Fanjin Zeng
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RedHN Privacy Policy

Privacy policy for the RedHN extension.

LegalJune 2, 2026· 3 min

RedHN Privacy Policy

Last updated: June 2, 2026

RedHN is a browser extension that provides a Reddit-style reading interface for Hacker News.

Summary

RedHN does not collect your personal data.

There is no RedHN account, analytics, tracking, advertising, remote code, or developer-operated backend. The extension stores your settings and reading state locally in your browser so the Hacker News reading interface can work.

Information RedHN Stores Locally

RedHN uses browser extension storage to save local settings and reading state, including:

  • Theme, font size, line height, and page width preferences.
  • Read/viewed story state.
  • Saved story IDs.
  • Muted keywords, muted domains, and muted topics.
  • A short-lived cache of public Hacker News API item and user responses.

This information is stored in the user's browser extension storage. RedHN does not send it to a RedHN server.

Hacker News Pages

RedHN runs on supported news.ycombinator.com pages. It reads the current Hacker News page markup so it can render the enhanced reading interface and keep Hacker News links and forms available.

When a user votes, replies, hides, favorites, or logs in, those actions remain interactions with Hacker News. RedHN does not operate a separate service for those actions.

Hacker News API

RedHN requests public story, comment, and user metadata from the official read-only Hacker News Firebase API at https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/. This public metadata is used to enrich the reading interface with details such as scores, comment counts, item data, and user profile data.

Data Sharing

RedHN does not sell user data and does not share user data with advertisers, analytics providers, data brokers, or other third parties.

RedHN communicates with Hacker News and the official Hacker News Firebase API only as needed to provide the extension's Hacker News reading interface.

RedHN uses WXT as its extension framework. No WXT analytics module or error reporting service is enabled in this project.

Changes

This policy may be updated when RedHN's behavior changes. The latest source for this policy is kept in the RedHN project repository.

Contact

Questions or issues can be reported at:

https://github.com/fanjin-z/RedHN/issues