NickSymbol has no accounts, no advertising and no analytics. We do not set a single cookie on an ordinary visit. What we do handle is the text you type into the generator and anything you deliberately submit — this page says exactly what happens to each of those, and how to have it removed.
Last updated: 12 August 2026. This policy describes the site as it is built today, not a template.
The short version
Everything below in one table. Each row is something we checked in the running site rather than something we assume.
| Thing | Does NickSymbol do it? |
|---|---|
| Accounts, logins, passwords | No — the site has no visitor accounts |
| Advertising, ad cookies, ad networks | No |
| Google Analytics or any analytics script | No — no measurement script of any kind loads |
| Cookies on a normal visit | None. The site sends no Set-Cookie to a visitor who only reads and generates |
| Selling or renting data | Never |
| The name you type in the generator | Yes — it is sent to our servers, see below |
| Your IP address | Used for rate limiting and abuse control, and written to normal server logs |
| Nicknames you submit to the community list | Stored and shown publicly, by your choice |
| Comments on articles | Open — WordPress stores what you type in the comment form |
What happens when you use the generator
The generator is not purely local. When you press generate, the text in the box is sent to our server, which builds the styled versions and asks two supporting services for a matching emoji set. Concretely, three things happen to that text:
- It is styled. Our server applies the Unicode style tables and returns the results to your browser.
- It is counted. We keep a per-day tally of how many times each name was generated, so we know which names to write about. The tally holds the name and a number — not you.
- It is looked up. The text is passed to a translation service and an emoji service, both operated for us, so we can suggest emoji that suit the meaning of the word.
Your IP address is involved in one narrow way: the request token that protects our API is a signature over your IP and a timestamp, and token requests are rate limited per IP. That is anti-abuse plumbing. The IP is not stored next to the name you typed, and it is not sent to the analytics side.
Once a week we push an aggregate of generated names — the name, and how many sessions and generations it saw — to our own reporting endpoint. That push carries no IP address, no browser identifier and nothing that ties a name back to a person. Names that look like personal data are dropped before they ever reach it: anything containing six or more consecutive digits, an @, or a web address is discarded, as are names shorter than two or longer than forty characters.
Nicknames you share with the community
If you use the “add your own version” box, that nickname becomes public — that is the point of it, and it will appear to anyone who looks up the same name. Along with the nickname, our name-service provider records the IP address the submission came from, as ordinary abuse protection. We never display that address, and our own pages never expose it.
Tapping copy on a nickname also increments a copy counter for that entry. The counter stores the nickname and a number, nothing about the person copying it.
What your browser keeps on your device
Three values are written to your browser’s local storage. They stay on your device, are never sent to us as an identifier, and are removed if you clear your browser data:
- Colour scheme — whether you chose light or dark.
- Favourites — the nicknames you tapped the heart on. This list exists only in your browser; we hold no copy.
- API token — the short-lived signature described above, so every action does not have to fetch a new one.
None of these is a cookie, so none of them travels automatically with your requests.
Comments on articles
Comments are open on blog articles. When you leave one, WordPress stores what you put in the form — name, email address, an optional website — plus your IP address and browser user-agent string, which is how spam filtering works. Your email address is never published. Comment avatars are fetched from the Gravatar service using a hashed form of your email address, which means Gravatar sees that hash when the page loads. If you would rather not appear at all, do not fill the form in; if you already have, write to us and we will delete the comment.
Server logs and our network provider
Like every website, our web server writes an access log: IP address, time, the URL requested, and the user-agent string. These are operational records used to diagnose faults and identify abuse. Traffic also passes through a content delivery and security network in front of the site, which processes the same connection information in order to serve pages and filter attacks.
How long we keep things
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Per-day generation and copy counters | 35 days, then deleted automatically by a daily job |
| The weekly aggregate awaiting sending | Cleared as soon as the send is confirmed |
| Nicknames submitted to the community list | Until you ask us to remove them |
| Comments | Until you or we remove them |
| Emails you send us | As long as it takes to deal with your message |
| Server access logs | The rotation period of the server, then overwritten |
Getting something removed
Write to mail@nicksymbol.com and tell us what to remove. For a nickname, send the exact text and the name page it sits under; for a comment, the article and the name you used. We do not require a formal request or proof of identity for this, because none of it is tied to an identity in the first place — which also means we cannot verify that a given nickname was yours, so we act on plausible requests rather than demanding documents. The full list of what we can help with is on the contact page.
Children
NickSymbol is not directed at children under 13 and asks for no personal details from anyone. If you believe a child has submitted something that identifies them, email us and we will remove it without asking further questions.
Your rights
Depending on where you live you may have the right to see what we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to how it is processed, or to receive a copy — under the GDPR in Europe, the CCPA in California, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act in India, among others. In practice we hold very little that could be about you: no account, no profile, no contact details unless you email us. Exercise any of these rights by emailing us; there is no form and no fee, and we do not discriminate against anyone for asking.
We have never sold or shared personal information for advertising or cross-context behavioural purposes, and we have no plans to.
Changes to this policy
When the site changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. We do not backdate it and we do not refresh it just to look current. If we ever add advertising, analytics or any other measurement, that will be written here before it goes live — not after.
Who is responsible
This site is published by the NickSymbol editorial team, which is also who reads the inbox above. You can find out more about how the tool is built and maintained at NickSymbol.