Privacy Policy

Hack News for iOS · Last updated 19 July 2026

Hack News does not collect, store, or transmit any personal information about you. There are no accounts, no analytics, no tracking, no advertising, and no third-party SDKs that phone home. The app talks to Hacker News on your behalf and nothing else happens in the background.

What stays on your device

Everything the app remembers is stored locally on your iPhone or iPad and is never sent to the developer:

• Your Hacker News session. If you choose to log in, your login is submitted directly to news.ycombinator.com. Your password is never written to disk; it is used once to complete the login and then discarded. The resulting session cookie and your username are stored in the iOS Keychain, marked device-only so they are not copied to other devices through backups.
• Your app settings. Display preferences — such as which lists appear on the home screen, and whether link previews are shown — are saved on the device, along with the date of the app's most recent successful version check (see below). None of these identify you.
• Cached articles and comments. Stories, comments, and link preview images are kept in memory while the app runs, to avoid re-downloading what you just read, and are discarded when the app quits. As with any app that loads web content, iOS may also keep temporary copies of downloaded pages in its own system cache on the device; that cache is managed and cleared by iOS, and nothing in it is sent anywhere.

Logging out erases the stored session immediately. Deleting the app removes your settings and cached content; because iOS preserves Keychain items across app deletion, log out first if you want the stored session gone as well.

Where the app connects

Hack News reads the public Hacker News website and parses it on your device. There is no intermediary server: your requests go to Hacker News directly, exactly as they would from a web browser.

• news.ycombinator.com — all stories, comments, profiles, votes, and comment submissions. Your use of Hacker News is governed by Y Combinator's own terms and privacy policy.
• config.hacknewsapp.com — at most once a day, the app fetches a small static file to check whether this version is still compatible with Hacker News's page format, so it can prompt you to update if an update is needed. The request contains no identifiers, no parameters, and no cookies; it is a plain download of a fixed file that is identical for every user. As with any web request, the server hosting that file may keep ordinary access logs (IP address, timestamp, user agent). Those logs are not used to identify, profile, or track anyone.
• Sites linked from Hacker News — when a story links somewhere, the app may fetch that page's preview image to display alongside the headline. That request goes from your device to the linked site, so the site can see your IP address, just as it would if you opened the link. These fetches are made without cookies and in an isolated session, so your Hacker News login is never shared with a third-party site.

Opening a link opens it in Safari's in-app browser. Anything you do there is between you and that website.

What the app does not do

• No analytics or usage measurement of any kind.
• No crash or diagnostic reporting to the developer.
• No advertising, ad identifiers, or tracking across apps and websites.
• No selling, sharing, or disclosure of user data — there is none to sell or share.
• No location, contacts, photos, microphone, or camera access.

Children

Hack News is not directed to children and does not knowingly collect information from anyone. It displays content from Hacker News, which is written by the public and not moderated by the developer.

Changes

If this policy changes, the revised version will be posted at this address with an updated date. Because the app collects nothing, changes are likely to be clarifications rather than new data practices.