Privacy and data

Comment systems have a history here: the free ones historically paid for themselves with visitor data. Connect's model is the opposite, and this page states precisely what is and is not collected, so you can verify the claims rather than trust the tone.

Where the data lives

All data is stored and processed in the European Union, with no US sub-processors anywhere in the chain: hosting, database, and email delivery are all EU providers. This is a design constraint of the whole Hakanai suite, not a configuration option.

What the widget does in the reader's browser

• No cookies. The widget sets none, first-party or otherwise.
• No local storage, no fingerprinting, no identifiers of any kind.
• No third-party requests. The widget script comes from connect.hakanai.io and talks to our API; nothing else is ever loaded.
• No tracking. A reader who does not comment leaves no trace at all. Loading a comment thread is an anonymous read, and we do not count your visitors, see Plans and quotas.

This also means the widget adds nothing to your own privacy policy's third-party section beyond Connect itself, and no consent banner is required for readers who merely read.

What is stored when someone comments

A comment stores: the author name as typed, the email address if one was given, the comment text, the page it belongs to, the timestamp, a hash of the IP address, and the browser's user agent string.

Details that matter:

• The IP address itself is never stored. It is hashed with a site-specific key at submission time and used only for rate limiting and spam control. The original IP cannot be recovered from what we keep.
• Email addresses are optional and never displayed. They exist for reply notifications the commenter opted into, and are visible to the site's moderators.
• Rejected and spam comments lose their email address after 30 days. There is no reason to keep contact details of people whose words were never published, so we do not.

Your obligations as a site owner

Under GDPR, you are the data controller for your comment section and Connect is your processor. In practice:

• Mention comments in your privacy policy: name, optional email, and comment text are stored by Hakanai Connect (EU) for the purpose of displaying the comment and delivering opted-in reply notifications.
• Commenters can exercise their rights (access, deletion) through you, and you can serve most requests yourself: deletion via the moderation queue, access via the JSON export. For anything you cannot do from the dashboard, contact us.

The business model, plainly

You (or your readers' goodwill toward the "powered by" link on free sites) are the customer; your visitors are not the product. Billing is based on comment volume precisely so that nothing about your audience needs to be measured. The full reasoning is in Plans and quotas.