COTW Community Privacy

Last updated: September 16, 2026

Who we are

COTW Community is an internal tool operated by Chris Hunt for The Code of the West's Instagram account, @thecodeofthewest. This notice covers the tool's handling of Instagram public comments. It does not describe every service offered by The Code of the West.

Information we process and why

Through Meta's official Instagram API, we receive public comment text, usernames and Instagram identifiers, timestamps, related post content and identifiers, and replies. We use this information to find comments needing attention, identify questions and follow-up requests, prepare and send relevant responses, prevent duplicate replies, and troubleshoot the tool.

AI assistance and service providers

An AI assistant may review comments and prepare or send light acknowledgments under Chris's editorial instructions. Serious, sensitive, contentious, or consequential conversations are reserved for human attention. Comment text and relevant context are processed by OpenAI through ChatGPT/Codex when the assistant reviews them. We have disabled the account's model-improvement training setting. OpenAI processes service data under its applicable terms and privacy policy, including service operation and security purposes. Local operational records are kept on our business computer. Shopify hosts this notice.

We do not sell comment data, use this tool to build audience profiles or train our own models, or use it to send unsolicited direct messages. This notice does not authorize uses beyond managing our account's community interactions.

Retention and security

We limit access to the people and systems needed to operate the tool and store access credentials separately from comment records. We review local records and remove comment content when it is no longer needed for replies, follow-up, troubleshooting, or security. Completed and skipped comment content can be removed through our manual cleanup process; unresolved items remain while they need attention. We retain minimal comment and reply identifiers and handling status when needed to prevent duplicate responses. Copies processed by Meta and OpenAI are subject to those providers' retention practices; removing a local record does not automatically remove those copies.

Your choices and deletion requests

To ask about this tool or request access, correction, deletion, or no further AI-assisted replies to your comments, email mrchrishunt@gmail.com with the subject 'COTW Community privacy'. Include your Instagram username and, if possible, the relevant comment or post link. Do not send passwords or access tokens. We may ask for information needed to verify and locate the request. We will review requests, remove data we no longer need from systems we control, and address relevant service-provider copies through available deletion processes, subject to applicable legal and security obligations. Minimal records may be retained where necessary to honor an opt-out or prevent duplicate contact.

This process does not itself delete your public comments from Instagram. Use Instagram's controls to manage content hosted there. Meta's privacy policy and OpenAI's privacy policy explain their own processing.

Updates

We will update this notice when the tool's data practices change and revise the date above.