Short, because there's little to say

This website

tapebell.com sets no cookies and runs no analytics, advertising or tracking scripts. It is hosted on Cloudflare, which processes the technical data any web request carries, such as your IP address, to deliver the page and protect it from abuse. See Cloudflare's privacy policy.

Referral links

When you click a sign-up button on the Brokers page you go to that broker's website. The broker, not The Tape Bell, records that you came through the author's link, and may set its own cookies. Its privacy policy applies from then on. The Tape Bell never learns who you are or whether you opened an account. It only sees a referral count if the broker reports one.

The Tape Bell app

No account to sign up for, no credit cards, and there is no The Tape Bell server. Your watchlist, holdings, settings and alert history are stored on your own Mac. The app talks directly to the services you connect: your market-data accounts (your market-data brokerage account, and Finnhub if you add it) and any broker you connect read-only. It does so using your own keys and sign-ins, under your own agreements with those providers. None of that passes through The Tape Bell.

The one exception is the Update symbol lists button in the app's Settings. When you press it, the app downloads the latest lists of the stocks it watches in each market from tapebell.com. That request carries only the app's name and version, plus the IP address any web request carries. It sends nothing about you, your holdings or your settings, and it happens only when you press the button.

These optional extras send something to a service you choose. All but the European filings lookup stay off until you switch them on:

• Alerts on your phone. Each alert's text (symbol, buy or sell, price) goes to the push service you picked: ntfy, Pushover or your own Telegram bot.
• US company filings. The app reads companies' reports from the SEC's free EDGAR service. The SEC asks every program to give a contact email, so the email you enter goes to sec.gov with those requests, and nowhere else.
• Ask in plain English. If you add your own AI provider key, the question you type and the names of the search fields (never your holdings, prices or alerts) go to that provider, which turns the question into a search. The search itself runs on your Mac. Your provider's own terms apply.
• Discord, Slack, email or KakaoTalk. If you add any of them, each alert's short text goes there through your own webhook, mailbox or Kakao app, as it does to a phone service.
• Company filings outside the US. For London and European listings the app looks up the company names in your lists on filings.xbrl.org, which needs no account, to find their annual reports. Japan's EDINET and Korea's Open DART (required for those markets), and J-Quants or EODHD if you add them, each receive only the company codes they are asked about, with your own key.
• Backup prices (Tiingo). If you add your own Tiingo key, the tickers of US stocks and crypto you hold that the main price feed could not price are sent to Tiingo, to value them. Quantities and amounts never are.

Email

If you email us (address on the contact page), your message is kept only to reply to you, and to tell you when The Tape Bell is released if you asked for that. It is never sold or shared.

The contact page shows the address only after a Cloudflare Turnstile check, which keeps it away from spam bots. Turnstile runs on that page alone; it looks at technical details of your browser to tell people from bots, under Cloudflare's Turnstile privacy addendum. No other page runs any script.

Last updated 09 Oct 2026.