Security and privacy while using Hunchly

We field a number of emails and questions asking what the security and privacy of your data is when using Hunchly. Here are some common questions and our responses:

1. Does Hunchly "call home" or communicate any information back to Hunchly servers?

No. Hunchly itself does not ever open a connection to the Internet on its own (with the exception of Data Forwarding ). Our license verification is also done locally and does not require any connection to the Internet. 

2. Does any of my case data get stored in the cloud? 

No. Hunchly stores all case data locally on your machine that you install it on. The Data Forwarding mechanism is the only way that Hunchly will send data to an external host, and this must be configured by the end user. It is disabled by default. 

3. Will Hunchly cause problems with my anti-virus?

Potentially. Hunchly opens a network port on your local computer (not accessible by other computers) in order to pass information between Chrome and the backend data processing. Your anti-virus or operating system firewall may show an alert that this port has been opened.

4. Do you collect any information about my investigations or where I am located?

No. We keep customer records for licensing and billing purposes, but we do not receive any usage information from Hunchly such as what pages you have visited or what cases you are working on. As we adhere to the Google Chrome Store security policies, and our extension is published through them, they provide high level information such as: weekly users of Hunchly, weekly installs/uninstalls, and aggregated information about usage per-country. There is no identifying information included in these metrics.

5. What other information do you collect?

The privacy policy that governs the use of the hunch.ly website and the license purchasing process can be found here.

If you have any other questions, please email us at support@hunch.ly and we will be happy to answer them.