Terms of Use

The agreement between you and The Wire.

Version 1.4 · In effect from 4 August 2026 · See also the Privacy Policy and Cookies

The short version

The Wire summarises other people's journalism and links you to it. It is not a substitute for reading the source.
AI writes the summaries. They can be wrong. Check anything that matters before acting on it.
Where The Wire speaks, the voices are AI-generated. None of the presenters is a person.
Nothing here is financial, legal, medical or safety advice — and The Wire is not an emergency alerting service. Never rely on a notification arriving.
It's free, personal and non-commercial. Don't scrape it, resell it, or hammer the API.
You don't need an account. Sign in only if you want alerts or the same feed on another device.
You can't publish anything to The Wire, so there is no user content to moderate.
Nothing in here removes your legal rights as a consumer.

1. This agreement

These Terms are a contract between you and Julian Elliott, operating The Wire from the United Kingdom ("we", "us"). They cover the website at wire.databased.business, the installable web app, the iOS app, and the notifications we send — together, the Service.

By using the Service you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, please stop using it and, if you have an account, delete it.

You must be 16 or older to use the Service.

Controller's registered legal form, company number where applicable, and postal address for service: to be completed before public release.

2. What The Wire is — and what it is not

The Wire assembles a personal news briefing. For each story it shows you the outlet it came from, a headline, a short summary, sometimes a single quotation, and a link to the original.

The Wire is not a publisher of news. We do not report, we do not employ journalists, and we do not reproduce articles. Every story belongs to the outlet that wrote it, and every card exists to send you there.

AI is involved, and we won't pretend otherwise

AI researches, summarises and ranks nearly everything here. Rather than claim a purity we don't have, we make a narrower promise we can actually keep — and for each part of it we tell you whether a machine enforces it or we are holding ourselves to it:

No invented sources. Every link is checked to be live before a story runs. A dead or fabricated URL kills the story.
No invented quotes. A quoted sentence must be found word-for-word in the source page. If it isn't there, the quote is removed; if we can't check (a paywall, say), the quote is removed rather than published unverified. This is now a machine check and it runs on every card. We ask the AI for one sentence copied out of the article it links to, we fetch that article, and we look for the sentence in it. It is the check this bullet spent months promising and not making: until August 2026 the briefing we asked the AI for did not include a quotation at all, so the comparison had nothing to compare, and this bullet said so plainly rather than letting you assume otherwise. Two things it still does not mean, because a check is worth less than an honest description of it: a sentence being printed in an article is not proof that the article is right, and a quotation removed for being unverifiable is not a quotation we caught anyone inventing.
Names we did not invent, but sometimes derived. Where we hold no curated name for an outlet we show its web address instead of guessing at a masthead, so what you see is always something you can check. The link itself is never invented — it is verified live before the story runs.
No single-source alarms from the news. Nothing from a news outlet may interrupt you unless two independent outlets are carrying it. Official warnings are the deliberate exception: a flood warning from the Environment Agency, or a severe-weather warning, is relayed from that one body because it is the authority — waiting for a second source would be waiting for the news to catch up with the flood. Those are marked as official records on the card, and §3 still applies to every one of them.

Even so, summaries can be wrong. Automated summarisation misplaces emphasis, drops caveats, and occasionally misreads. Ranking is a machine's guess at what matters to you. Where a story bears on a decision, read the original before acting. The link is right there, and that is what it is for.

And the voices are AI-generated too

Where The Wire speaks, nobody is speaking. The audio editions — the daily podcast, the RSS feed it publishes, and the per-item read-outs — are written by AI and read aloud by AI-generated voices. The presenters have names and settled characters, and that is all they are: The Wire has no reporters, conducts no interviews, and records no one. Nothing you hear is a recording of a real person, and no real person is being impersonated.

Everything above about summaries applies to what those voices say, and it applies with less warning, because audio has no link to tap and goes by at speaking pace. Treat an episode as a headline service, not as a source. When they name an outlet — and they are instructed to — that outlet is where the reporting came from, and it is the thing to read.

The Wire does not serve audio. This site never has. The earlier desk at desk.databased.business did, and it has since withdrawn it: the podcast, the RSS feed, the per-item read-outs and the radio mode are all gone, and those addresses answer 410 Gone. The paragraphs above are kept, not because there is audio to hold to account, but because they say what any audio would be held to if The Wire ever speaks again.

Not advice

The Service is general information. It is not financial, investment, legal, tax, medical, employment or safety advice, and no relationship of professional reliance arises from using it. In particular:

Markets and money. Nothing in The Wire is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything, or a personal recommendation under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. We are not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Prices, rates and tariffs shown may be delayed, rounded or wrong. Investments can go down as well as up.
Flood, weather and emergency information. Where The Wire surfaces a flood warning, a weather alert or similar, it repeats a public feed from a body such as the Environment Agency. It is a convenience, never an authority. Always follow the official source and the instructions of the emergency services. Do not rely on The Wire to warn you of anything. See §3.
Planning and local notices. Planning application data comes from third-party aggregation of public records. It may be incomplete, delayed or misplaced. Check with the relevant council before relying on it.

