Privacy Policy

Last Updated 28 August 2026

Lumen is an interface to the Hive blockchain. This policy says what we do with information about you, in plain terms. It describes the product as it is built, not as we would like it to sound.

Two things are worth knowing before the detail.

We keep very little. There is no advertising here, no analytics product, no tracking pixels, and nothing about you is sold or shared for marketing.

Some of what you do is not ours to delete. Posts and comments are published to a public blockchain that nobody owns and nobody can edit. That part is permanent, for everyone, including us.

What we never ask for

Your private keys, seed phrase or wallet password. Not by any route, ever.
Your telephone number.
Your legal name, date of birth, address or any identity document.
Payment card or bank details.

Your IP address

We do not store your IP address. Rate limiting needs to tell two visitors apart, not know who they are, so your address is converted into an irreversible one-way hash before anything is written down. We cannot turn it back into an address, and neither can anyone who obtains our database.

Those counters are deleted after two days.

Our web server is configured not to keep access logs, so there is no second copy of your address sitting in a log file either.

What we do keep

If you sign in with your own Hive account

Almost nothing: a cookie that keeps you signed in, and the rate limiting counter above. Everything you post or vote on is signed in your browser and broadcast under your own account. Your keys never reach us.

If you sign in with a wallet, a passkey or a Google account

This creates a Lumen account. To run it we keep:

How you sign in. For a Bitcoin or Ethereum wallet that is your public wallet address, and nothing else: signing in works by asking your wallet to sign a one-time challenge. For a passkey it is the public key your device generates, which never leaves your device. For Google it is the account identifier Google gives us and your email address, stored encrypted.
A label for each device you have signed in from, and when it was last used, so you can recognise your own devices and remove one you no longer have.
Your profile: display name, avatar, and the interests you pick.
What you write and do here: posts, comments, votes, follows, reblogs and blocks.
Which posts we have already shown you, so your feed does not repeat itself. This orders your feed and does nothing else. It is not sold, not shared, and not used to advertise to you.

Cookies and browser storage

Lumen sets one cookie, which keeps you signed in. Page scripts cannot read it, it is sent only over a secure connection, and it expires.

We use no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies of any kind.

Your browser also keeps a few things on your own device that never reach us: your language, your username, your saved vote preferences and any unsent draft. Clearing your browser data clears all of it.

Other services your browser talks to

Lumen embeds no advertising and no analytics. These services receive a request because the site needs them to work, and each therefore sees your IP address in the ordinary way any website you visit does:

a Hive blockchain node, to read and publish;
the Hive image host, for pictures in posts;
Cloudflare Turnstile, for the "confirm you are human" check when you sign up;
WalletConnect, only if you choose to connect an Ethereum wallet that way;
a price feed, for token prices;
YouTube or X, only when a post you are reading embeds their content.

We have no advertising or data-sharing arrangement with any of them.

The blockchain part

When you publish a post or a comment it is broadcast to the Hive blockchain, a public ledger run by independent parties around the world. Once it is there:

anyone can read it, permanently, including services that copy the whole chain;
it cannot be deleted. Not by us, not by you, not by anyone;
removing it from Lumen hides it here and does not remove it from Hive.

If you signed in with your own Hive account it is published under your account. If you have a Lumen account, it is published under an account we operate on your behalf, which declines all rewards. The permanence is the same either way.

Please treat anything you publish as public and permanent, because it is.

Crawlers, search engines and AI

Public posts on Lumen are public. We do not block search engines, archives or AI crawlers from reading them, and the same content is on the Hive blockchain where anyone can read it regardless of what we do. If you would rather something were not read by an automated system, do not publish it.

How long we keep things


Rate limiting counters (hashed, no address)	2 days
Post text already published to Hive	discarded once publication is confirmed; the blockchain holds it
Your account, profile and activity	until you delete your account
Anything already published to Hive	permanent, and outside anyone's control

Security

Email addresses are encrypted. The key that publishes on behalf of Lumen accounts is held in memory by the server and never written to our database. Sign-in cookies cannot be read or altered by your browser. Access to our database is limited to the people who run the service.

No system is perfectly secure and we do not claim otherwise.

Children

Lumen is not for anyone under 13 and we do not knowingly keep information about anyone under 13. If you believe a child has an account here, contact us and we will delete it. We cannot remove anything already published to the blockchain.

Your rights

Depending on where you live you can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to limit how we use it, or to receive it in a portable form. You can also complain to your data protection regulator.

Write to the address below and we will answer within the period the law allows.

The one limit we have to be honest about: we can delete what is on our servers. We cannot delete anything already recorded on the Hive blockchain, because no such ability exists for anybody. Deleting your account removes it from Lumen and does not remove your published posts from Hive.

Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top, and give notice on the site where the change materially affects your rights.

Contact

Until dedicated support addresses are published here, you can reach us on Hive at @lordbutterfly.