Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 1, 2026

Hilo (“Hilo”, “we”, “us”, or “our”) is a research companion that lets you upload web pages you have visited so we can analyze them, discover relationships between them, cluster them by topic, and generate topic reports. This Privacy Policy explains what data we collect, how we use it, and the rights you have over it.

Hilo is operated by an individual operator. If you have any questions about this policy or your data, contact us at qingjingtao84@gmail.com.

1. Data we collect

  • Account data. When you sign in with Google, we receive your email address, name, profile picture, and Google account identifier. We never receive your Google password.
  • Content you upload. Web page URLs, titles, page text and HTML, PDFs, and text selections that you choose to send to Hilo, together with timestamps. Hilo does not silently monitor your browsing — only the pages you explicitly upload are collected.
  • Derived knowledge. AI-generated summaries, extracted entities, concepts, and insights, vector embeddings, topic clusters, relationship links, and generated reports produced from your uploaded content.
  • Subscription and usage data. Your plan, credit and usage counts, and billing records. Card payments are handled by our payment processor as merchant of record; we do not store your full card number.
  • Technical data. Browser and device type, IP address, and service logs used for security and troubleshooting. Authentication tokens are stored locally on your device.

2. How and why we use your data

We use your data to:

  • provide the core service — analyze your uploads, cluster them by topic, and generate reports (to perform our contract with you);
  • send your content to third-party large language model (LLM) providers strictly to produce the outputs above (to perform our contract with you);
  • operate billing and prevent abuse or fraud (legitimate interests and contract performance);
  • secure, debug, and improve the service (legitimate interests).

We do not sell your personal data. We do not use your uploaded content to train our own models. Our LLM providers process your content solely to return results to us, in accordance with their respective API terms.

3. Third parties we share data with

We share data only with service providers who process it on our instructions:

  • Google — authentication (sign-in).
  • OpenAI (GPT) and DeepSeek — analysis of your uploaded content.
  • Cloud storage and database providers — to store your content and derived knowledge.
  • Our payment processor — to handle subscriptions and payments as merchant of record.

4. Where your data is stored and international transfers

Your data is stored on cloud infrastructure located in Singapore. If you access Hilo from another country, your data may be transferred across borders. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as Standard Contractual Clauses to protect your data during such transfers.

5. Data retention

We retain your account data, uploaded content, and derived knowledge for as long as your account remains active, so that your knowledge base persists and remains useful to you over time. We do not automatically delete your content.

You may request deletion of your account and associated data at any time by emailing qingjingtao84@gmail.com. We will delete your data upon such a request, except where we are legally required to retain certain records (for example, billing and tax records).

6. Your rights

Depending on where you live (including the EU, UK, and California), you may have the right to access, correct, export, delete, or restrict the processing of your personal data, and to withdraw consent where processing is based on it. To exercise any of these rights, contact us at qingjingtao84@gmail.com. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.

7. Security

We protect your data with encryption in transit (HTTPS), access controls, and scoped credentials. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

8. Children

Hilo is not directed to children under the age of 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, please contact us so we can remove it.

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post any changes on this page and update the “Last updated” date above. Material changes will be communicated within the app.

10. Contact

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or how we handle your data, contact us at qingjingtao84@gmail.com.