5-person Australian Alpha · updated 17 July 2026
Privacy
This notice explains the limited first-party data used to select and evaluate the five-person Australian Alpha.
Who operates Cat Brief
Cat Brief is operated by You Zi Jia from China for a small Australian product Alpha. Cat Brief is not an Australian company, government service or official news organisation. Contact hello@catbrief.can-xiao.com. For access, correction, deletion, privacy complaints or unsubscribe problems, use the Privacy Request form or email privacy@catbrief.can-xiao.com.
What we collect
Alpha application: name, email, confirmation that you are 18 or over, whether you are based in Australia, state or territory, whether you work in a technology or digital business, role category, news-following frequency, likely listening context, willingness to listen twice and give feedback, preferred watchlist track, a simple eligibility marker, consent timestamp and wording version, signup source and creation time. If selected, the database links your application to one frozen anonymous code from CB-A01 to CB-A05 and stores only a hash of the private invitation token. Product events include that anonymous code for invited sessions, a random session identifier, event name, episode, listen number, time, approved channel/UTM values, player position and page version. Founding Circle responses store the anonymous code, discussion, optional reply relationship, text and time. Feedback, contact and privacy-request fields are limited to what each form states.
Why we collect it
We use application answers and a simple eligibility marker to review fit, freeze five participants only after at least eight qualified applications, administer two listens without replacing no-shows or withdrawals, attribute behaviour to anonymous participant codes, operate the invitation-only Founding Circle, evaluate usefulness and handle messages and privacy rights. Invitation attribution is deliberately linked to the selected application in the private operational database; other visitors' anonymous listening events are not reverse-matched to a named application.
Services and storage location
The site, first-party forms and D1 database use OpenAI Sites infrastructure backed by Cloudflare services. Data may be processed outside Australia or China in regions used by those providers. Pilot emails and manual replies use Gmail. Google states that Gmail content is stored in its data centres and encrypted in transit and at rest; Google also states that it maintains servers around the world and information may be processed outside the country where a person lives. Cat Brief therefore does not promise Australia-only or China-only storage. See Google’s Gmail privacy explanation and Google’s Privacy Policy.
Retention and control
Qualified applicants who are not selected have their identifiable application data deleted within 30 days after the five-person cohort is frozen, unless a record is reasonably needed to resolve a request or legal issue. Selected-participant application, invite attribution, event, feedback, Founding Circle, contact and privacy-request records are retained for up to 90 days after the Alpha ends, then deleted or irreversibly aggregated on the same exceptions. Email consent can be withdrawn at any time through the Unsubscribe page. A deletion request may revoke private access and remove or anonymise discussion text while the experiment still records that the frozen anonymous slot was not replaced.
Access, correction, deletion and complaints
Use the first-party Privacy Request form. We may ask for enough information to verify the request. Cat Brief is operated by You Zi Jia from China.
What we do not do
We do not sell personal data, build advertising profiles, use cross-site tracking, fingerprint devices, record keystrokes, collect precise location, or install advertising pixels. Hosting and security infrastructure may process routine request data such as IP address and User-Agent, but the product database does not store full IP addresses.