This article answers some general questions about Premium plans at CityFALCON. If you ever need more information than you can find in our Knowledge Base, don't hesitate to contact us (see last answer on this page for options).
The Questions:
- Where is my personal information stored?
- How is my data protected during and after my subscription?
- Is Premium available in all countries?
- Can I share my Premium content? Do you have licensing plans?
- How does my subscription work across multiple devices?
- How is licensed and copyrighted content treated?
- I turned off registration/subscriptions. Why do I still see such content?
- Why should I pay you for content that is already public?
- What content is available for offline reading and without paywalls or advertisements?
- How far back do the archives reach?
- I had an account before CityFALCON Premium. What happens to my account?
- How can I contact you if I have more questions?
Where is my personal information stored?
Your personal information is stored in two places: our servers and Chargebee's servers. But the same information isn't stored on both (except identifying information to connect your CityFALCON account with the Chargebee payment information).
Your personal information like your email address, your preferences, and the data we use to improve your experience with personalisation is stored on or servers.
Your financial information, like your credit card information and payment details, are stored on Chargebee's or its affiliates' servers. We don't store your financial information on our own systems.
How is my data protected during and after my subscription?
Your data is subject to both our Privacy Policy and to Chargebee's Privacy Policy. Both are robust defenders of your privacy, so don't worry about your data falling into the wrong hands.
We can't speak for Chargebee, but they have spoken for themselves on their Security page, which details all the ways they protect your financial and personal data. As for us, your data will be retained, even if you delete your account, only to comply with UK data retention polices. These are usually in place for KYC reasons. As soon as we are allowed to legally delete your data after you close your account, though, we will.
If you want the incentive for us deleting you data as soon as we can: society and our product change very fast, and holding on to old data isn't very useful for us. it might even skew our algorithms the wrong way. So rest assured we protect your data while you're here and, even if you decide to leave us on bad terms, we'll protect your data until we can legally delete it.
Is Premium available in all countries?
Premium is available in any country in which UK-resident businesses are permitted to transact. This means we are not able to provide services to citizens of certain countries under sanctions or otherwise disallowed from doing business with UK companies.
Initially, all purchases will be charged in United States Dollars (USD), so the prices you see on the sales pages are in USD. This may lead to a small discrepancy in the quote price and the actual price if your card is not based on USD, since the exchange rate might change slightly during processing. This does not bar anyone from using our services just because the credit card is based on another currency.
Can I share my Premium content? Do you have licensing plans?
Unfortunately we cannot offer licenses to our customers for the content we provide on our platform. It is only intended for your own consumption, whether that be at your house, in your job, or while you're out with others. Obviously you cannot copy a news article and post it on your own website, and you can't sell access to paywalled content to other people. Just basic copyright stuff.
Of course, if you're sitting around the coffee table and you see a really interesting story, you can tell your friends. But you shouldn't be selling access to our platform for access to our partners' platforms. And you shouldn't regularly share access to your account, either. It's only meant for a single individual (you).
How does my subscription work across multiple devices?
You can use your Premium subscription on any device that you personally own or is used primarily by you. That means your home voice system, your smartphone, your laptop, and your work computer can all use CityFALCON with the same subscription.
Sharing of CityFALCON accounts is not permitted, though, so you and your friend can't sign up for one account then use it simultaneously in different locations for different purposes. Also, it won't work very well, because our machines will get confused about how to personalise for the account, filters will keep getting synced across different devices, and you might hide a story the other person liked.
How is licensed and copyrighted content treated?
Some subscription plans will allow you to see content that is otherwise behind paywalls without the need to register and purchase subscriptions to various news sources. The consumption of this information is intended for your sole use only and not for anyone else's. You may not copy, distribute, or otherwise disseminate copyrighted or licensed materials for any reason other than personal use (like printing new stories) or uses protected by law (such as educational purposes, which are protected in some jurisdictions).
