Read this document to learn more about how our Xayn News Assistant works, what content users can read, and what we do to support the media industry. In this policy “we”, “us”, and so forth refer to the company Xayn AG, located in Germany. To learn if and how we use data to operate this website and our News Assistant app, please see our privacy policy.
Xayn offers a personalised and private news assistant with a continuous news stream powered by the Xayn search engine. Its decentralised AI searches the Internet for interesting news and curates it for users in a continuous, personalised feed while protecting their privacy. No personal data is stored on any other devices. The Xayn AI resides in the user device and does work only for that user. That way, Xayn blends personalised news recommendations with privacy based on edge AI.
We firmly believe that a free and independent press is without a doubt an important pillar for a strong, open, and resilient democratic society – and we want to put our technology, which puts the focus on the human right of privacy, to the best use.
For us, a privacy app is one that does not send any of the personal data (IP address, search requests, and so forth) from the app elsewhere for storage or processing. “What happens within the app, stays within the app.” We achieve this with decentralized or device-level computing, making it impossible for us to access personal data of our users.
Our News Assistant is a search assistant; it finds interesting articles from the internet and curates them for users in a personalised stream while protecting their privacy. To tailor the content stream to user preferences, we built an AI that learns from user interactions (likes, dislikes and time users spend with each document) directly on their device. Thus, all their personal data always stays only on their device and is never sent to us.
On each device, different AI models work together, creating an AI assistant that performs multiple jobs to search the Internet for content most relevant to a specific user:
We forward the user’s search requests which are generated automatically by the Xayn AI for the news feed between their app and our Xayn content index, and vice versa. The index only includes URL and title of the articles which we use for the reranking. Whenever a user clicks on a document, the reader mode is activated and processes locally.
We must do this to provide users with the respective content. This index does neither log, store nor even analyse any of the user´s personal data and acts as a stateless service. The user’s personal data is not used at all once forwarded between their app and the index, and vice versa. In addition, we encrypt the information that travels from the app to the index and back and only those endpoints can decrypt this.
Because we believe that a transparent Internet is a better Internet and wanted to give back to the developer community, we also open-sourced our entire codebase – including our AI-based assistant, the app itself, our entire infrastructure as well as all additional components, such as the reader mode. You can find all of our repos at Github.
Traditional AI models follow a central approach: Data is centrally collected and brought to the algorithm. We turn this around to protect personal data and digital privacy.
Instead of sending data to a centralised AI, we bring the algorithms to the data – where they are trained locally. The personal user data always remains on the devices where it can’t be accessed by anyone else – not even by us. This way, privacy is built into the app by design. Xayn also automatically blocks personalised advertising, external trackers and cookies – so third parties can no longer track users on the internet when they use our app.
We built the Xayn News Assistant for digital natives who care about great journalism more than any one media brand and who construe privacy as a human right. Digital natives expect a high degree of automation and great user experience; we believe these expectations also apply to the way they inform themselves through reading press articles and we built the Xayn News Assistant with that in mind.
Our individualised personalisation is based on a decentralised technology used in our Xayn News Assistant. This technology also protects users from polarisation caused by filter bubbles. This is so since all recommendations are based on the unique user behaviour instead of any popularity-based algorithms or any cross-profiling of users, which are known to fuel polarisation on social media platforms. On social media, content that gets a lot of engagement from many people is ranked higher in the individual personal profiles. This means that the content suggestions are based largely on the community behaviour and not so much on the unique behaviour of each individual user.
The Xayn News Assistant, in contrast, generates article suggestions and their rankings based solely on the behaviour of the user who consumes and interacts with this private, personalized news stream. Our app also doesn’t have any community element to it. Such elements make up large parts of social media. The Xayn News Assistant offers no commenting, no sharing of articles or images with other users, no interaction with other users. This means users can enjoy news in a completely private way.
Our business model is not based upon ads and/or collecting user data – we don’t have access to any personal user data. Therefore, our users can be sure that when using our app, they won’t be micro-targeted by any other company, institution, or organisation based on user interactions with the Xayn News Assistant.
The Xayn AI contains an exploratory part that delivers users new and perhaps surprising content suggestions. This achieves two aims: to allow for shifts of user interests in content over time, and to occasionally expose users to content they might not ordinarily expect to see. This is realized with what is called a Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit as one of our AI models.
Initially, the beta version of our Xayn News Assistant will be released as a basic version, free of charge. During the beta program, Xayn will continuously introduce new features which users can test extensively and on which they can give feedback. Beta users will be the first to know about new product offerings and will maintain their unlimited free access to the app once it’s been released in the official freemium version later this year.
Once the official Xayn News Assistant is released, users can try it out for free for seven days. Thereafter, they can enjoy individualised personalisation and a full protection of their digital privacy in the Xayn News Assistant for only 1.99 EURO a month.
The official Xayn News Assistant will be available on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
Xayn is a personalised and private news assistant for smartphones. Xayn helps users to cut through the noise in the vast ocean of online news to get stronger new signals meaningful to the user. Our powerful and decentralised AI searches the entire web to find news, articles, and blog posts that fit the interest of the individual users. This content is then curated for this user in a continuous personalised news stream – while also protecting their privacy at all times.
