Mera is an impact-first, privacy-first personal news assistant operated by Mera News B.V., registered in the Netherlands.
Mera is a discovery platform for publishers. Our purpose is to help readers find news they care about and to drive traffic to the publishers who produce it. We are an RSS/Atom feed reader, not a destination that replaces the original source.
What users see
Mera displays the headline (title) and a link to the original article on the publisher's website, together with a short note of our own (see below).
We show headlines verbatim. We do not rewrite, paraphrase, or AI-generate alternative headlines. Users may optionally translate a headline into their own language using an on-device LLM; that translation happens locally on the reader's device and is never produced or stored by Mera.
We add a short note from us about how a story may connect to you specifically. This note is Mera's own words on relevance to you; it is not a copy, rewrite, or summary of the publisher's article.
We do not display the article body.
We do not display the feed summary or description to users.
We do not display publisher images, full text, or paywalled content.
Every item links directly to the source. Mera is built to send readers to publishers.
How we obtain content
We read publicly available RSS and Atom feeds that publishers themselves publish. We take only what the feed provides, and we use less of it than the feed offers.
The complete, public list of every source we read is maintained openly at our feed registry:
github.com/Mera-News/mera-news-rss-feeds
Internal relevance processing
To decide whether an article is relevant to a given reader, our systems may read the summary text included by the publisher in the feed.
This processing is internal and automated only.
The summary is never shown to users.
The summary is not retained beyond what the relevance step requires.
This is a text and data mining operation used solely to rank relevance.
Supporting publishers
Mera wants publishers to flourish. When publishers thrive, the ecosystem produces better journalism, Mera gets better content, and readers get better news.
We track a reader's engagement on-device only. This behavioral data stays on the reader's device and is never sent to our servers.
Based on that on-device signal, Mera nudges readers to subscribe to or otherwise support the publications that matter most to them.
Our incentives are aligned with publishers: we succeed by sending you engaged, loyal readers, not by keeping them inside Mera.
The legal basis we rely on
This is our good-faith position under EU and Netherlands law. It is not legal advice. If you disagree, we would rather remove your sources than argue (see removal below).
DSM Directive (EU) 2019/790, Art. 15 (press publishers' right). The right permits the free use of individual words and very short extracts. Mera displays only verbatim headlines and links, shows no summaries, and sends readers to the source.
DSM Directive, Art. 4 (text and data mining exception). Our internal, non-displayed relevance analysis of feed summaries relies on the general TDM exception, subject to honoring rights reservations and opt-outs.
InfoSoc Directive 2001/29/EC, Art. 5(1). Any copy of a summary made during relevance processing is transient and incidental, forming an integral part of a technical process with no independent economic significance.
Hyperlinking case law (Svensson, GS Media). Linking to content that publishers have lawfully made available is established as lawful.
Database Directive 96/9/EC. We acknowledge the sui generis database right and do not extract or re-utilize a substantial part of any publisher's database.
GDPR (EU) 2016/679. This governs our users' personal data only, not publisher content. Mera minimizes server-side data through on-device processing.
Auteurswet (Dutch Copyright Act) and its implementation of the DSM Directive, including the press publishers' right and the citaatrecht (quotation) principles.
Databankenwet (Database Act) for the sui generis database right.
UAVG (Uitvoeringswet AVG, the Dutch GDPR implementation) for our users' personal data.
Respecting your choices
We do not crawl or scrape any website, so we never request or rely on robots.txt. We read only the RSS/Atom feeds that publishers have willfully published, because we believe that feed is the one channel a publisher has deliberately chosen to make available to readers like us.
We respect machine-readable rights reservations and exclusion signals, including:
Machine-readable TDM reservations (for example, tdm-reservation signals)
Rights or usage terms stated within your feed
If you reserve rights through these signals, we will exclude your content from relevance processing and from the platform.
How to request removal
If you are a publisher, rights holder, lawyer, or agency and want your sources removed, use either route:
Route
How
GitHub issue
Open an issue on github.com/Mera-News/mera-news-rss-feeds naming the feed(s) or domain(s) to remove
Confirmation that you are authorized to make the request
We remove sources on request, no explanation or dispute required. We aim to acknowledge within 2 business days and to remove the sources within 5 business days.
Privacy
This policy covers how we use publisher content. For how we handle the personal data of our users, see our Privacy Policy. Mera is built to keep personal reading data on-device wherever possible.