Privacy notice

This notice explains what personal information HoofnHorn collects, why we collect it, who we share it with and how long we keep it. It also explains the choices you have. HoofnHorn LLC, a North Carolina limited liability company, is responsible for the information described here.

Last updated September 20, 2026.

What we collect from you

Your account details: Your name, email address and the state you are in. If you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address and profile picture from Google instead of asking you to type them.
Your profile: A display name, and optionally a farm name, a short bio and a profile photo. These are public. Anyone browsing the marketplace can see them.
Contact and location details: A phone number and a ZIP code, if you add them. We use your ZIP to work out how far a listing is from you. We never publish your exact address.
What you list and what you write: Listings, animal records, documents you upload for verification, comments, and messages you send to other members.
Payment details: Card payments are handled by Stripe. Your card number never reaches our servers. We store the brand and the last four digits so you can tell which card is on file.
Identity verification, if you apply to be a verified breeder: Our identity checks are carried out by Stripe Identity. You send Stripe a photograph of a government ID and a photograph of your face, and Stripe compares the two. That includes biometric information taken from the images. You send it to Stripe directly: the document and the photographs never reach our servers, and we cannot see them. What Stripe tells us is your name as it appears on the document and whether the check passed. We keep those two things and nothing else. We never receive your date of birth, your document number, your ID number, or the address on your ID.

What we collect automatically

Sign-in information: A session cookie that keeps you signed in for 30 days, and a security cookie that protects forms from being submitted by another site on your behalf.
Device and connection information: Your IP address and browser user agent when you sign in, and when an administrator takes an action on the marketplace.
Referral information: If you arrive through an affiliate link, we record which link brought you and a one-way hash of your IP address. If you then create an account, we record which click brought you and a one-way hash of the IP address you signed up from. We keep these hashes to check for referral fraud, such as someone referring themselves from a second account. They cannot be turned back into your IP.
Advertising information: If you arrive from one of our own ads, we record which ad brought you, including the tag that Facebook or Google adds to the link. If you then create an account, we keep that record with your account so we can see which of our ads bring people to HoofnHorn.

We do not track you across other websites, and we run no advertising cookies from Facebook or Google. If one of our own ads brought you here, we keep a record of which ad it was, as described above.

How we use it

Run your account and keep you signed in.
Show your listings to buyers, and show you listings near you.
Take payment of our closing fee, and pay affiliates what they are owed.
Send you the emails the marketplace depends on: verifying your address, resetting your password, telling you that you have been outbid or that your auction has ended.
Send you saved-search alerts and app notifications, if you have asked for them.
Check listings, comments and profile photos against our rules before they go live, and screen messages before they are delivered.
Investigate fraud, disputes and abuse, and keep a record of administrator actions.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

What is public

A marketplace only works if buyers can see who they are dealing with. These are public, and you should treat them that way:

Your display name, farm name and bio.
Your profile photo.
The state you sell from.
Your listings, and any comments you write on them.
The ZIP code of a listing, and roughly where it is on a map. This is the animal’s location, not your home address.

Your email address, your phone number and your own coordinates are never published and never put into our search index. Messages between members are encrypted and are not public. Our support team can read the private conversation that opens after a sale, including the pickup details both parties share there, so that we can help when something goes wrong. Every time we open one, we record who opened it and why.

Who we share it with

We share personal information with the companies below because the marketplace needs them to work. We do not share it with anyone else, except where the law requires it.

StripeTo take payment of our closing fee.: We deliberately send Stripe as little as possible. Your email address, your name and your address are not included in what we send. Stripe handles your card details directly and we never see the number.
Stripe IdentityTo confirm who a breeder is before we show buyers a verified badge.: Only if you apply to be a verified breeder, and only what you hand to Stripe yourself: your ID document, a photograph of your face, and the biometric information Stripe derives from them to check that they match. Stripe processes this as a controller under its own privacy policy at stripe.com/privacy, and Stripe's own Consumer Privacy Notice at stripe.com/legal/privacy-center covers what it does with a verification. If you close your account we ask Stripe to delete the copy it holds for us, images included. Stripe keeps its own copy as a controller in its own right, and that one is not ours to delete: write to privacy@stripe.com to ask Stripe to remove it, or to stop Stripe using your identity data to improve its technology.
ResendTo deliver our email.: Your email address and the contents of the message. This is how a verification link or an outbid alert reaches you.
AnthropicTo check listings, comments and messages against our rules.: Before any content is sent, we strip out email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers and social media handles and replace them with a marker. The content is checked, not stored by us for any other purpose.
MeilisearchTo make listings searchable.: Listing details, the listing's ZIP code and rough coordinates, and the seller's public display name. Your email address, your phone number and your own coordinates are never indexed.
Amazon S3To store photographs and documents.: Files are stored under keys that carry no name or account identifier.
ExpoTo send notifications to the phone app.: A device push token, and only if you turn notifications on.
Google (analytics)To understand how the site is used.: The pages you view and actions such as searching, creating an account, signing in and bidding. Never your name, email address or phone number.
Google (sign in)If you choose to sign in with Google.: Google tells us your name, email address and profile picture.

How we protect it

Some information is sensitive enough that we encrypt it in our database, so that reading the database is not the same as reading your details. That covers your email address, your name, your phone number, your ZIP code, your coordinates, the contents of your messages, and any documents you upload for breeder verification.

Your password is hashed, which is one-way. We cannot read it, and neither can anyone who obtains the database. Nobody at HoofnHorn will ever ask you for it.

How long we keep it

Your account: Until you close it.
Sign-in sessions: 7 days after the session expires, then deleted.
Email verification and password reset links: 1 day after they expire, then deleted.
Affiliate click records: 90 days, then deleted.
Affiliate referral records: For as long as the referred account exists, then deleted with it.
Saved-search alert records: 90 days after you were notified, then deleted.
Administrator audit records: The record of who did what is kept permanently. The IP address and browser attached to it are erased after 2 years.
Sale records: Kept after you close your account, in an anonymised form. See below.

Closing your account

You can close your account from your account settings. There is a 30-day window before anything is erased, so that closing it by mistake is recoverable. You can cancel during that window.

After that, we erase you rather than delete the trade. Your name, email address, phone number, ZIP code, coordinates, profile photo and bio are removed. Your display name becomes “Former member”.

What stays is the record of what happened: bids, sales, payments and the comments other members were replying to. An auction with no bidder is not a record, and a payment with no buyer is not a payment. Each of these is kept for a reason the law recognises, including completing the transaction, keeping the marketplace secure, another member’s own record of what they said, and our legal obligations.

Your choices

See and change your details, at any time, in your account settings.
Turn off saved-search alerts and app notifications without closing your account.
Ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you.
Ask us to correct it, or to erase it by closing your account.
Sign in with an email address and password instead of Google, or connect and disconnect Google whenever you like.

Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights, and we will not treat you differently for using them.

Children

HoofnHorn is for adults buying and selling livestock. It is not intended for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has given us information, write to us and we will remove it.

Changes to this notice

If we change how we handle your information, we will update this page and change the date at the top. If the change is significant, we will tell you directly rather than expect you to notice.

Contact us

For anything about your privacy or the information we hold, write to support@hoofnhorn.com. Tell us what you are asking for and we will come back to you.