All personal data is left on the devices of the users at all times and the AI trains locally on the individual smartphones. This way, Xayn blends personalised news recommendations with privacy based on edge AI.
The Xayn News Assistant trains directly on device-level to create a personalised news stream for each individual user. This also means that users might see recommendations in their curated news feed that link to content behind paywalls. In this first stage of our Xayn News Assistant, users would need the respective subscriptions to access these paywalled articles. Media publishers benefit from this as more potential users might be led to their news content, which will thus receive more attention and respective clicks.
Our app only shows content that isn't behind paywalls and curates it directly on device-level to create a personalised news stream. We believe that the Xayn News Assistant can also be of great interest for the media industry to reach young digital natives who are more and more difficult to reach via traditional media platforms as several studies have shown (see also 3.1.).
We firmly believe that a free and independent press is an important pillar for strong democratic societies. Our technology supports the human right of privacy on the web. With our Xayn News Assistant, we extend this support to the right to a free press, so that good journalism can continue to flourish in the digital age.
Therefore, we’re looking forward to partnering with the media industry – for example, so that users will also be able to access premium content through our Xayn News Assistant.
If you’re a publisher and interested in partnering with us, please contact us via press@xayn.com.
Yes, we are looking forward to partnering with the media industry. We firmly believe that a free and independent press is without a doubt an important pillar for a strong democratic society – and we want to put our technology which supports human right of online privacy, to the best use.
With our Xayn News Assistant, we want to help media companies reach the younger audience that favours social media over traditional news platforms for access news, as several studies show.
The Digital News Report 2021 by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford has shown that those “aged 18–24 (so-called Generation Z) have an even weaker connection with websites and apps (18%) and are almost twice as likely to prefer to access news via social media (34%), aggregators, or mobile alerts.”
The US polling service Morning Consult/The Hollywood Reporter analysed in 2021 that social media is by far the most popular platform for daily news consumption among those aged 18-34 (44%) and those aged 35-44 (40%). Online-only news site land in second in the youngest age group (16%) followed by cable news (15%), radio (15%), and network news (12%).
The new report How Young People Consume News and the Implications for Mainstream Media by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford has concluded that
With our Xayn News Assistant, we cater for these preferences of the younger audience and combine them with an AI-based personalised and private curation of quality journalism. The look and feel of our app are like popular social media platforms such as TikTok or Instagram, making it more attractive to digital natives. Our decentralised edge AI also always protects the privacy of the user.
We believe that our app can be of great interest for the media industry to reach young digital natives. Therefore, we’re looking forward to partnering with the media industry. With our Xayn News Assistant, we extend our support for privacy as a human right to the right to a free press, so that good journalism can continue to flourish in the digital age.
If you’re a publisher and interested in partnering with us, please contact us via press@xayn.com.
Yes. Every time a user clicks on a news suggestion that appears in their Xayn news feed, the owner of the website receives the web traffic.
Whenever a user clicks on an article, we block the automated user profiling by blocking cookies and third-party tracking in the reader mode.
At first glance, Xayn has a similar look and feel to popular social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram. Apart from Xayn’s focus on news, three major aspects set us apart from traditional social media:
The Xayn News Assistant includes browser components and creates a continuous, personalised and private feed for news, articles, and blog content. That feed only shows headlines and pictures but no snippets. Every time a user clicks on a news suggestion that appears in their feed, the owner of the website receives the web traffic. We block the automated user profiling by blocking cookies and third-party tracking in the reader mode.
Users can only read content that also can be crawled via robot.txt. This means that they cannot read content that is behind paywalls when using the Xayn News Assistant. Each publisher can protect all their content behind technical walls. When using Xayn, the privacy of the user is protected because we block cookies, ads and third-party tracking in the reader mode. Reader modes are standard in privacy settings of many browsers (see Mozilla’s definition of a browser) such as Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Brave. Any user who wishes to browse privately, can change these settings. With the Xayn News Assistant, each user can read news content in a reader mode and – with a simple click – can chose to open an article in another browser of their choice.
Our Xayn News assistant therefore only sorts through content from the Internet to give users personalised recommendations, leading them to different websites. This way, Xayn enables users to access a website found by Xayn’s decentralized and personalized AI. Therefore, the Xayn News Assistant and its usage support compliance with the copyrights of content providers.
We believe that our model can also be of great interest for the media industry to reach the younger audience who favours social media over traditional news platforms for access news, as several studies show (see also 3.1.). Therefore, we’re looking forward to partnering with the media industry – for example so that users will also be able to access premium content. We want to create new ways of financing the media industry so that good journalism can still flourish by getting more attention and reaching a broader audience. With our Xayn News Assistant, we extend our support for privacy as a human right to the right to a free press, so that good journalism can continue to flourish in the digital age.
If you’re a publisher and interested in partnering with us, contact us via press@xayn.com.
We’re delighted you’re interested in partnering with us. Please contact us at press@xayn.com.
