Legal
Privacy policy
What Hype Machine collects, why, who else receives it, how long we keep it, and how to have it deleted.
The short version
- You add social accounts by pasting a public profile address. Hype Machine doesn’t connect to your social accounts, and we never see a password for them.
- Data providers read public profiles and posts for us only when a customer asks, such as by pressing Sync. Nothing is read on a schedule.
- Your brief, and the posts of the accounts you track, are sent to Anthropic, our AI text provider, to write your posts and analyses. Each picture’s description is sent to OpenAI, our AI picture provider, to make the picture.
- We don’t sell data or show ads, and we don’t use your data to train AI models.
- Hype Machine runs on Iridiom, a platform we also operate. Your email and password are kept there, and work on the other products that run on it if you choose to use them.
- To have data erased, email webmaster@hypemachine.co. Deleting a project in the app doesn’t erase its data.
Who we are
Hype Machine is run by Probalia Ventures LLC, 240 Harriman Road, Irvington, NY 10533, USA (“we”, “us”). We decide how the data on this page is used, which makes us its controller. Email us at webmaster@hypemachine.co.
This policy covers www.hypemachine.co and the Hype Machine app at app.hypemachine.co, including what Hype Machine holds about people who aren’t customers, whose public profiles customers track.
The app runs on Iridiom, a software platform we also operate, so some screens and emails there may use the Iridiom name.
Your sign-in. Your email address and password, or your Google or Microsoft sign-in, are kept once, on Iridiom, for every product that runs on it. Signing up here doesn’t set you up anywhere else: nothing exists for you in another product until you go there and sign in, with the same email address and password. What you do in one product isn’t shared with another, and each has its own privacy policy.
Hype Machine is not affiliated with, endorsed by or run by LinkedIn, Meta, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or X.
How Hype Machine gets social data
- You add an account by pasting its public profile address: yours or a competitor’s, on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, and on X where we’ve set that up.
- Hype Machine doesn’t connect to social accounts. It never asks you to sign in to a social platform or for a password, and it has no access to any account there: it reads only what a profile shows publicly.
- When you press Sync, a data provider reads what that profile shows publicly: its details, and its recent posts with their public counts. Apify reads LinkedIn and TikTok. ScrapeCreators reads Instagram and Facebook. Nothing syncs on its own.
- X accounts are read only through X’s own API, and only where we’ve set that up. Where we haven’t, Hype Machine writes X posts but doesn’t read X accounts.
- If a sync can’t read a follower count, you can type it in.
- Hype Machine never posts, comments, likes, follows or sends messages on any platform.
What we collect about you
Everything below comes from you, from the public profiles you add, or from Stripe and your sign-in provider. We don’t buy data about you.
Your account
| Data | What it is, and why we have it | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| Account details | Your name, email address and password, which we store only as a one-way hash. If you sign in with Google or Microsoft instead, the name, email address and profile picture they share with us. Also the workspace your Hype Machine projects live in, and who belongs to it. Used to sign you in and run your account. | Until you ask us to delete your account. |
| Sign-in and security records | Each sign-in, failed attempt and password-reset request, with the email address used, the IP address and browser details. Used to keep accounts secure and to limit repeated attempts. | 90 days, then deleted by a weekly clean-up. A count of failed attempts is kept on your account until you next sign in or change your password, and the time of the last failed attempt until your account is deleted. Counters that limit repeated attempts last at most an hour. |
| Purchases | What you bought, when, and how much you paid, plus the customer record Stripe keeps for Hype Machine: your email address and our internal account IDs. You type your card and billing details into Stripe’s own form, and they never reach us. Used to take payment, give you what you bought, and keep accounting records. | Kept as accounting records. We don’t delete them on request while tax or accounting law requires us to keep them. |
| What you agreed to | Which version of the terms of service and privacy policy you accepted, and when: when you sign up, when we ask you to accept a new version, and when you pay. Used to show what you agreed to. | As long as you have an account, and afterwards for as long as we may need to show what you agreed to. |
| Product news, if you ask for it | Only if you tick the box when you sign up or buy, or turn on Product news in Settings: your email address, the words you agreed to and when, and each time you unsubscribe. Used to send you occasional emails about Hype Machine: new features and offers. | Until you unsubscribe. After that, the record of what you agreed to and when you unsubscribed, for as long as we may need to show it. |
Your projects
| Data | What it is, and why we have it | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| Your brief | The brand brief you write (up to 2,000 characters) and the files you upload (PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, text or Markdown, up to 3 MB each), with the text we pull out of them. Used to write your posts in your brand’s voice. | Until you change the brief or remove the file. Otherwise kept until you ask us to erase it. |
