Privacy

The short version

You can read and search every issue of Ka ʻElele without an account, without signing in, and without being tracked across other websites. We do not sell information about you, and we do not use it for advertising.

What we collect

Questions put to the archive. When you use “Ask a question”, we keep the text of the question, the number of passages it matched, and the time it was asked. We keep this to see what people come to the archive looking for and to find gaps we should fill. We do not store your name or your address, and we do not attach questions to a person.

A one-way fingerprint of your network address. To stop one visitor from exhausting the question limit, we store a scrambled, irreversible form of your IP address alongside each question. It cannot be turned back into an address, and we do not use it for anything else.

Nothing else. There are no advertising trackers, no third-party analytics scripts, no social media pixels, and no cookies for ordinary visitors. Museum staff who sign in to manage the archive get one session cookie, which does nothing but keep them signed in.

Please don’t type anything into the question box that you would not want kept — treat it like a note you are leaving for Museum staff to read.

Outside services

Making an archive searchable by meaning, rather than only by exact words, requires processing text with services we do not run ourselves. We want to be plain about what that means in practice.

• Preparing the issues. Ka ʻElele is published as PDFs. Some older issues have no machine-readable text at all, so we send images of those pages to a language-model provider once, when the issue is first added, to have the words transcribed. The transcription is then stored in our own database and the process is not repeated.
• Searching. Your search words are sent to a provider that converts them into a numeric representation so we can compare them against the archive. The archive’s own text is not sent at this point — it was converted the same way when the issue was added, and the comparison happens in our database.
• Answering questions. When you ask a question, our database first selects the passages most likely to answer it. Your question and those selected passages — not the whole archive — are then sent to a language-model provider, which writes the answer from them. The passages are published material from Ka ʻElele.

These providers act as processors for Bishop Museum. Bishop Museum reserves the right to change providers, to use more than one at a time, or to move this processing onto its own systems, at any time and without notice. Any provider we use is bound by contract not to use this material to train its models. We are describing what happens, not naming a permanent vendor.

Hosting and the database are operated by service providers on the Museum’s behalf. Their servers are located in the United States.

How long we keep things

Questions and their scrambled network fingerprints are kept for up to 24 months, then deleted. Staff sign-in sessions expire after a week. Everything else on the site is the published magazine itself, which the Museum keeps permanently as part of its record.

Children

This archive is a general-audience publication and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has sent us something through the question box, write to us and we will remove it.

Your choices

Because we do not hold an account for you, there is usually nothing to look up. If you believe a question you asked should be removed, write to us with roughly when you asked it and what it said, and we will find and delete it. Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, or delete personal information, or to object to its processing; we will honour those requests where the law gives them to you.

Reading without any of this

Every issue can be downloaded as a PDF straight from its page. Downloading a PDF involves no search, no questions and no outside processing.

Changes

We will update this page when the archive changes, and the date at the top will tell you when. Material changes will be described here rather than made quietly.

Contact

Bishop Museum, 1525 Bernice Street, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi 96817. Contact the Museum.