# Privacy notice

HellionChat is a Dalamud plugin for FINAL FANTASY XIV, focused on giving the user explicit control over what their chat
client stores locally. This document describes what the plugin does with your data, what it does not do, and how you
exercise the rights the GDPR gives you over data you generate yourself.

This document is informational. The maintainer of HellionChat is **not** a controller or processor of your data in the
GDPR sense, because no data ever leaves your machine on the maintainer's infrastructure. Independently of that, the
plugin is built so that you can act on your own data the way the GDPR expects.

Last reviewed: 2026-05-05 (HellionChat v1.1.0).

---

## TL;DR

- All chat data the plugin stores stays on your machine, in your Dalamud `pluginConfigs/HellionChat/` directory.
- The plugin does not phone home. No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporter, no usage counter, no remote update
  check beyond what Dalamud itself does.
- One outbound network call exists by design: the BetterTTV emote service (for chat emotes). It is documented in detail
  below and can be reasoned about per request.
- You can export every message the plugin has stored, in Markdown, JSON or CSV, and you can wipe stored history per
  channel, per date range, or globally.

---

## What the plugin stores locally

HellionChat keeps three kinds of state on your machine, all under `%appdata%\XIVLauncher\pluginConfigs\HellionChat\` on
Windows (`~/.xlcore/pluginConfigs/HellionChat/` on Linux/macOS via XIVLauncher Core):

1. **Configuration** (`HellionChat.json`). Plugin settings, channel whitelist, retention values, layout state, theme
   colours. Contains no chat content.

2. **Message database** (SQLite file in the same directory). Chat messages from the channels on your whitelist, stored
   as MessagePack-encoded blobs. The default whitelist out of the box covers only your own conversations: tells, party,
   free company, linkshells, cross-world linkshells, alliance, ExtraChat. Public chat, NPC dialogue, system messages and
   battle logs are dropped on the storage layer and never written to disk.

3. **Cached emote images** (`EmoteCacheV1/` directory). Image files downloaded from BetterTTV when an emote appears in a
   message you receive. See "Outbound network calls" below.

There is no shared state with the upstream Chat 2 plugin. `pluginConfigs/HellionChat/` is independent from
`pluginConfigs/ChatTwo/`.

### Retention defaults

- Tells: 365 days
- Your-conversation channels (party, FC, linkshells, cross-world LS, alliance, ExtraChat): 90 days
- Global default for anything else: 30 days

**Retention is off by default.** The plugin does not delete anything on its own until you explicitly turn the retention
sweep on in the settings. Until then, stored messages stay until you clear them.

---

## What the plugin does not store

- Public chat (`/say`, `/yell`, `/shout`), NPC dialogue, system messages and battle logs. These are filtered before they
  reach the storage layer.
- Anything from channels you remove from the whitelist. The privacy filter runs on the way in, not on the way out.
- Login credentials, character IDs, account IDs. The plugin uses whatever Dalamud already exposes about the local
  character to attribute messages. Nothing of that is sent anywhere or persisted beyond the message itself.

---

## Outbound network calls

HellionChat makes two kinds of automatic outbound network requests. Both are inherited from upstream Chat 2 and both are
documented here because "GDPR-by-design" means you should know what your client does on your behalf.

### 1. BetterTTV emote service (`api.betterttv.net`, `cdn.betterttv.net`)

- **What it does:** When a chat message arrives that references a BetterTTV emote, the plugin asks the BetterTTV API for
  the emote metadata and downloads the image from the BetterTTV CDN to display it inline.
- **What is sent:** A standard HTTPS GET request. Your IP address reaches BetterTTV (unavoidable for any HTTPS request);
  the request itself contains no identifying user data, no character name, no message text. Only the emote ID being
  looked up is in the URL path.
- **When it triggers:**
    - The emote _list_ (global emotes plus the top-1500 community emotes over fifteen API pages) is fetched from
      `api.betterttv.net` once per session at plugin startup, provided the **Show emotes** option is on. This first
      list-fetch happens before any chat message has arrived. BetterTTV's edge therefore sees your IP as soon as the
      plugin loads, not only after an emote is mentioned.
    - The individual emote _images_ on `cdn.betterttv.net` are fetched on demand, only when an incoming chat message
      contains a token matching one of the cached IDs. These are cached locally (`emoteCache/`) and reused across
      sessions.
- **Cached:** Yes, in `emoteCache/`. A given emote is downloaded once per machine and reused.
- **How to opt out:** Turn off the **Show emotes** option in Settings → Chat. With it disabled, the emote cache does not
  load and no requests to BetterTTV are made for the rest of the session.
- **BetterTTV's privacy policy:** <https://betterttv.com/privacy>

Source: `HellionChat/EmoteCache.cs`.

### 2. Square Enix Lodestone font (removed in v1.0.4)

Earlier versions of HellionChat (and upstream Chat 2) downloaded `FFXIV_Lodestone_SSF.ttf` from
`img.finalfantasyxiv.com` once during font setup. That code path was a leftover from upstream's removed webinterface
feature and was no longer consumed anywhere. The in-game symbol glyphs (job icons, item glyphs, status effects) come
from Dalamud's bundled symbol-font helper, not from the downloaded TTF.

