Tenkrel
Tenkrel

Privacy policy

Effective date: November 2, 2026

Tenkrel is an independent Hacker News reader for Android developed by Zachy (“we”, “us”). This policy covers the Tenkrel app (dev.zachy.tenkrel) and tenkrel.zachy.dev. For privacy questions or requests, email tenkrel@zachy.dev.

Your reading activity and interest profile are processed and stored on your device, not uploaded to us. The app still connects to Hacker News to retrieve stories and comments. Opening an external link or visiting this website also involves the services described below.

1. Information used by the app

Tenkrel does not require an account or a Hacker News login. It does not request your name, email address, contacts, precise location, photos, microphone or camera access. The app has no advertising, advertising-ID tracking, or integrated analytics or remote crash-reporting service.

To provide reading and personalization features, the app handles these categories locally:

  • Public Hacker News content: story and comment IDs, text, author usernames, titles, links, timestamps, scores and discussion structure. These are supplied by Hacker News, not an identity you create in Tenkrel.
  • Reading state and dismissals: your position and collapsed branches, plus dismissed story IDs, titles, sources and dismissal times, so you can resume reading and restore dismissed stories.
  • Reading interactions: which comments are visible, viewing times and duration, visible portions, revisits, and interactions such as expanding or collapsing a branch and moving between threads. Locally generated session and event identifiers associate these observations within the app; they are not advertising or hardware identifiers.
  • Local personalization: numerical representations of comment text (“embeddings”), semantic groups, derived interest scores, and the more-like or less-like feedback you choose to give. These help rank discussion threads in For you.
  • Operational state: local job status, retry counts, inference timing and error information needed to run and troubleshoot on-device processing. Some diagnostics may also appear in Android’s local system logs.

2. On-device learning and your controls

On Android 8 and later, local learning is enabled by default. A visible comment can be indexed before you spend five seconds reading it; sustained attention can contribute to your local interest profile. Reading is treated as a possible sign of interest, not agreement. The bundled model processes comment text on your device using LiteRT-LM. We do not send comment text, embeddings, reading observations, feedback or your derived profile to a cloud AI service, and we do not use them to train a server-side model.

Background jobs can finish processing comments already queued on the device after you leave a screen. The app’s local AI features are unavailable on Android 7; the reader remains usable and existing stored data is retained.

  • Pause learning in For you stops new implicit reading observations. It does not erase existing data or disable manual feedback, and already queued embedding work may finish.
  • Reset preferences removes reading-interaction history and explicit feedback and resets the derived interest profile. It retains cached source content, embeddings and semantic groups. If learning is still enabled, subsequent reading can create new observations.
  • Clear feedback removes the effect of your selected more-like or less-like feedback for that comment.
  • Dismissed → Restore / Restore all removes the corresponding local dismissal records. It does not delete the separate personalization data.

3. Network requests and other services

Hacker News: Tenkrel makes HTTPS requests to the official API at hacker-news.firebaseio.com, operated for Hacker News / Y Combinator using Google Firebase infrastructure. The service receives the requested story or comment identifier, your network IP address and ordinary connection/request information such as headers and request timing. Requests can include content fetched ahead of what you actually read. They do not include your local reading-duration history, embeddings, feedback or interest profile. Tenkrel does not operate a server that receives those requests.

Hacker News and its infrastructure providers handle requests under their own practices. See the Y Combinator privacy policy and Firebase privacy information. We do not control their server logs or retention.

External links and Android actions: when you open an article or other link, Tenkrel passes the URL to your browser or another app that handles it. That destination may receive your IP address and browser information and may use cookies or collect other data under its own policy. Some external links use HTTP rather than HTTPS. Text you choose to copy or share through Android’s text-selection actions is handled by Android or the app you select.

Google Play and Android: app distribution and any platform diagnostics you choose to share with Google are governed by Google’s settings and privacy practices. They are separate from Tenkrel’s local personalization.

We do not sell your personal information or share your local interest profile for advertising.

4. This website and privacy correspondence

This website is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. To deliver and protect it, Cloudflare processes network and request information such as IP addresses, requested URLs, browser headers, timestamps and security events. Its infrastructure may process data in countries other than your own. See Cloudflare’s privacy policy for its practices and retention information.

The website does not include advertising or analytics scripts. It stores your chosen light/dark appearance in your browser’s local storage. This preference is not sent to us and remains until you change it or clear this site’s browser data. Fonts and images are served with the website.

If you contact tenkrel@zachy.dev, we and the email services delivering the message receive your email address, message and any attachments you send. We use this information to respond to your inquiry, resolve issues and handle privacy requests. Please do not send passwords or unnecessary sensitive information.

5. Retention and deletion

Persistent app data has no automatic age-based deletion schedule. It remains in the app’s private storage until you use the applicable controls or remove the app’s data. Older reading evidence may have less influence on rankings over time; this is not the same as deleting the underlying records.

To remove all of Tenkrel’s local app data, use Android Settings → Apps → Tenkrel → Storage (or Storage & cache) → Clear storage / Clear data, or uninstall the app and choose to remove its data if Android offers a keep-data option. Labels vary by device. Clearing only the cache is not sufficient. This removes the local databases and preferences; future use can download public content and create new local data again.

The app is configured to exclude its data from Android cloud backup and device transfer. Your device’s Android version and manufacturer control platform behavior. We do not maintain a cloud copy of your local reading profile and cannot retrieve or delete it remotely.

Privacy correspondence is retained for as long as needed to handle the inquiry and any related dispute or legal obligation. You may request deletion by email; we will delete information we no longer need, subject to applicable legal requirements. Third-party API, hosting and email services manage their own operational records under their applicable policies.

Tenkrel does not create user accounts, so there is no Tenkrel account to delete. Removing local app data does not delete public posts or accounts on Hacker News or information held by external websites.

6. Security

The app stores its databases and model files in app-private Android storage and uses HTTPS for Hacker News API requests. Its configuration disables cleartext network traffic within the app. On-device databases rely on Android’s storage and device protections; Tenkrel does not add its own database encryption layer. Protect your device and keep Android updated. No storage or transmission method can guarantee absolute security.

7. Your privacy rights and contact

Depending on your location, you may have rights to access, correct, delete or restrict the use of personal information, object to processing, or complain to your local data-protection authority. Contact tenkrel@zachy.dev to exercise applicable rights concerning information we hold. For information stored only on your device, use the local controls above. For records held independently by Hacker News, Google, Cloudflare or an external site, contact that service.

8. Changes to this policy

We will publish changes on this page and update the effective date. If a future app version materially changes how personal information is handled, we will provide any additional notice or consent required before that new processing begins.