Privacy policy

Lurkfish analyzes public Instagram and TikTok content — posts and comments on accounts our customers choose to track — and produces weekly intelligence briefs. This policy explains what we collect about our customers and about the public content we analyze.

We collect only content that is publicly accessible to a logged-out visitor (posts, captions, comments, follower counts), obtained through licensed third-party data providers. We operate read-only: we never post, follow, message, or interact; we never access private accounts, log in on anyone's behalf, use platform credentials, or bypass authentication, rate limits, or other technical access controls.

We do not store commenter identities. At ingestion, the commenter's username is replaced with a salted one-way hash whose only purpose is spam de-duplication. Evidence quotes shown in the product display the comment text, its like count, and which tracked brand's post it appeared on — never who wrote it. Because we hold no identities, author-level lookups or exports are impossible by design.

For customers we store: email address, organization and workspace names, tracker configuration, and billing state. Card payments are processed by Lemon Squeezy (merchant of record); crypto payments by NOWPayments. We never see full card numbers or wallet keys.

Product analytics (page events like "brief opened") and error monitoring run on PostHog and Sentry respectively, tied to your account email, used only to improve the product.

Raw posts and comments are pruned automatically per your plan's history window (3, 12, or 24 months). Deleting a tracked account, tracker, or workspace permanently removes its collected posts, comments, and analyses; quotes embedded in already-delivered briefs are redacted. If your subscription lapses, your data is retained for 60 days and then deleted.

Data subject requests: email support and we will act on them. Note that requests about a specific commenter are impossible to fulfil by design — we cannot search by author because we store no authors.

We process customer account data to provide the service under our contract with you. We process public platform data for business-to- business market analysis on the basis of legitimate interests, balanced by strict data minimization — we discard commenter identities at ingestion and keep only what the analysis needs. Where local law requires a different basis or additional rights, we honor it.

Lurkfish is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Meta Platforms, Instagram, TikTok, ByteDance, or any platform. Those names are trademarks of their respective owners, referenced only to describe the public content we analyze. Platform content belongs to the platforms and the people who created it; we claim no ownership of it, and we honor removal requests from platforms, rights-holders, and individuals.

We do not sell data. We do not train AI models on your data or on collected platform data — analysis models are used at inference time only. We do not build advertising profiles.

Privacy questions: reply to any Lurkfish email or write to the support address in your account. We answer ourselves — there is no ticket robot.