| Weekly posts | Every version of every post Hype Machine writes for you, the directions you give it, your own edits, and the picture description for each post. Used to show you your weeks and to count what your plan has used. | Kept with the project until you ask us to erase it. There is no in-app delete for posts. |
| Pictures | The pictures made for your posts, the full prompt sent to make each one, and the picture styles you choose or write. Used to show and download your pictures and keep a week’s look consistent. | Kept with the project until you ask us to erase it. You can delete a picture style you wrote, but its wording stays in the prompts of pictures already made. |
| Your library catalogue | If you use From your library: the catalogues you upload, with each file’s path and name, its size and shape, its description, setting, products and codes, any words in it, what’s visible of any people in it, colours, campaign, tags, usage rights and any preview link you include, and which file was picked for each post. Never the photos or videos themselves: Hype Machine doesn’t receive them. Used to pick a file for each post. | Until you remove the library in the app, or replace its entries. The name, path and description of a file already picked for a week stay with that week until you ask us to erase them. |
| Analyses | The results of What’s working, goal plans, competitor insights and post analysis, with any goal you type. Also a short summary of what your audience responds to (patterns, topics and tone), saved to your workspace. Used so you can open them again. | Until you ask us to erase them. An analysis of a single post is deleted with that post’s account. |
Accounts you track
| Data | What it is, and why we have it | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| Profile details | For each account you add, yours or a competitor’s: the platform, handle, display name, profile address, a link to the profile picture, and the follower count, read from the profile or typed by you when it can’t be read. Used to label accounts and work out engagement rates. | Until the account is removed, or you ask us to erase it. |
| Public posts and their numbers | Each post’s text, type, publish time and link, links to its pictures or video thumbnail (we don’t copy the media), and its public counts: likes or reactions, comments, shares, views and saves, where the platform shows them. Also the ranks and scores we work out. The first sync reads up to a year back. Used to rank posts, compare accounts on the same platform, and shape your weeks: the text of the best and newest posts of the accounts you mark as yours is sent to our AI text provider, so the posts it writes follow their voice. | Until the account is removed, or you ask us to erase it. |
| Follower history | The follower and post counts read at each sync. No platform reports past follower growth, so we keep our own record. | Deleted with the account. |
| Sync log | A record of each sync: the account’s handle, when it ran, how much it read and what it cost. Used to space out syncs and track costs. It stays when an account is removed, so removing and re-adding an account doesn’t skip the wait. | Until you ask us to erase it. |
Records of use
| Data | What it is, and why we have it | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| Records of use | A record of each request Hype Machine makes to our platform (your account, what was asked for and how long it took), and for each AI request, your email address, the model used, its size and its cost, never what was asked or answered. Used to run the service, control costs and investigate faults. | Kept as business records. If you ask us to delete your account, we remove your details from them. |
| Data-provider costs | For each paid request Apify makes for us: your account, which of its tools ran, and what it cost, never what it read. Used to control costs. | Kept as business records. If you ask us to delete your account, we remove your details from them. |
| Screening of AI requests | Requests to the AI and its answers are screened automatically for attempts to misuse it. When something is flagged, we keep which check matched and where in the text it was, never the text itself. Used to stop abuse. | 90 days, then deleted by the weekly clean-up. |
| Logs and error reports | Technical records of requests and errors, which can include a tracked account’s name and profile address, a post’s link, or the words that made a content check refuse a request. Some errors go to Sentry, our error-monitoring service. On app.hypemachine.co’s own pages (sign-in, checkout and the frame around the app), Sentry may also record a small share of visits as a replay of clicks and page changes, with all text and anything typed hidden. It doesn’t record inside the Hype Machine app itself. | Deleted by a weekly clean-up once they’re old enough: app logs after 7 days, error records after 90 days, audit records after 1 year. Error records we flag for an investigation are kept until we unflag them. What Vercel and Sentry keep follows their own retention. |
| Emails to us | Anything you send to webmaster@hypemachine.co. Used to answer you and handle your requests. | As long as we need it to answer you or to show we handled your request. |
To have an account, you need to give us your name, email address and a password, or sign in with Google or Microsoft. To buy something, you give your payment details to Stripe. Without these we can’t provide Hype Machine. Everything else is up to you.
Hype Machine needs a brief before it can write your posts.
Please don’t put sensitive information, such as health information or religious beliefs, in your brief or files. Hype Machine doesn’t need it.
