Spicy Browser

Privacy Policy

Effective 2026-10-14 · Last updated 2026-10-19

This policy explains what data the Spicy Browser app for Android (“the app”) and this website (spicybrowser.com) process, why, and what control you have. It applies to version 1.0 of the app and later versions until we publish an updated policy on this page.

1. Who we are

Spicy Browser is made by Buzzyto OÜ, a private limited company registered in Estonia (registry code 17484090), Vesivärava tn 50-201, 10152 Tallinn, Estonia. Buzzyto OÜ is the data controller for the processing described here.

For anything about this policy, write to office@buzzyto.com.

2. The short version

  • You don’t need an account. We never ask for your name, email address or phone number.
  • Your bookmarks, tabs, settings and browsing data stay on your phone.
  • The app contains no analytics, advertising or crash-reporting SDKs.
  • The proxy is optional and stays off until you turn it on. Our proxy servers don’t log the connections you make through them: not your IP address and not the sites you visit.
  • We don’t sell your data, and we don’t share it with anyone for advertising or profiling.

3. Data that stays on your device

The app stores the following on your phone:

  • your bookmarks, including hidden bookmarks;
  • your open tabs, which Android keeps so they can come back if the app is stopped in the background;
  • your settings, such as accent colour, search engine, encrypted DNS provider and ad-blocking categories;
  • a count of how many requests the ad blocker blocked (a number only, not the sites);
  • if you use encrypted DNS, a cache of the answers from your encrypted DNS provider (the names of sites, and of the servers their pages load from, looked up while the proxy is off), kept until it fills up or Android needs the space; Clear browsing data… with History or Cache selected deletes the stored answers at once and the cache’s index the next time the app is restarted (for example after a force stop or a phone restart);
  • the website data every browser keeps: cookies, cache and the back/forward history of open tabs.

This data is not sent to us. Android cloud backup is turned off for the app, so this data is not copied to your Google account backup either. You can delete it with Clear browsing data… in Settings, by clearing the app’s storage in Android settings, or by uninstalling the app.

4. When you turn on the proxy

The proxy is optional. It is off by default, and you turn it on yourself for a limited time.

While it is on, the app sends your web traffic through our proxy server, and websites see the server’s IP address instead of yours. To forward your traffic, the server has to use two pieces of information while each connection is open:

  • your IP address, so it can send responses back to you;
  • the address of the site you connect to (its domain name or IP address, and port).

We don’t log them. Our proxy servers write no connection logs: no IP addresses, no sites or domains, no connection times and no per-user traffic volumes. This information stays only in the server’s working memory, while the connection is open; if a connection fails, for example because a site’s name doesn’t exist, its error line is held in memory for about a second and then discarded. None of it is written to disk or sent to our monitoring systems.

Each proxy server has its own login, and every copy of the app uses the same login for a given server, so the login doesn’t identify you, and there is no account linked to you.

When you turn the proxy on, the app checks that the connection works by loading a test address from Google (www.google.com/generate_204) through the proxy. With “Auto”, the default choice, the app runs this test through all our proxy servers at once and uses one of the first to answer. Each of these servers sees your IP address only while its test runs, and doesn’t log it. The app doesn’t use your location to choose a server. Google sees our servers’ IP addresses, not yours.

Some things don’t go through the proxy, even while it is on: a website can learn your device’s real IP address through WebRTC (a browser feature used for calls and live video), and a file you download is handed to another app, which downloads it without the proxy - the app warns you before that. On devices with an old Android System WebView (version 83 or older), forms, logins and live connections don’t go through the proxy either: they use your own IP address and your network’s DNS. The app shows this as “Limited mode”. Safe Browsing checks, which warn you about dangerous sites, are made by Google Play services from your device’s own IP address, not through the proxy (see section 7).

Encryption. The proxy does not add its own encryption. For sites that use HTTPS (the padlock in the address bar), the content of your traffic stays encrypted between your phone and the site, and neither we nor anyone else along the way can read it. The address of the site you connect to can still be seen by the networks your traffic passes through. For sites that don’t use HTTPS, the content is not encrypted, just as without a proxy.

