Public (anyone can see)

Your feed — Available at /@yourusername. Shows posts ranked by your interests.
Your likes — Available at /@yourusername/likes. Posts you've loved or liked.
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 subscribe to.

Private (only you can see)

Email address — Used for password reset and optional email digests.
Dislikes — Unlike loves and likes, your dislikes aren't visible to anyone.
Reading history — Posts you've clicked are tracked but only visible to you at /history.
Seen items — Posts that have scrolled into view (used for the "hide seen" feature).
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?

Public feeds enable social discovery. You can subscribe to another user's feed to see posts ranked by their interests, or follow their likes to discover content through someone whose taste you trust.

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.
Feed subscriptions — 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 items — Posts that appear in your viewport for 3+ seconds are marked as seen.
Interest recommendations — Topics Scour thinks you might like, based on your reactions.

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.

Account Management

Settings

Your Settings page lets you configure:

Display preferences (open links in new tab, infinite scroll, etc.)
Languages you speak (to filter out posts in other languages)
Filter defaults (timeframe, all feeds vs subscribed, hide seen posts)
Paywalled content settings
Excluded domains
Email digest preferences (see Email Digests for details)

Data Export

You can export your data at any time:

Feeds — Download your subscriptions 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 the Settings page. Scroll to the bottom and click "Delete Account."

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

Your interests and feed subscriptions
All reactions (loves, likes, dislikes)
Your reading history and seen items
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.

Reactions — Learn what reactions do (and don't do) and how your likes and history work.
Export & Integration — Use your Scour feed in other RSS readers.
Email Digests — Configure email delivery of your personalized feed.