Privacy Notice

Last updated 13 August 2026

Who we are

This Feed is operated by DEPARTMNT on behalf of H.LLS. For the details you share here, DEPARTMNT acts as the data controller.

What we collect

Name — to personalise your “tapped in” receipt.
Email — to keep you posted on H.LLS releases and events.
Phone (optional) — only if you choose to share it. It’s held for future SMS updates about drops; we won’t use it until that feature launches, and we never share it.
Date of birth — optional, used to confirm you’re over 18 and keep the community age-appropriate. This portal stores it; it stays here only, is never shared with other portals or third parties, and is deleted with your account.
Tap activity — which tag you tapped and when, for campaign analytics.

Why we collect it

We use your details to deliver this experience and to keep you in the loop about H.LLS music and events. We never sell your data, and we won’t message you about anything else without asking first.

How long we keep it

We keep your details until you ask us to remove them, or until they’re no longer needed for the above. Anonymous, aggregate counts (like total taps) may be kept longer.

Our usage analytics have a hard time limit: raw activity records (visits, taps, plays) are deleted after 540 days — about 18 months — and inactive analytics profiles are removed on the same schedule. Only anonymous, aggregate totals are kept beyond that.

If you order a physical card, we remove the delivery name and address from the order record 12 months after it’s been delivered — long enough to sort out any delivery problems or returns, and no longer. The rest of the order record (what was ordered and when) is kept for our records.

Your rights

You can ask us to access, correct, or delete your data at any time — email hello@departmnt.xyz and we’ll sort it. If you have an H.LLS account you can also download a copy of everything we hold about you (visit /api/account/export while signed in) or delete your account yourself from the account menu.

Analytics

We run our own first-party analytics to understand how the app is used — which taps, plays, and pages get attention. It never uses third-party tracking pixels, never fingerprints anonymous visitors, and we never sell or share this data.

To count returning visitors honestly we store one random first-party identifier (“dpt_vid”) in your browser for up to 13 months. It isn’t tied to your name or email and is used only for our own audience statistics. You can switch it off here at any time — no account needed — which deletes the identifier from your browser:

Count me in anonymous stats — a random first-party id helps us count returning visitors. No account needed to turn it off; nothing is shared.

If you have an H.LLS account you can also turn analytics identity off in your account settings, which stops us linking your activity to you.

Who else touches your data

A few carefully-chosen services help us run this app. None of them may use your data for their own purposes on our behalf.

Vercel — hosts the app. Like any host it processes connection metadata (your IP address, request headers) to serve pages and keep the platform secure.
OpenAI — checks Voice comments for illegal and harmful content, and tags overall comment sentiment overnight. Comment text is sent for that check only; OpenAI doesn’t keep it or use it to train models on our behalf.
Spotify — powers the in-app track player. The player loads only after you press “Load Spotify player”, and when it loads Spotify sets its own cookies under its own privacy policy. If you never press it, nothing is sent to Spotify.

Your comments and the Voice wall

If you have an H.LLS account you can post comments on tracks and demos under a display handle you choose. Here’s what that involves and how we handle it.

Display handle — a nickname you pick to speak under. It’s public, it’s never your real name, and you can change it in your account settings.
Comment text — what you write (up to 500 characters), plus which track or moment it’s attached to. Comments are public: other people can see them next to your handle — that’s the point of the wall.
Drafts — if you start a comment before you’ve joined, we hold it as a draft so it can post once you confirm your account. Unclaimed drafts are deleted after 30 days.
Moderation records — if a comment is reported, hidden, removed, or appealed, we keep an append-only log of that action (never the comment text) so we can meet our online-safety duties.

Publishing your comment is part of the community rules you accept when you post, and our legitimate interest in running the community and passing your feedback to the artist — it isn’t based on consent. That means you can’t un-publish a comment by withdrawing a permission; the way to remove your comments is to delete them or delete your account (see “Your rights” above). Deleting your account removes or fully anonymises your comments, reactions, and drafts. Withdrawing marketing consent stops us emailing you but does not, on its own, take down comments you’ve already published.

We check comments for illegal and harmful content using an automated moderation service and human review — that safety work is a legal obligation under the Online Safety Act, not something we ask your consent for. Every comment has a Report button, and if we hide or remove yours we’ll tell you and give you a way to appeal. If you’re not signed in you can still react to tracks with emoji; those reactions are anonymous and only ever shown as totals.

Your handle and comment text stay inside the Voice feature. We never sell them, never use them for advertising, and never feed the words themselves into our aggregate analytics — only counts of activity. To report a comment, appeal a decision, or reach us about anything on the wall, use the in-app buttons or email hello@departmnt.xyz.

Remembering your device

When you claim a card, bandana or mini CD you can tick “Remember this device”. If you do — and only if you do — we create a private, one-way signature of your browser (a hash, never the raw details) and link it to your H.LLS account, so the next time you tap on this device we know it’s you and you don’t have to sign in again.

We never do this for anonymous visitors, never share or sell it, and never use it for advertising — it lives apart from our analytics and does one job: recognising you on your own device. It expires after 90 days, you can withdraw it any time by signing out, and deleting your account erases it immediately.