Methodology Chapter 03 of 08
What Insights records, and where it stays.
Insights is your private reflection of a reading week: the topics that held your attention, the sources you returned to, and where your reading sat on the political spectrum. All of it is built from records your phone writes when you open something, and all of it is computed on the phone that wrote them. Mosaic's servers never receive your reading history, so the only copy of your week is the one in your hand.
Your patterns, on your phone.
Review the on-device-only topic and source patterns of a sample reading week.
Tap a topic to see how attention reached it.
Iran conflict
World
23%
Specific topics inside
Showing Insights view 1 of 2: Topic Landscape
What gets written down
Two kinds of record exist, and both are written by a deliberate act of yours. Nothing you scroll past or merely see in the feed writes anything.
- The article record Written when you open an article.
- Which article it was, its publisher, when you opened it, and roughly how long you kept it open. The record also keeps the article's own labels, its subjects and specific topics, and the publisher's lean and factual-reporting ratings as they stood that day, so your week can be read back later without looking anything up again.
- The activity record Written when you open a Story or a Big Picture.
- Which one you opened, its title and topics, when, and from which part of the app. Expanding a long timeline summary is noted the same way. This is what lets your week count the Stories you explored, not just the individual articles you read.
Where the records stay
Each record is a small file in the app's own storage, protected by the same encryption that protects everything else on your device. Three rules govern what happens to it from there.
Written and read in one place
The records are created by the app, stored by the app, and read back by the app on the same phone. They are not analytics: no dashboard of ours consumes them, and no third-party service receives a copy.
Your settings travel. Your history does not.
Fetching your feed sends the request the Feed ranking chapter describes: the weights and preferences you chose. It never carries what you read. If an insight prompts you to tune a publisher, the new setting travels afterward, and the reading that prompted it stays behind.
Deleting the app deletes the data
The records exist nowhere else, so removing Mosaic removes them. There is no account to close and no server-side copy to request, because neither exists.
How a week is counted
Insights reads the last seven days, a window ending the moment you open the page. Inside it, one rule does most of the work: everything counts once. An article counts once however many times or from however many places you opened it, and a Story counts once however often you returned to it. Four sections then read that week four different ways.
- Weekly Reflection What led your week?
- The headline naming the topics that held most of your attention, with the week's standout figures beneath it. It is assembled from the three sections below rather than counted separately, so its numbers always agree with theirs.
- Topic Landscape What did you read about?
- Attention counted from the articles, Stories, and Big Pictures you opened, each worth one unit. Two views share the section: Specific files an article under the one named topic it is mainly about, and Broad files it under every subject area it touches, which is why the two views total differently. The topics themselves are the labels from the Article labels chapter.
- Source Map Who did you read?
- Your opened articles grouped by publisher, showing which sources you returned to and what share of the week each one carried. The map draws no conclusions about the sources. Any publisher on it opens the same report card the Publisher ratings chapter describes.
- Perspective Where did your reading sit?
- Your opened politics and world articles, grouped into left, center, and right by the same publisher lean ratings the Publisher ratings chapter explains, with the exact counts always shown. An article from an unrated outlet is set aside and reported as set aside, never assumed to be Center, and with fewer than three rated articles the section shows a plain note instead of percentages built on too little.
The records themselves
There is no model to disclose in this chapter. No AI reads these files, and every sentence Insights shows you is assembled from fixed templates, so the same week always produces the same words. What is written to your phone is small enough to print, so the shape of both records is shown here with sample values in place of a real week.
What an article record holds
One file per opened article. The timestamps are exact, the ratings are the publisher's at the time of reading, and the topics are the article's own labels.
{
"articleId": "8f3d2c9a-41e6-4b0f-9a7e-5c1d6e2f8b04",
"title": "Iran Signals Openness to Renewed Nuclear Talks",
"url": "https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/world/...",
"domain": "nytimes.com",
"publisherName": "The New York Times",
"readAt": "2026-08-01T13:42:07Z",
"readTimeSeconds": 184,
"articleType": "news",
"articleTopics": ["world", "politics"],
"canonicalTopics": [
{ "displayName": "Iran conflict", "isPrimary": true }
],
"publisherLean": "Left-Center",
"publisherFactualReporting": "High"
}What an activity record holds
One file per opened Story or Big Picture. The topics riding on the record are what let the Topic Landscape count a Story without looking anything up again.
{
"eventType": "story_cluster_opened",
"occurredAt": "2026-08-01T13:39:52Z",
"targetId": "c41b8a77-93d5-4f2e-8c66-0d7a1b5e9f23",
"targetTitle": "Iran Nuclear Talks Resume in Geneva",
"sourceSurface": "home_feed",
"canonicalTopics": [
{ "displayName": "Iran conflict", "isPrimary": true }
],
"broadTopics": ["world", "politics"],
"schemaVersion": 1
}The boundary
What Insights does not do
- Nothing you read is sent anywhere. The records live on your phone, the counting happens on your phone, and Mosaic operates no server that could receive them. We could not read your history if we wanted to.
- Insights never changes your feed on its own. Nothing you read teaches the ranking anything: your feed follows the settings you chose, and only those settings travel with a request.
- No AI reads your week. Every sentence is assembled from fixed templates, so the words describe counts rather than impressions, and the same week always produces the same sentences.
- It describes patterns and never judges them. Insights will tell you which source appeared most often. It will not tell you what you should read, or that your habits are good or bad.
- It is a seven-day mirror. Each time you open it, Insights counts the last seven days of reading and nothing older.