3. We cannot guarantee a notification will reach you

Read this one properly. Notifications depend on your device, your operating system, your network, your battery and power settings, your notification permissions, and a push service run by Apple, Google or Mozilla that we neither own nor control. Any of these can delay a notification, deliver it silently, or drop it entirely.

The Wire is also designed to interrupt you as little as possible: it deliberately holds back alerts when it judges you unavailable, and shows you afterwards what it held back. The Service must never be used as a safety-critical alerting system, and it is not a substitute for official emergency alerts. Keep the Government's Emergency Alerts enabled on your phone, and sign up to warnings directly with the relevant authority.

4. Your account — and reading without one

You do not need an account. The Wire can be read signed-out, with your topics kept on your own device and nothing about you held by us. An account exists only to unlock urgent alerts and the same feed across devices. See Privacy Policy §2.

Accounts are created through Sign in with Apple. We never see or hold a password, and we do not ask Apple for your name or email address.
One account is for one person. Please don't share it.
You are responsible for the security of the device you stay signed in on.
You may delete your account at any time — see Privacy Policy §9. There is nothing to pay and no notice period.
We may suspend or close an account that breaches §6. Where it's practical and lawful, we'll tell you why first.

5. Content, and why there is none of yours

You cannot publish to The Wire

The Service has no mechanism for publishing anything to other readers. There are no comments, no posts, no replies, no profiles, no submissions and no sharing to other users. Topics you follow, searches you save and the home area you set are configuration of your own edition: they are never shown to anyone else, and are covered by the Privacy Policy, not by any publishing licence.

This is deliberate. It means there is no user-generated content to host, moderate or take down, and none of the risks that come with it. If you want to write something about a story, do it where you already publish.

Other people's journalism

Quotations, and the facts reported, belong to the outlets that produced them. We use them for reporting current events and for quotation with sufficient acknowledgement, which is fair dealing under sections 30(1ZA) and 30(2) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The headline on a card is not the outlet’s. It, the summary and the “why it matters” line are written by AI from the outlet’s report, and the page says so in two places that are always there: a statement in the footer of every page, and a note on your first edition. We do not reproduce the outlet’s own headline, so nothing on the card is presented as their words except a quotation, which is marked as one. In practice:

The outlet is named on every card, before the headline.
Weather, flood, energy and planning alerts are not written by AI at all. No model is involved in producing them. They carry the issuing service’s own wording — the Met Office, the Environment Agency, the local planning register — or a short fixed form of words we wrote once. We say so rather than labelling them, because calling an official flood warning “AI-written” would both claim the authority’s words as ours and teach you to discount the one thing on the page you should act on.
Summaries are short, and the link to the original is the most prominent thing on the card.
We never reproduce an article, never re-host a publisher's text, and never circumvent or strip a paywall. Where a page is paywalled we treat the refusal as final, and any quotation we could not verify is dropped rather than published.
We take no payment from anyone for placement or ranking. There is no such thing as a promoted story in The Wire.

Publishers: if you would like your outlet excluded, or believe a summary misrepresents your reporting, email privacy@databased.business with the URL. We will act promptly. We would rather remove something than argue about it.

Our part

The headlines, the summaries, the “why it matters” notes, the ranking, the design and the software are ours, protected by copyright. You may read, save and share links freely. You may not republish The Wire's text at scale, or use it to build or train a competing product or dataset.

Links out

Tapping a story takes you to a third-party website we do not control. We don't endorse it, we aren't responsible for it, and once you're there their terms and privacy policy apply, not ours.

6. Acceptable use

Please don't:

Scrape, crawl or bulk-download the Service, or access the API by any means other than the app.
Automate access, circumvent rate limits, or generate load that degrades the Service for anyone else.
Attempt to reach another user's data, or to bypass authentication or any access control.
Probe, scan or test the Service's security without our written permission. Genuine, good-faith security research is welcome — email privacy@databased.business first and we will not pursue you for it.
Reverse engineer the Service, except where law gives you that right and we cannot exclude it.
Resell, sublicense or commercially exploit the Service or its content.
Use the Service unlawfully, or to infringe anyone's rights.
Remove attribution or misrepresent the origin of anything you take from it.

7. Availability, and the state this is in

The Wire is free, in active development, and offered without any service level. It is currently distributed to a small group of testers. Expect outages, missed editions, changed features and the occasional bug. We may add, change, suspend or discontinue any part of it — including the whole thing — at any time. Where we plan to stop the Service entirely, we will give reasonable notice so you can export or delete your data.

8. Guarantees and liability

The Service is provided "as is". To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude all implied warranties, and we do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, error-free, or that the information in it is accurate, complete or current.

