Welcome to our content policy! 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 Reader, we extend this support to the right to a free press, so that good journalism can continue to flourish in the digital age.
Read this document to learn more about how our Xayn News Reader 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 Reader app, please see our privacy policy.
Xayn offers a personalised and private news reader 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.
Xayn is a privacy-compliant app, meaning it does not transmit any personal data (i.e. IP address and geolocation) from the app to a third party server for storage or further processing. We achieve this through enabling decentralized computing directly on the end devices, with the effect that we also have no access to the personal data of our users.
Our News Reader is a media search assistant and aggregator that finds interesting articles, analysis, and op-eds from across the web and curates them for individual users in personalized news feeds, all while protecting their privacy. The AI models were specifically developed to tailor the news stream to users' individual preferences based on interactions (likes, dislikes, and dwell time) carried out on the device. This way, all personal data always remains on the devices.
On each device, different AI models work together to create an AI reader that searches the Internet for content that is most relevant to individual users:
We forward and return the search queries automatically generated by the Xayn AI for the news feed between the app and our Xayn index. This index contains only the URL and title of the articles we use to customize the news order. Every time users click on a document, the reader mode is activated and processed locally.
The use of the Xayn index is necessary to provide users with relevant content. It acts as a stateless service and does not log, store, or analyze users' personal data. Users' personal information is not processed when the search queries are passed back and forth between the app and the index. We encrypt the information transferred from the app to the index and back so that only the endpoints can decrypt it.
We believe that a transparent internet is a better internet. We also want to give back to the developer community, which is why we have open-sourced our entire code base, including our AI-based reader, the app itself, all of our infrastructure, and any additional components such as reader mode. All of our source code can be found on 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 in reader mode– so third parties can no longer track users on the internet when they use our app.
We built the Xayn News Reader 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 Reader with that in mind.
Our individualized personalization is based on the decentralized technology used in our Xayn News Reader. This technology also protects users from polarization caused by filter bubbles. All recommendations are based on individual user behavior and not on popularity-based algorithms or cross-profiling of users, which are known to promote polarization on social media platforms. On social media, content that is shared by many people is ranked higher in personal profiles. This means that content suggestions are based on community behavior rather than individual user behavior.
Xayn News Reader, on the other hand, generates article suggestions and their ranking based solely on the behavior of individual users interacting with the private and personalized news stream. Our app has no community element. Users interact with the news completely privately.
Our business model is not based on collecting or selling user data. We do not even have access to personal data of our users. They can be assured that their interactions with Xayn News Reader are not being monitored by us or a third-party organization.
The Xayn AI includes an exploratory element that provides users with new and perhaps surprising content suggestions. This allows the AI to react flexibly to shifts in user preferences. It also prevents filter bubbles, serving users stories they might not have sought out on their own. We implement this with a so-called Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit as one of our AI models.
Users can try the Xayn News Reader for free for 28 days. Thereafter, they can enjoy individualised personalisation and a full protection of their digital privacy in the Xayn News Reader for only 1.99 EURO a month.
The Xayn News Reader is available on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
Xayn is a personalised and private news reader 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.
Xayn News Reader trains directly on devices to create a personalized news stream for each individual user. This also means that users could see recommendations in their curated news feed for articles behind paywalls. In this first phase of our Xayn News Reader, users will need the appropriate individual subscriptions from publishers to access these paid articles. Media publishers benefit from Xayn because it brings readers, clicks, and attention to their articles.
Our app only displays content that is not hidden behind pay barriers. It curates it directly on devices to create a personalized news stream. Xayn News Reader will help publishers reach young digital natives, who are increasingly difficult to tap as a target group via traditional media platforms and channels.
We firmly believe that a free and independent press is an important pillar of a strong democratic society. Our technology supports the human right to privacy online. With our Xayn News Reader, we extend this support to protect the free press so that good journalism can thrive 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 Reader.
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 Reader, 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 from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford showed that 18- to 24-year-olds (Generation Z) have a very weak attachment to news sites and apps (18%). They are almost twice as likely to prefer accessing news through social media (34%), aggregators or mobile notifications.
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, from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, concludes that
With our Xayn News Reader, we are addressing these preferences of younger audiences through AI-based, personalized and private selection of journalistic content. At first glance, our app resembles the feed functions on popular social media platforms such as TikTok or Instagram, making it 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 Reader, 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 Reader uses its browser components to create a continuous, personalized and private news feed for news articles and blog content. This feed displays only headlines and images and no snippets. Every time users click on a news suggestion in the feed, the website owner receives the web traffic. By blocking cookies and third-party tracking in reader mode, we prevent the automatic creation of user profiles.
Users can only read content that can be crawled via robot.txt. Consequently, if they use Xayn News Reader, they cannot read content behind payment barriers. Each publisher is free to hide their content behind technical walls. When using Xayn, the user's privacy is protected because we block cookies, advertising, and third-party tracking in reader mode. Reader modes are standard in the privacy settings of many browsers (see Mozilla’s definition of a browser). With Xayn News Reader, users can read content in reader mode and open articles in another browser of their choice with a single click.
With its decentralized and personalized AI, Xayn makes users aware of web content and the associated websites. As a result, Xayn News Reader 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 Reader, 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.
