Hashtag Ninja

Privacy

Hashtag Ninja takes a sentence describing what you want to know about a hashtag and turns it into a collection plan. The planner needs no account: the brief you type is sent to a model provider (below), the plan comes back, and nothing about that request is stored against you. If you sign in, we keep your email address so the account exists, and the credit balance attached to it.

Collection, and the session you supply

A collection runs as you, against the account you control, so it needs a session for the platform being collected from. You paste one in when you start a run.

That session is not stored. It is passed to the collection service at the moment a run starts and then dropped: it is not written to our database, it is not written to a log, and it is not kept in a file. There is no column for it — a run that has already started is picked up again by the run's own reference, which is why finishing one never needs the session a second time. The practical consequence is the one worth stating plainly: a breach of our database could not disclose your platform session, because it is not in there.

What a run does keep is the result: the posts it collected, the report written from them, and the plan it ran. Those are what you paid for and what the CSV is served from. They are public posts, they are attached to your account, and they are deleted when your account is deleted.

We do not offer collection on a schedule today. A scheduled report would have to keep a session long enough to use it later, which is a different promise with a different answer, and this page changes in the same commit as the code if that ever ships.

The free measurement, which runs on our account

The free tool on the home page and the tool pages does two things. It plans a collection from your brief, which needs no account and reaches no platform at all. It may also show a small live measurement of one hashtag from that plan — and that read runs on an Instagram account we operate, never on yours. You are not asked for a session, and if you paste one anywhere on that page it is ignored.

What comes back is counts. How many posts were sampled, posts per day over the sampled window, the spread of likes, which tags were posted alongside, and which hours of the day carried the most posts. No post, no caption, no username, no image and no link to anybody's post is shown or kept — not because they are hard to fetch, but because a measurement of a hashtag is a fact about the hashtag, and republishing a stranger's post to an anonymous visitor is a different thing that we do not do.

The measurement is cached for about six hours under the hashtag alone, so a tag is read once however many people ask for it. That cache is keyed on nothing about you: it holds a hashtag and its counts, and there is no visitor, session or address in it. It is also bounded — a fixed number of live reads a day across everybody — which is why the panel sometimes says the measurement is unavailable while the plan still appears. That is us, not you.

Cookies and tracking

We use no cookies to identify you and no advertising pixels. We do not build a profile of you across visits, and we do not sell or share your data.

We do measure how the product is used, so we can tell which parts of it are working. That measurement is first-party — it goes to our own servers and nowhere else — and it is scoped to a single visit: a random id is kept in your browser's sessionStorage and is discarded when you close the tab. We record which steps were taken and how long they took, the page path, and the host a visit arrived from (for example google.com), never the full link or anything you typed into a search box.

We also record three broad facts about the visit itself: the kind of device (phone, tablet, desktop, or an automated crawler), the operating system and its major version only — iOS 17, never iOS 17.4.1 — and the country and region the connection came from, which Cloudflare works out at its edge so that we never see or keep the address itself. We do not keep the browser's User-Agent string: it is read once to work out the device and the system, and then discarded, because the full string is detailed enough to single somebody out.

Each of those is counted on its own. We keep a daily total per device kind, and a separate daily total per country, and we never keep a row that combines them — so the numbers cannot be narrowed to "the one person on a tablet in Iceland". The cost of that, to us, is that we cannot ask which system a particular country's visitors run. We think that is the right way round.

We also measure how long each page was open and visible, so we can see which pages are actually read. The clock stops whenever you switch away from the tab, so a page left open in the background does not count as time spent reading.

We do not store your IP address for analytics. To count distinct visitors within a day we keep a one-way hash of it combined with the date and a secret, which cannot be reversed and cannot be matched to any other day. Individual event records are deleted after 30 days; only anonymous daily totals are kept after that.

If you are signed in, we keep one small record per account so we can tell repeat use from first-time use: your account id with the first day and the last day it was active. Two dates, and nothing else — not what you did, not which pages, not from where. It is your existing account id, not a new identifier: nothing is written to your browser to make it, and it does not exist at all for a visit you make signed out. It is deleted when your account is deleted.

We also use Cloudflare Web Analytics for page-view counts. It sets no cookies and does not track visitors across sites.

Who else touches your data