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes our liability for: death or personal injury caused by our negligence; fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

If you are a consumer — which you almost certainly are — you have statutory rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and other consumer protection law, including a right to services supplied with reasonable care and skill. Nothing in these Terms affects those rights. If any part of this section conflicts with them, your statutory rights win.

Subject to the two paragraphs above, and because the Service is supplied free of charge: we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of data, or any indirect or consequential loss; and our total liability to you for all claims arising out of the Service is limited to £100.

We are not liable for anything caused by events outside our reasonable control, including failures of the internet, of your device, or of a third-party push, hosting or data service.

9. If you got the app from Apple's App Store

These terms apply in addition to everything above, and are required by Apple:

These Terms are between you and us only, not Apple. We, not Apple, are solely responsible for the app and its content.
Your licence to use the app is a non-transferable licence to run it on Apple-branded devices you own or control, as permitted by the Usage Rules in the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions.
Apple has no obligation to provide any maintenance or support for the app.
If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple, and Apple will refund the purchase price (which for The Wire is nothing). To the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation of any kind, and any other claims, losses, liabilities, damages, costs or expenses attributable to a failure to conform to a warranty are our responsibility.
We, not Apple, are responsible for addressing any claim by you or a third party relating to the app — including product liability claims, claims that the app fails to conform to a legal or regulatory requirement, and claims under consumer protection or similar legislation. Apple is also not responsible for investigating, defending, settling or discharging any claim that the app infringes a third party's intellectual property rights.
You confirm that you are not located in a country subject to a US Government embargo or designated as "terrorist supporting", and that you are not on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
You must comply with any applicable third-party terms of agreement when using the app.
Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms, and on your acceptance will have the right to enforce them against you as a third-party beneficiary.

10. General

Changes. We may update these Terms. Material changes will be notified in the app before they take effect, and the version and date at the top will change. Continuing to use the Service after that means you accept the new version; if you don't, delete your account.
Severability. If a court finds any provision unenforceable, the rest stands.
No waiver. Not enforcing something once doesn't mean giving it up.
Transfer. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms. We may transfer ours if the Service changes hands, and will tell you if we do.
Third parties. Apart from Apple under §9, nobody who isn't a party to these Terms may enforce them under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.
Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy and the Cookies & Storage Policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service.
Governing law. These Terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the UK or in the EU, you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of where you live, and may bring proceedings there.

11. Change history

Version	Date	What changed
1.5	12 August 2026	The second bullet in §2 goes back to a plain promise, which is what version 1.3 said would happen “when the check makes its first real comparison”. That has now happened: the briefing we ask the AI for asks it for a verbatim sentence out of the article it links to, and the product fetches the article and looks for the sentence. So the bullet no longer says “not yet a machine check” and no longer tells you to treat a quotation on a card as unchecked, because both of those are now untrue and a page that undersells a check teaches you to discount it. Nothing was removed and no right of yours changed: the rule itself — found word-for-word in the source, or removed — is the same rule it has always been, and the bullet still says what the check cannot do, which is tell you whether the article is right.
1.4	4 August 2026	Corrected §2's statement about audio. It said audio “runs on the earlier desk at desk.databased.business”; that address has withdrawn audio entirely — the podcast, its RSS feed, the per-item read-outs and the radio mode are gone and those URLs answer `410 Gone`. The paragraph now says The Wire serves no audio anywhere. Nothing was removed and no right of yours changed: the AI-generated-voices statement is kept as the standard any future audio would be held to.
1.3	3 August 2026	Corrected the second bullet in §2, which described a check we have not built. The rule itself is real and unchanged — a quoted sentence must be found word-for-word in the source page, or it is removed — but the paragraph introduced the four bullets with “and we build to enforce it”, and for this one that is not true: the check exists in the product and has never run, because the briefing we ask the AI for has no field for a quotation. The bullet now says so, and says to treat any quotation on a card as unchecked. The opening line of §2 dropped the word “verified” from “a single verified quotation” for the same reason. The other three bullets are unchanged and remain true, and this bullet goes back to a plain promise when the check makes its first real comparison.
1.2	3 August 2026	Corrected two statements in §5 that were not true of the product as shipped. “…and every card says so” described a per-card label that had been removed; the sentence now names the two carriers that do exist — the footer statement on every page, and the note on your first edition. And a new bullet says plainly that weather, flood, energy and planning alerts are not written by AI, which the previous wording implied they were. Nothing was removed and no right of yours changed: both edits make the page describe what already happens.
1.1	3 August 2026	Said plainly that the voices in the audio editions are AI-generated and that none of the presenters is a person. Nothing was removed; §2 gained a paragraph and the short version gained a line.
1.0	28 July 2026	First published.

12. Contact

privacy@databased.business — for questions about these Terms, complaints, publisher requests and security reports.