Privacy Policy

Effective Date: December 19, 2025

Your privacy is critically important to us. At CommentGrid, we have a few fundamental principles:

  • We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
  • We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
  • We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted.
  • We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

We are the folks behind CommentGrid, a service designed to help you export social media comments efficiently. This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

  • Our website (commentgrid.com)
  • Our other products, services, and features that are available on or through our website.

Throughout this Privacy Policy we'll refer to our website and services collectively as "Services."

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so — for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.

We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let's go over the information that we collect.

No Retention of Exported Data

Unlike other services, CommentGrid does not store, retain, or archive the social media comments or data you process through our Service. The data is fetched in real-time from the public URLs you provide, converted into a downloadable format (e.g., Excel/CSV), and sent directly to your device. Once the session ends, we do not keep a copy of this data on our servers.

Information You Provide to Us

It's probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:

  • Communications with us: You may provide us with information when you communicate with us via email or support forms. When you communicate with us, we store a copy of our communications.

(Note: We have removed sections regarding account creation, payment information, and public profiles as CommentGrid does not currently require user accounts or payments.)

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

  • Analytics: We use Google Analytics to collect information about how you use CommentGrid. This helps us improve the Service. Google Analytics collects information such as how often users visit this site, what pages they visit when they do so, and what other sites they used prior to coming to this site. We use the information we get from Google Analytics only to improve this Service. We do not combine the information collected through the use of Google Analytics with personally identifiable information. You can opt-out of Google Analytics by installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.
  • Log information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, including the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services.
  • Location information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions.
  • Information from cookies & other technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor's computer, and that the visitor's browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. CommentGrid uses cookies to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

  • To provide our Services. For example, to process the data export requests you initiate.
  • To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services. For example, by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our Services so we can create new features that we think our users will enjoy.
  • To protect our Services, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations.
  • To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
  • To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to respond to your support questions.

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:

(1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under the applicable terms of service; or

(2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or

(3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or

(4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to provide and update our Services; to improve our Services; to safeguard our Services; to communicate with you; and to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy.

  • Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf.
  • Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us (like Google Analytics for understanding site usage, or email delivery services).
  • Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
  • To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of CommentGrid, third parties, or the public at large.
  • Business transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when it's no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it.

For example, we keep web server logs that record information about a visitor to CommentGrid's websites, like the visitor's IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to CommentGrid's websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.

As mentioned above, we do not retain the social media data you export via our service.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so. We monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

  • Set your browser to reject cookies: You can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using CommentGrid's websites, with the drawback that certain features of the websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
  • Opt out of analytics: You can opt-out of Google Analytics by using the official browser add-on.

Your Rights (GDPR & US Laws)

If you are located in certain parts of the world, including some US states and countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the "GDPR"), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.

Since CommentGrid does not maintain user accounts or store personal export data, the data we hold about you is limited to server logs and analytics data. If you wish to exercise your rights, please contact us.

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, please contact us via email at: [email protected].

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, CommentGrid may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. CommentGrid encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

Note: This document is adapted from the open source legal policies from Automattic, available under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license.