Last updated September 14, 2026
Podbooster is operated by Straw Hut Media. This page describes what we collect, why we collect it, and who else processes it. It covers two different groups of people, and the difference matters: customers who buy a campaign, and listeners who arrive on an episode page from one of our ads.
If you clicked one of our ads and are reading an episode page, this is the part that applies to you. We never store your IP address.
To count a download to the IAB v2.1 standard we have to be able to tell one listener from another for 24 hours, so that the same person is not counted twice. We do that without keeping the identifier: your IP address is combined with a secret salt and passed through a SHA-256 hash, and only that hash is written to our database. The hash cannot be reversed to recover the address, and it is not shared with anyone.
Alongside that hash we record:
None of this identifies you by name, and we do not build a profile of you, sell any of it, or use it to advertise to you elsewhere.
We use a signed session cookie to keep you logged in for 30 days, and a separate one for administrator access. Both contain an identifier and a cryptographic signature and nothing else. We do not use third-party advertising cookies to track you across other websites. Episode pages carry a Google Ads conversion tag, which reports that a conversion happened so that our own ad campaigns can be measured.
| Service | What it handles |
|---|---|
| Stripe | Card payments. They receive your payment details directly; we do not. |
| Amazon Web Services | Sending transactional email through Amazon SES — magic links, receipts, campaign reports. Also an S3 bucket that receives download reports from podcast hosting platforms. |
| Google Ads | Running the advertising campaigns that deliver your downloads. |
| Anthropic | Generating ad copy and episode summaries. Podcast metadata is sent; customer personal data is not. |
| Spotify | Episode embeds, where a show is on Spotify. Public podcast data only. |
| Railway | Hosting the application and its database. |
We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with anyone beyond the processors above.
Campaign and payment records are kept for as long as we need them for accounting and to answer questions about work we did for you. Listener records — the hashed identifiers described in section 1 — are kept as aggregate campaign statistics. Because the IP hash is one-way, these cannot be traced back to a person even by us.
You can ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete your account and its data. Email podbooster@strawhutmedia.com and we will action it. If you are in the EU or UK, these are your rights under the GDPR; if you are in California, under the CCPA. We do not charge for any of them.
Listener data has no deletion path for a simple reason: with no raw IP stored and only a one-way hash retained, we have no way to identify which record is yours. That is a deliberate design choice, not an obstacle.
Podbooster is a business service and is not directed at anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children.
If this policy changes materially we will update the date at the top and, for changes that affect customers, email the address on file.
Straw Hut Media — podbooster@strawhutmedia.com