Privacy Policy

Last updated: February 2026

What Hacker Smacker Collects

Hacker Smacker collects only the minimum data required to provide friend/foe functionality on Hacker News:

• Your Hacker News username — used to identify your friend and foe relationships.
• Friend and foe ratings — which HN authors you have marked as friends or foes, along with the comment that prompted the rating (comment text, comment URL, thread title, and thread URL).
• Usernames visible on the page — sent to the server to look up friend-of-a-friend relationships. These are not stored permanently; they are used only for the duration of the lookup.

How Your Data Is Used

Your data is used exclusively to provide the Hacker Smacker service:

• Displaying friend/foe indicators next to usernames on Hacker News.
• Computing friend-of-a-friend and foe-of-a-friend relationships so you can discover quality commenters through your network.
• Displaying your profile page on hackersmacker.org (if you choose to keep it public).

What Hacker Smacker Does Not Do

• Your data is never sold to third parties.
• Your data is never used for advertising or marketing.
• Hacker Smacker does not track your browsing on any site other than news.ycombinator.com.
• Hacker Smacker does not collect your email address, real name, or any personal information beyond your HN username.

Data Storage

Friend/foe relationships and rating context are stored on the Hacker Smacker server using Redis. An authentication token is stored locally in your browser's extension storage to verify your identity.

Profile Visibility

Your Hacker Smacker profile (showing your friends and foes) is public by default. You can make your profile private at any time by toggling the visibility switch on your profile page.

Data Deletion

To remove your data from Hacker Smacker, uninstall the extension and contact samuel@ofbrooklyn.com to request deletion of your server-side data.

Contact

If you have questions about this privacy policy, contact samuel@ofbrooklyn.com.