Legal
Privacy policy
What Hype Machine collects, why, who else sees it, how long we keep it, and how to make us delete it.
Who we are
Hype Machine is operated by TODO — registered legal entity name, TODO — registered business address. We are the data controller for the information described on this page. You can reach us at privacy@hypemachine.co.
Hype Machine is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by LinkedIn, Meta, Instagram or TikTok.
What connecting an account permits
You connect a social account by signing in through that platform’s own login screen. We never see your password. What we receive is a read-only token, scoped to the specific things listed below, which you can revoke at any time from inside Hype Machine or from the platform’s own settings.
| Platform | We can read | We cannot |
|---|---|---|
| Your profile, your posts and their analytics, and your follower count. | Post, comment, message, follow, or read anything about anyone you have not asked us to look at. | |
| Your professional account's profile, your media and its insights — views, reach, likes, comments, saves and shares. | Post, comment, message, follow, or read your direct messages. | |
| TikTok | Your public videos and your account statistics — follower count, following count, likes and video count. | Post, comment, message, follow, or read your direct messages. |
We do not read your direct messages on any platform, and we never post, comment, follow or send anything on your behalf.
What we collect about you
Everything below comes either from an account you connected, or from something you typed into Hype Machine. We do not buy data about you, and we do not use third-party advertising trackers.
| What | Why we have it | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| Account details | Your handle, display name, profile URL, profile picture URL and follower count for each account you connect. Used to label your channels and to compute engagement rates. | Until you disconnect the account or delete the project. |
| Your posts | The text of each post, its media URLs, its type, when it was published and its permalink. Used to show you what you posted and to analyse what performed. | Until you disconnect the account or delete the project. |
| Engagement figures | Reactions, comments, shares, views, saves and reach, where the source can report them, plus the scores and rankings we derive from them. This is the product. | Until you disconnect the account or delete the project. |
| Follower history | A dated record of your follower and post counts at each sync. No platform reports historic follower growth, so it exists only if we record it as we go. | Until you delete the project. |
| Drafts and notes | Post copy you write or generate in Hype Machine, and any notes you add to a project. | Until you delete the project. |
| Account and billing | Your email address and sign-in credentials, and — if you buy anything — a record of the purchase. Card details are handled by Stripe and never reach us. | While your account exists. Purchase records are kept as long as tax and accounting law requires. |
Accounts you don’t own
Hype Machine lets you add an account you do not own by pasting its public profile URL, so you can benchmark your channel against it. When you do that, we read what that profile shows publicly — the same things any visitor to that page can see.
| What | Why we have it | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| Public profile details | When a user adds an account by pasting its public profile URL, we read what that profile shows publicly: handle, display name, profile picture URL and follower count. | Until the user who added it removes it or deletes the project. |
| Public posts | The text, media URLs, publish time, permalink and public engagement counts of recent posts on that profile. Used only to benchmark against the user's own channel on the same platform. | Until the user who added it removes it or deletes the project. |
Being clear about this. A profile added this way belongs to a real person or organisation who has not agreed to anything with us. We only read what is already public, we use it only to benchmark against the channel it was added to compare with, we never sell it or use it to build a profile of anyone, and we delete it when the user who added it removes it.
If an account of yours has been added to Hype Machine by somebody else and you want it removed, email privacy@hypemachine.co with the profile URL. We will remove it and confirm.
What we use it for
- Showing you your own numbers. Displaying your posts and their engagement, and ranking each post against the rest of that channel.
- Analysis you ask for. When you request an analysis or post ideas, the posts and figures for that channel are sent to our analysis provider to generate it.
- Running the service. Authenticating you, keeping your projects separate from other customers’, processing payments, and diagnosing faults.
We do not sell your data. We do not share it with advertisers. We do not use your content or your figures to train machine-learning models, and our analysis provider does not train on it either.
Where we rely on a legal basis under the UK/EU GDPR: processing your connected-account data is necessary to perform our contract with you; reading public profiles you ask us to benchmark against rests on our legitimate interest in providing a comparison tool, balanced against the limited, already-public nature of what is read; and keeping purchase records rests on legal obligation.
Who else receives it
We use the following processors. Each receives only what it needs to do its job, and none of them may use it for their own purposes.
| Who | What they do | What reaches them |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Database and file storage | Everything listed above. Each customer's app data lives in its own isolated database schema. |
| Vercel | Hosting | Standard web request data — IP address, user agent, requested URL — for the site and the application. |
| Cloudflare | Application runtime | Application requests as they are processed. Cloudflare runs the sandbox the Hype Machine application executes in. |
| Anthropic | Analysis and content generation | Post text and engagement figures for the channel being analysed, when you ask for analysis or ideas. Sent per request; not used to train models. |
| ScrapeCreators | Reading public Instagram profiles | The public profile URL you asked us to read. No data about you or your connected accounts. |
| Apify | Reading public LinkedIn and TikTok profiles | The public profile URL you asked us to read. No data about you or your connected accounts. |
| Stripe | Payments | Your email address and the amount charged. Card details go directly to Stripe and never reach our servers. |
We will also disclose data where the law requires it, and to a successor entity if the business is sold — in which case this policy continues to apply until you are told otherwise.
How long we keep it
The tables above give the retention period for each category. In general: data from a connected account is kept while that account is connected and the project exists, and is deleted when you disconnect the account or delete the project.
Some platforms impose their own, shorter limits on how long their data may be stored. Where a platform’s rules are stricter than the periods above, the platform’s rules apply and we delete accordingly.
Your rights, and how to use them
You can ask us to:
- give you a copy of the data we hold about you;
- correct anything that is wrong;
- delete your data (see below);
- stop or limit a particular use of it;
- transfer it to another service in a machine-readable format; or
- object to processing we base on legitimate interest.
Email privacy@hypemachine.co. We answer within 30 days. There is no charge. If you are in the UK or EU and you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to your national data protection authority.
If you are a California resident: we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising any right above.
Deleting your data
There is a dedicated page for this, with the exact steps and what happens at each one: Delete your data.
In short: disconnecting an account removes that account’s posts and figures. Deleting a project removes everything in it. Emailing us removes your account and everything associated with it.
Security
Access tokens for your connected accounts are stored encrypted. Each customer’s application data is held in a separate, isolated database schema rather than in shared tables. Access to production systems is limited to the people who need it.
No system is perfectly secure. If we ever suffer a breach affecting your data, we will tell you and the relevant regulator within the time the law requires.
Where data is processed
Our processors operate in the United States and the European Union. When data moves out of the UK or EEA, it is covered by the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, as applicable.
Children
Hype Machine is not for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has given us data, email us and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
If we change what we collect or who receives it, we will update this page and change the date at the top. Material changes will also be emailed to account holders before they take effect.
Contact
TODO — registered legal entity name
TODO — registered business address
privacy@hypemachine.co