Where. Our proxy servers run on servers we rent from hosting providers, who operate the hardware and the network connection (see section 10). Today they are in the Netherlands (EU) and in Germany (EU). If that changes, we will update this section.

5. Encrypted DNS

Before a site can open, its name (for example, example.com) has to be translated into an IP address. This is called DNS.

Encrypted DNS is off by default. If you turn it on, the app sends the domain names it needs to look up, encrypted, to the provider you choose, and the provider sees your IP address. While the proxy is on, the app doesn’t look up the sites you open: it passes their names to our proxy server, which looks them up through public DNS services (Cloudflare and Google) from its own IP address. Your encrypted DNS provider doesn’t see these names then; your network still can, because the connection to our server is not encrypted (see “Encryption” in section 4). You can choose one of these providers:

These providers are independent companies that handle this data under their own policies. We don’t receive it.

When encrypted DNS is off, or if the provider you chose can’t be reached, the app looks up domain names through your network’s usual DNS service (normally your mobile operator or Wi-Fi provider), so your network can see the names of the sites you open. While the proxy is on, the app makes no such lookups, except in “Limited mode” (section 4); your network can still see the site names in your traffic, see section 4. On devices with an old Android System WebView (version 83 or older, “Limited mode”), a page that can’t be loaded with encrypted DNS while the proxy is off is loaded again by the browser itself, over your network’s usual DNS.

6. Ad blocking

The ad blocker works entirely on your phone. It checks the addresses a page tries to load against block lists that come inside the app. Nothing about what you browse is sent to us or to the authors of the lists. The lists are updated when you update the app.

7. Websites, search engines and Google Play

  • Websites you visit receive what any browser sends them, such as cookies and your IP address (or our server’s IP address while the proxy is on), and handle it under their own policies.
  • Search. Text you type into the address bar that is not a web address is sent as a search to the search engine you chose: Google by default, or DuckDuckGo, Bing or Yahoo.
  • Android System WebView and Google Play services are parts of Android made by Google. The WebView shows the pages you open, and its Safe Browsing feature (on by default) checks them against Google’s list of dangerous sites; Google Play services make these checks from your device, under Google’s privacy policy. The app turns off the WebView’s usage statistics, so the WebView doesn’t send them to Google from this app.
  • Google Play handles downloading and updating the app under Google’s privacy policy. If you allowed your phone to share usage and diagnostics data, Google may give us crash and performance reports about the app. We use them only to fix problems.

8. Server statistics and security

To keep the service running we collect technical statistics about our servers themselves: processor, memory and disk use, total network traffic per server, and per-server counts of connection attempts, open connections, failed logins and blocked addresses. These statistics are numbers only: they contain no IP addresses, no sites and nothing about individual users. We keep them for 30 days.

To protect the proxy from password-guessing attacks, a server records the time, an error code and the IP address of a connection attempt that fails to log in, and automatically blocks an address for one hour after five failed attempts within five minutes. Connections that log in are not recorded. These records stay on the server and are deleted after no more than 7 days. The list of blocked addresses is kept only in the server’s working memory.

9. What we don’t do

  • We don’t show ads in this version of the app.
  • We don’t use analytics, advertising or tracking SDKs, and we don’t build profiles.
  • We don’t sell or rent personal data, and we don’t share it with others except the service providers in section 10, who process it for us.
  • We don’t use data from the app to train AI models.

If a future version adds ads or anything else that processes more data, we will update this policy and the data safety section on Google Play before that version is released.

10. Service providers and international transfers

We use these service providers. They process data only to provide their services to us:

  • hosting providers that rent us the servers that run the proxy and collect our server statistics (see below for where they are);
  • Cloudflare, which hosts this website (see section 14);
  • Fastmail (Fastmail Pty Ltd, Australia), which hosts our office@buzzyto.com mailbox.

Our servers in the Netherlands, including the one that collects our server statistics, are rented from a hosting provider registered in the United Arab Emirates, and our servers in Germany from a hosting provider in Germany (EU). The United Arab Emirates has no adequacy decision of the European Commission. We have no Standard Contractual Clauses or other safeguards under Article 46 GDPR with the hosting provider registered there. When you use one of our servers in the Netherlands, your IP address and the address of the site you connect to pass through the servers of that provider. With “Auto”, the default choice, the connection test also reaches those servers, so they see your IP address even when another server is chosen (section 4). As described in section 4, the servers hold this data only in working memory while the connection is open and don’t log it. The records of failed logins described in section 8 are kept on the server that received them, for no more than 7 days.