People who aren’t Hype Machine customers
If your public profile is tracked
A Hype Machine customer can add any public profile on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook to compare with their own account. That includes a person’s own profile, not only a company’s page. If it’s your profile, this section is for you.
| Data | What it is, and why we have it | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| Public profile details | What the profile shows to anyone: handle, display name, profile address, a link to the profile picture, and the follower count. Read by our data providers from the public page. | Until it’s removed from every project that tracks it, or you or the customer ask us to erase it. It isn’t deleted automatically, even when that customer’s project ends or is deleted. |
| Public posts and their numbers | The text, type, publish time and link of recent public posts, links to their media, and their public counts. The first read goes up to a year back. Used to compare the profile with the customer’s own account on the same platform, including in written insights our AI text provider produces, which can quote the posts and name the profile. If the customer marks the profile as their own, the text of its best and newest posts is also sent to our AI text provider as examples of the voice the customer’s posts should follow. | As for profile details. Written insights that name the profile stay until you or the customer ask us to erase them. |
| Follower history and sync log | The follower and post counts read at each sync, and a record of each sync that includes the profile’s handle. | Follower history goes with the profile. The sync log stays until we’re asked to erase it. |
Where it comes from. Your public page, read by our data providers: Apify for LinkedIn and TikTok, ScrapeCreators for Instagram and Facebook, and X’s own API for X where we’ve set that up.
What it’s used for. Comparing with the customer’s own account on the same platform, inside that customer’s project. If the customer marks your profile as their own, the text of your best and newest posts is also used as an example of the voice their posts should follow; we don’t check which profiles a customer marks as their own. We don’t sell it or use it for advertising.
Legal basis. Legitimate interests, ours and our customers’, in comparing how public social media accounts perform. You can object at any time.
To have it removed, email webmaster@hypemachine.co with the profile address. You don’t need a Hype Machine account or a reason. We’ll remove it from every project that tracks it, including deleted projects, with the sync log’s record of its handle and any written insights that name it, and confirm. See If someone else added your profile.
If you commented on a tracked post
Hype Machine keeps each tracked post’s public count of comments, not the comments or who wrote them. One feature, which no screen in the app offers and which can be reached only by a direct request to it, counts the comments on a public LinkedIn post hour by hour. To do that, Apify reads the post’s comments, with each commenter’s name, profile address and headline and the comment’s text, and passes them to Hype Machine, which keeps only the number of comments in each hour. Apify keeps a record of each read, and what it returned, in our Apify account.
If you appear in a brand’s own photos
A customer who uses From your library uploads a catalogue of their own photos and videos, written by their own AI tool. It can describe what can be seen of the people in them: clothing, hair, pose, expression and what they’re doing. Hype Machine refuses descriptions that give anyone’s age, ethnicity or skin tone, and the instructions it gives the customer’s AI tool say never to name anyone. Hype Machine never receives the photos or videos. The descriptions of the files shortlisted for a post are sent to our AI text provider to pick one. To have a description of you removed, email webmaster@hypemachine.co.
What we use it for
- Writing your posts and pictures. Your brief, files and directions, and the best and newest posts of the accounts you mark as yours on each platform, are sent to Anthropic, our AI text provider, to write each week. Each picture’s description (who and what is in it, the scene, the light and the camera) and your picture style are sent to OpenAI, our AI picture provider, to make it.
- Picking from your library. If you use From your library, the descriptions and details of the files shortlisted for each post are sent to Anthropic to pick one. Never the files.
- Measuring accounts. Ranking posts, comparing you with competitors on the same platform, and running the analyses you ask for. The analyses send your tracked accounts’ post text and numbers to Anthropic, and competitor insights send competitors’ post text, names and follower counts.
- Running the service. Signing you in, taking payment, counting what your purchases have used, stopping abuse and fixing faults.
- Answering you. Support and privacy requests.
We don’t sell personal data, share it with advertisers, or show ads. We don’t use your data to train AI models. What our AI providers may do with what they receive is set by their own terms, linked under Who else receives it.
Hype Machine makes no decision about anyone that has legal or similarly significant effects.
Legal bases (UK and EU GDPR)
- Contract: running your account and projects, writing your posts and pictures, and taking payment.
- Legitimate interests: reading and comparing public profiles that customers add; security and preventing abuse; logs, error monitoring and page analytics; tracking costs.
- Consent: product news emails, only if you ask for them. You can withdraw it at any time, with the unsubscribe link in any of them or in Settings.
- Legal obligation: keeping purchase records, and answering rights requests.
