Privacy

Last updated 2026-10-01

SocialEar watches public conversations on Reddit, Hacker News, Lobsters, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X and LinkedIn for the words you choose. This page says what that involves storing, about you and about other people, who else touches it, and what you can do about it. Questions and requests go to support@socialear.app.

What we store about you

Your email address, a hash of your password (never the password), the moment you agreed to the terms, and the sessions you are logged in with. Everything you set up: keywords, sources, alert rules, saved views, team invites, and any Slack webhook address you paste in. For the API, a hash of each key and its first eight characters; the key itself is shown once and not kept. If you subscribe, the customer and subscription ids Polar issues; we never see or store card details.

Your IP address is used to limit how often one place can sign up, log in or ask for a code, and is held for that purpose for up to an hour. It is not attached to your account.

What we store about other people

This is the part worth reading. To show you your mentions we store public posts, comments, video titles and captions that match your keywords, along with each author's public username or handle, their public avatar, the post's score or view count, and a link back to it. Those authors are not our users and did not sign up here. We collect only what the platform shows to anyone with a browser, and we do not follow private accounts.

We keep that content only for your plan's retention window: 90 days on Starter, 12 months on Pro, 24 months on Team, and up to 36 months on a negotiated Enterprise contract. A nightly sweep deletes anything older. For Reddit we also check whether the author has since deleted the post, and when they have we delete the text here too. If you are the author of something we hold and want it removed sooner, write to support@socialear.app and we will remove it.

The legal basis for this, where one is required, is legitimate interest: the interest of a brand in knowing what is said about it in public, balanced by short retention, by keeping only what was already public, and by removing anything on request.

How machines read it

Every mention is read by a language model to judge whether it is relevant, how the author feels about your term, and whether they are asking for something. The text of the post and your keywords go to the model through OpenRouter; your email and account details do not. When you ask for a reply draft, the post's text goes the same way. When you paste your website during setup, its public text goes to a model on Cloudflare or to Anthropic so it can suggest what to watch. Model providers process this under their API terms.

Who else touches it

Cloudflare hosts the service, the database, the stored transcripts and delivers our email. Polar processes payments as merchant of record. OpenRouter and Anthropic provide the models above. Small collector programs on Railway, talking to us through CloudAMQP and reaching the platforms through residential proxy providers, fetch the public pages for us; they see which accounts and words are being watched, never who is watching. If you connect Slack, the mentions you route there are posted to your channel by Slack. If bot protection is turned on, Cloudflare Turnstile checks the signup and contact forms for you and sees the request that submits them. Originstat counts page visits for us without cookies and without knowing who you are. Nobody else, and we do not sell anything to anyone.

Several of these providers are in the United States. If you are in the EU, the UK or elsewhere, your data leaves your region to reach them.

Cookies and your browser

One cookie, se_session, keeps you logged in for up to 60 days. It is strictly necessary and there is no other (no advertising, no tracking), which is why there is no cookie banner. Your browser's local storage keeps your theme choice, which sidebar sections you folded, and, on the API reference page only, an API key you paste there to try requests; that key never leaves your browser.

Your rights

You can delete your account yourself, under Settings → Delete account: it removes your account, the workspaces you own and every mention in them immediately, and it is not recoverable. Write to support@socialear.app to get a copy of everything we hold about you, to correct it, or to object to any of the processing above, and we will answer within thirty days. If you are in the EU or the UK you can also complain to your data protection authority.

Age

SocialEar is for people who are at least 16. We do not knowingly hold an account for anyone younger, and we will delete one if we learn of it.

Security and changes

Everything travels over HTTPS. Passwords are hashed with PBKDF2, API keys are stored as hashes, and access to the database is limited to the people who run the service. If a breach affects your data we will tell you by email without undue delay. When this page changes materially we will email you before it takes effect; the date at the top always says when it last did.