Cloudflare, which hosts this website, processes data in the United States under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (Article 45 GDPR) and the Standard Contractual Clauses in its data processing terms (Article 46 GDPR); Fastmail, which hosts our mailbox, is an Australian company and may process the emails you send us in other countries, including the United States; Australia has no adequacy decision of the European Commission, and these transfers are covered by the Standard Contractual Clauses in Fastmail’s data processing terms (Article 46 GDPR). You can ask for a copy of these safeguards at office@buzzyto.com.

Google, the encrypted DNS providers, the public DNS services our proxy server uses (Cloudflare and Google, which receive the names of the sites you open from our server, without your IP address) and the search engines you choose are independent companies that decide for themselves how they handle data; see sections 5 and 7.

  • Proxy. Using your IP address and the address of the site you connect to while the proxy is on is necessary to provide the proxy you asked for (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR).
  • Security of the proxy. Recording the IP addresses of failed login attempts and blocking them for a short time (section 8) is based on our legitimate interest in protecting the service and its users from attacks (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).
  • Crash reports from Google Play. We use them only to find and fix problems in the app, based on our legitimate interest in providing an app that works (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). They don’t identify you to us.
  • This website. Delivering the pages and protecting the site from attacks is based on our legitimate interest in running a secure website (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).
  • Email. If you write to us, we use your email address and message to answer you. Where your message is about using the app under our terms, this is necessary for that agreement (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR); otherwise it is based on our legitimate interest in answering questions about our products (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). We keep the correspondence for up to 12 months after our last reply, unless the law requires us to keep it longer.

Encrypted DNS lookups and searches are sent from your phone directly to the provider you chose; we don’t receive this data.

12. Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us for access to your personal data, and for its correction, deletion, restriction or portability, and you can object to its processing. Write to office@buzzyto.com; we reply within 15 days of receiving your request.

Your right to object. Where we rely on our legitimate interests (section 11), you can object at any time on grounds relating to your particular situation.

You don’t have to give us any personal data to use the app. If you don’t turn on the proxy, nothing about your browsing reaches our servers. We don’t make decisions about you based solely on automated processing, including profiling, that have legal or similarly significant effects.

Because we don’t keep data linked to you, in most cases we will have nothing to show or delete apart from emails you sent us. If so, we’ll tell you.

You can also complain to the Estonian Data Protection Inspectorate (Andmekaitse Inspektsioon) or to the data protection authority where you live.

Users in Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The data protection laws of your country also apply to our processing of your data, and they give you rights like those above, including to confirm whether we process your data and, in Mexico, the rights of access, rectification, cancellation and opposition. Buzzyto OÜ (section 1) is the controller, and you can use all these rights by writing to office@buzzyto.com; we reply within 15 days. For Brazil, this address is also our contact channel under Article 41 LGPD (encarregado). We use your data only for the purposes in section 11. All of them are needed to provide the service you asked for or to keep it secure, and we have no other purposes such as marketing or profiling. Where your law does not recognise legitimate interests, we rely on these uses being necessary to provide the service under our Terms of Service. Your data is processed outside your country, on our proxy servers in the countries named in section 4 and by the service providers in section 10, because that is necessary to provide the service you asked for (for Brazil, Article 33(IX) with Article 7(V) LGPD). You can also complain to your national data protection authority.

13. Children

Spicy Browser is intended for adults (18+). It is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly process children’s data.

14. This website

spicybrowser.com is a static website hosted on Cloudflare Pages. It sets no cookies and loads no analytics, fonts, scripts or other content from third parties. Cloudflare processes visitors’ IP addresses for us to deliver the pages and protect them from attacks (see sections 10 and 11); its own privacy policy explains how it handles data. We don’t receive visitor logs.

15. Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we update the dates at the top of this page. If a change materially affects how the app handles your data, we will tell you about it in the app and on this page at least 30 days before it takes effect, unless a shorter period is required for legal or security reasons.