Who else receives it
These providers process data for us, to run Hype Machine. Each gets what its job needs.
| Who | What they do | What reaches them |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Database | Everything described on this page except files: accounts, projects, tracked accounts and their posts, weekly posts, analyses, purchase records and logs. |
| Cloudflare | Runs the Hype Machine app, and stores files | Every request the app handles, including your name and email address, and what you put in. Stores your brief files and your pictures. |
| Vercel | Hosting for www.hypemachine.co and app.hypemachine.co, and page analytics on both | Standard request data (IP address, browser, the page asked for) for both sites; everything the Hype Machine app sends through our platform, including what goes to the AI provider and the requests we make for it to outside services; page views on both sites, with the links into the app clicked on www.hypemachine.co; and load times on app.hypemachine.co’s own pages. |
| Stripe | Payments | Your email address, our internal account IDs, what you’re buying and the amount, plus the card and billing details you type into Stripe’s form. |
| Resend | Account emails, such as welcome and password reset, and product news if you ask for it | Your name, email address and the email’s content, and whether you’ve asked for product news. |
| Sentry | Error monitoring | Error details and browser information. From a small share of visits to app.hypemachine.co’s own pages, a replay of clicks and page changes with all text and form fields hidden. |
| Upstash | Limits on repeated requests, and short-lived caching | Your email address or IP address, as a counter that lasts at most an hour, and short-lived copies of some account settings. |
| Google or Microsoft | Sign-in, only if you choose it | Your sign-in with them. They send us your name, email address and profile picture. |
| Google (Fonts) | Serves typefaces on app.hypemachine.co and inside the app | Your IP address and browser details, when a page loads its fonts. |
| Anthropic | AI that writes posts and analyses, and picks from your library | Your brief and the text of your files, your directions and goals, the post text and numbers of the accounts you track (the best and newest posts of the accounts you mark as yours, to follow their voice), for competitor insights competitors’ post text, names and follower counts, and, if you use From your library, the descriptions and details of the files shortlisted for each post (never the files themselves). |
| OpenAI | AI that makes pictures | The prompt for each picture: who and what is in it, the scene, the light and the camera, as written for the post, your picture style, and any redo note. |
| Apify | Reads public LinkedIn and TikTok profiles and posts | The public profile or post address and how far back to read. Apify keeps a record of each read, and what it returned, in our Apify account. |
| ScrapeCreators | Reads public Instagram and Facebook profiles and posts | The public profile address or handle. |
| X Corp | Reads public X profiles and posts, only where we’ve set up X reading | The handle. |
| Tailwind Labs | Serves a styling script the Hype Machine app loads | Your IP address and browser details, when the app loads. |
| DreamHost | Email for webmaster@hypemachine.co | The emails you send us. |
What Anthropic and OpenAI may do with what they receive is set by their own terms: Anthropic’s commercial terms and OpenAI’s services agreement.
We’ll also disclose data when the law requires it, to protect our rights or someone’s safety, or to a buyer if the business is sold. In a sale, this policy keeps applying until you’re told otherwise.
How long we keep it
The tables under What we collect about you give the period for each kind of data. In short:
- Project data (brief, files, weekly posts, pictures, library catalogue, analyses, tracked accounts) isn’t deleted automatically. It stays when a project’s year ends and when you delete a project. It’s erased when you remove it in the app, where the app lets you, or when you ask us.
- Profiles of people who aren’t customers stay until every customer tracking them removes them, or until we’re asked to erase them. The sync log’s record of a handle stays until we’re asked to erase it.
- Logs are deleted by a weekly clean-up, at its first run after they reach their age:
- App logs: 7 days.
- Sign-in and security records: 90 days.
- Error records: 90 days (any we flag for an investigation are kept until we unflag them).
- Audit records: 1 year.
- Purchase records are kept for accounting.
- Backups. Our database provider keeps backups so data can be recovered after a fault. Data you’ve asked us to erase can remain in those backups until they expire.
Cookies and browser storage
www.hypemachine.co sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser. It counts visits with Vercel Web Analytics, without cookies: Vercel records the page, where you came from, your country, device and browser, and which links into the app you click. We don’t send it anything about who you are. Its typefaces are served from the site itself.