The download was removed in v1.0.4. As of that version HellionChat makes no automatic network call to Square Enix or to
any `finalfantasyxiv.com` host.

Cached `FFXIV_Lodestone_SSF.ttf` files left over from earlier versions remain in `pluginConfigs/HellionChat/` until
manually deleted. They are no longer read.

### Links you click yourself (no automatic traffic)

The settings panel contains a few buttons that open external pages in your browser when you click them: the upstream
Chat 2 GitHub repo, the upstream maintainers' Ko-fi pages, the HellionChat issue tracker and `hellion-media.de`. Nothing
happens until you click. They are documented here for completeness, not because they generate background traffic.

---

## What the plugin does not do

- **No telemetry.** Source verified: no calls to AppInsights, Sentry, PostHog, Plausible, Google Analytics, Microsoft
  Clarity or any comparable service exist in the codebase, nor in the direct dependencies the plugin pulls in. See
  `docs/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md`.
- **No crash reporting.** Crashes go to Dalamud's local `xllog`, not to a remote endpoint controlled by HellionChat.
- **No usage counters.** The plugin does not count installs, sessions, feature usage, channel activity or anything else
  for the maintainer.
- **No phone-home update check.** Updates are delivered through Dalamud's plugin installer, which polls the custom-repo
  `repo.json` on GitHub. That is GitHub's traffic and falls under GitHub's privacy policy. The plugin code does no
  separate update check.
- **No background sync.** Messages stay on your machine. No cloud backup, no sharing feature, no remote viewer.

---

## Your data, your rights

The GDPR gives you specific rights over data about you. Because HellionChat stores everything locally, those rights
translate directly into plugin features:

### Right to access (Art. 15)

Use the export feature in the plugin settings. You can export to **Markdown**, **JSON** or **CSV**, filtered by channel,
date range or sender substring. The export goes through a Dalamud file dialog and writes wherever you point it, on your
machine.

### Right to erasure (Art. 17)

Two options:

1. **Targeted deletion.** The "retroactive cleanup" feature lets you apply your current whitelist to the existing
   database. It shows a preview of what will be removed before you confirm with Ctrl+Shift, runs in the background, and
   calls `VACUUM` afterwards to actually shrink the file.
2. **Full deletion.** Close the game and delete the `pluginConfigs/HellionChat/` directory. The next plugin start will
   produce a fresh, empty configuration.

### Right to portability (Art. 20)

The JSON and CSV exports are open formats. The Markdown export is human-readable and machine-parseable. Nothing is
locked into a proprietary container.

### Right to object / restrict processing (Art. 21, 18)

Adjust the channel whitelist or set retention to a low value. Both take effect immediately on new messages. Existing
data needs the retroactive cleanup to apply retroactively, by design.

---

## Third parties involved

| Party                                                      | Why they appear                                    | What reaches them                                                        | Their privacy policy                   |
| ---------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -------------------------------------- |
| BetterTTV (NightDev LLC)                                   | Optional emote rendering                           | HTTPS request for an emote ID; your IP                                   | <https://betterttv.com/privacy>        |
| Hellion Forge (Gitea, self-hosted by Hellion Online Media) | Plugin distribution via custom repo, issue tracker | Whatever the Gitea instance sees from any HTTPS request to a public repo | <https://hellion-media.de/datenschutz> |
| Dalamud / XIVLauncher (goatcorp)                           | Plugin loader, font subsystem, repo polling        | Whatever Dalamud reports for itself; out of HellionChat's scope          | <https://github.com/goatcorp/Dalamud>  |

The Hellion Forge Gitea instance and the Dalamud/XIVLauncher loader are unavoidable for anyone using HellionChat through
Dalamud at all. BetterTTV is the only third party HellionChat introduces on top of that baseline, and it is opt-out via
settings.

---

## Dependencies that touch the network

For a full dependency inventory see `docs/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md`. Of the direct dependencies the plugin pulls in:

- `MessagePack`: local serialisation, no network.
- `Microsoft.Data.Sqlite`: local SQLite access, no network.
- `morelinq`: LINQ helpers, no network.
- `Pidgin`: parser combinators, no network.
- `SixLabors.ImageSharp`: image decoding (used for the BetterTTV emote pipeline), no network on its own.

The single network call listed under "Outbound network calls" is written directly in HellionChat's own source, not
delegated to a dependency.

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## Changes to this notice

If a future release changes what HellionChat stores, sends or caches, this document will be updated and the change
called out in the changelog block of that release. The "Last reviewed" date at the top tracks the version this document
is accurate for.

---

## Questions

For privacy-related questions specific to HellionChat:

- Email: `kontakt@hellion-media.de`
- Discord DM: `@j.j_kazama`

Security-relevant findings (for example, the plugin storing or sending something this document says it does not) go
through the private advisory in `SECURITY.md`, not a public issue.

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Maintained under **Hellion Forge**, the modding and plugin line of **Hellion Online Media** | Bad Harzburg |
[hellion-media.de](https://hellion-media.de)
