Privacy Policy

Effective October 18, 2026

Skelly is a browser built to keep the web out of your business, and that starts with us. Skelly doesn't collect any data about you. No accounts, no analytics, no ads, no tracking, and no servers of ours that your browsing passes through.

This policy covers the Skelly apps for iPhone and Android, and this website.

What we collect

Nothing. We don't collect, store, sell, or share personal information, usage data, or diagnostics. The app contains no analytics, advertising, or crash-reporting code, ours or anyone else's, so there's nothing to opt out of.

What stays on your phone

To do its job, Skelly keeps a few things on your device, and only there:

• Your home screen sites, Bare Bones and script settings, appearance, and Reader text style.
• The articles you've read in the last 30 days, while History is on. History is left out of device backups, and turning it off in Settings deletes it.
• Articles you save for offline reading, until you swipe them away.
• Site icons, headline pictures, and the latest headlines, kept as a cache that Skelly refreshes or clears on its own.
• Cookies and other data that websites store in the browser, as in any browser.

We never see any of it, and deleting Skelly removes all of it. If you back up your phone with iCloud or Google, those backups may include Skelly's settings and saved articles, under Apple's or Google's terms. Your history is never included.

Who Skelly connects to

Skelly talks directly to the websites you use, never through a server of ours.

• Websites you visit. Like any browser, Skelly loads pages from the sites you open, and those sites receive what browsers normally send, such as your IP address. Their own privacy policies apply. With Bare Bones on, their scripts don't run, which stops most of their trackers.
• Latest headlines. Skelly fetches your sites' news feeds and their pictures straight from those sites, without sending cookies.
• Home screen icons and names. These come from each site itself, without cookies, rather than from an icon service that would learn which sites you read.
• Search. Anything you type in the address bar that isn't a web address goes to DuckDuckGo, or to Google once you turn Bare Bones off for google.com. Their privacy policies apply to your searches.

Read aloud

Read aloud uses your phone's built-in speech voices, which run on the device. The article's text isn't sent anywhere to be read.

Suggested sites

Suggestions are based on the region set on your phone, under Language & Region. Skelly never asks for your location.

Crash reports from Apple and Google

If you've chosen to share diagnostics with app developers in your phone's settings, Apple or Google may pass us crash reports and performance statistics. They're anonymized before we see them, and you can turn sharing off at any time in your phone's privacy settings.

Children

Skelly is meant for a general audience. Since it collects no data from anyone, it collects none from children either.

This website

This site uses no cookies, analytics, or JavaScript. It's hosted on GitHub Pages, which may log visitors' IP addresses for security, as described in GitHub's privacy statement.

Changes to this policy

If anything changes, we'll update this page and the date at the top. If Skelly ever needed to collect data, which we don't plan to, we'd say so here before the change reached the app.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email us at hello@skelly.surf.