The app at app.hypemachine.co uses the cookies and storage below. None of them is for advertising.
| Name | What it’s for | How long |
|---|---|---|
__Secure-Cookie | Keeps you signed in. | 24 hours. |
next- __Secure-Cookies | Protect the sign-in form, and return you to the page you were on. | Until you close the browser. |
__Secure- __Secure-Cookies | Complete a sign-in with Google or Microsoft safely. | 15 minutes. |
tenant-Cookie | Knows you’re signing in to Hype Machine. | 1 hour. |
marketing-Cookie | Carries your choice about product news through a sign-up with Google or Microsoft. | 15 minutes, or until the sign-up finishes. |
iridiom-Cookie | Remembers whether you chose light or dark. | 1 year. |
theme activeWorkspaceIdLocal storage | Your light or dark choice, and the workspace you last used. | Until you clear it. |
iridiom:Session storage | Which error notices you’ve already seen. | Until you close the tab. |
hm. hm. hm:Local storage, inside the app | Whether you view a full week or one post, which posts you’ve downloaded, and a note that opens the right project. | Until you clear it. The note is ignored after 2 minutes. |
| Stripe’s own cookiesAt checkout | Set by Stripe to process payment and prevent fraud. | See Stripe’s privacy policy. |
app.hypemachine.co also runs Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights, which count page views and measure how fast pages load, and Sentry, described under Records of use. Its pages load fonts from Google Fonts, so Google receives your IP address and browser details.
The Hype Machine app inside app.hypemachine.co also loads its typefaces from Google Fonts, and a styling script from Tailwind’s CDN (cdn.tailwindcss.com), so Tailwind receives your IP address and browser details too. If your library catalogue includes preview links, the app shows each preview by loading it from wherever it’s hosted. See Who else receives it.
Deleting your data
- The steps. What each one removes is on Delete your data.
- A competitor. Removing it in the app deletes its profile, posts and follower history, and any analysis of one of its posts. The sync log’s record of its handle, and whole-platform analyses that drew on it, stay until you ask us to erase them.
- Files, styles and your library. You can remove a brief file, a picture style you wrote, or your library catalogue in the app.
- A project. Deleting a project removes it from your account, but doesn’t erase its data from our systems. Nor is there an in-app delete for posts, pictures or one of your own tracked accounts.
- Everything else. To erase a project’s data, or your whole account, email webmaster@hypemachine.co from the address on your account. If you also use another product that runs on Iridiom, say whether to erase your sign-in as well, which ends it for every product, or only what’s in Hype Machine. We’ll confirm when it’s done.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you can ask us to:
- tell you what data we hold about you, and give you a copy;
- correct it;
- erase it;
- limit how we use it;
- give it to you in a machine-readable form to take elsewhere; or
- stop using it where we rely on legitimate interests.
Email webmaster@hypemachine.co. It’s free. We may ask you to confirm who you are first. We answer within one month. If a request is complex, we may take up to two more months, and we’ll tell you why.
If you’re in the UK or EU and not happy with our answer, you can complain to your data protection authority: the ICO in the UK, or the authority where you live in the EU.
If customers track your public profile, that includes objecting to our reading it: see People who aren’t Hype Machine customers.
US state privacy rights
If you live in a US state with a consumer privacy law, such as California:
- What we collect: identifiers (name, email address, IP address), commercial information (purchases), internet activity (sign-in and usage records, logs), and the content you give us. The sources and purposes are described above.
- Who receives it: only the service providers listed above, for those purposes. We don’t sell personal information, or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
- Sensitive information: we collect your Hype Machine sign-in (email address and password), which the law counts as sensitive, and use it only to sign you in and keep your account secure. We don’t use it to infer anything about you.
- Your rights: to know, correct and delete what we hold. Email webmaster@hypemachine.co, yourself or through an authorized agent. We’ll confirm who you are, answer within the time given under Your rights and never later than the law allows, and won’t treat you differently for asking. If we turn a request down, you can appeal by replying to our answer.
We also collect professional information from the public social posts we read, which may happen to contain sensitive information. It’s used only as described above.
Security
Every page and request uses HTTPS. Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes. Card details never reach us.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your data, we’ll tell you and the relevant authorities as the law requires.
Where data is processed
We’re based in the United States, and our providers process data in the United States and in other countries where they operate. If you’re in the UK or EU, your data is transferred to the United States.
Children
Hype Machine is for people 18 and over. We don’t knowingly collect data from anyone younger. If you think a child has given us data, email webmaster@hypemachine.co and we’ll delete it.
Customers can add public profiles, and some may belong to people under 18. If one does, email webmaster@hypemachine.co and we’ll remove it.
Changes to this policy
If we change what we collect, who receives it or how long we keep it, we’ll update this page and the date at the top, and the next time you use Hype Machine we’ll ask you to accept the new version.
Contact
Probalia Ventures LLC, trading as Hype Machine
240 Harriman Road, Irvington, NY 10533, USA
webmaster@hypemachine.co
See also the terms of service.