Just to be clear, personal use is allowable at work. It just needs to be your intention to use the material personally. Making your job easier with the help of our services is personal use. Just don't go copying and disseminating news stories for all 300 of your coworkers to read every morning.
Why do I still see sources that require subscriptions or registration?
The CityFALCON Story Filters let you hide sources that require subscriptions and registrations. However, even if you've decided to do so, sometimes a few might still appear in your feed. This may happen because the source recently changed its policies (like adding a paywall) and we have not updated our database to reflect the change. There may also be geolocation restrictions, which we do not keep track of. On CityFALCON, the source does not know you, but once you visit their site, they may impose the restriction. One more reason is that we may have missed a visitation restriction, such as only 5 free visits per week. If you hide these sources and are still asked to register or subscribe, please take a minute to send us the details so we can update our database.
A final reason: some sources wall off only some of their content. Because some content is freely available for as many views as desired, it will be marked as not requiring a subscription or registration. However, some of the content might still require registration.
Why should I pay you for content that is already public?
Under our Premium plans, you may have noticed we offer publicly available content as a feature. It's already public, so why pay for it? How is that a selling feature? Let us explain.
Many news organisations and publishers have free versions of their service, but these are almost invariably financed by advertisements. Advertisements slow down load times and cluttered the page. When you see public content through a Premium subscription, it will be advert-free, giving you less of a headache when reading lots of information.
Moreover, you won't need an adblocker, harming publisher revenues (we pay them a licensing fee), and you won't have to worry about malicious code from advertisements, either.
What content is available for offline reading and without paywalls or advertisements?
We'd love to make all content available offline and free of advertisements and paywalls, but due to licensing restrictions and the fact that some publications earn their entire revenue stream through advertisements, we cannot offer all content for offline viewing.
The content we pay directly for, that is, Premium content, is available offline and free of advertisements and paywalls. You can tell content is Premium when it already preloaded on your story page in full text. In those cases, there is no need to leave the CityFALCON platform, and you can be sure that if you download that content, it will still be available offline.
See a partial list of our Premium providers here.
What is the difference between Premium Sources and Premium Content?
Premium Content will be displayed on the CityFALCON platform in full-text format (i.e., the entire story is printed within the CityFALCON website or app). There will be no advertisements or website redirects, and the entire story will be paywall-free. Premium Content also includes some non-public content not available on the publisher’s public-facing website.
Non-Premium Content requires a visit to the publisher's website to view the full text of the story. Their site may include advertisements, paywalls, and trackers. CityFALCON has no control over what the publisher website contains.
Premium Sources are those publications that provide Premium Content. Premium Sources may also provide non-Premium content. Because of the way licensing works, we may be able to provide some stories from Publisher A as full-text on CityFALCON while others will require you to visit Publisher A's website, even though both stories come from Publisher A.
To force your feed to display only Premium Content, under the Source Filter set the Show Premium Content ONLY toggle switch to "on". See our Advanced Source Filters help article to refine your source filters.
How far back do the archives reach?
Our Basic plan allows up to 30 days archival content and our Silver plan will allow up to 1-year archival content once the archive feature is released. This is based on the date of access, not the date you joined CityFALCON or upgraded your plan. For example, if you check your feed on 25 December 2020 and are a Silver user at the time, you can see content back to 25 December 2019.
Our Gold and some API users will receive access to content back to 01 January 2018, the date we upgraded our infrastructure. Our data reaches back farther than this, and as we grow, we will continue to reprocess pre-2018 content and make it accessible as soon as it is available.
I had an account before CityFALCON Premium. What happens to my account?
All CityFALCON accounts registered before the launch of Premium will automatically be converted to our free Basic plan. If you want to upgrade, you can do so at any time.
How can I contact you if I have more questions?
If your questions haven't been answered in the FAQ or the Knowledge Base, you can contact us via the Contact Us popup available in the footer of every page or through our Contact Form.