Data and privacy

There are no accounts here, and we do not collect personal information about you. Not your name, not your email address, not your location. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to unsubscribe from.

Please don't use your real name

You sign each piece with whatever you type in the signature box, and that signature is public on anything you post to the feed. We'd rather you used a first name, an initial, a nickname, or nothing recognisable at all. The same goes for the writing itself: it is read by strangers, so think twice before putting real names, addresses, workplaces or anything else that identifies you or someone else into it.

What is stored, and why

What you write

Kept so it can be shown back to you, and shown to others exactly as far as you chose when you posted it — and no further.

Your signature

Whatever you typed. Free text, never verified, never matched against anything.

A random device token

Your browser makes up a random number the first time you visit and keeps it in local storage. It is what lets this device see its own writing under "yours" and stops the same person liking a piece twice. We only ever store a hashed form of it, so the copy in our database can't be used to impersonate you. It isn't linked to any identity, because we don't have one for you. Clear your browser storage and it is gone — along with your access to anything you wrote on that device.

Your IP address, briefly

Used to stop one machine flooding the site. It is hashed before it is written down, so no readable address is stored, and the counter is deleted within about a day.

Analytics

We run Umami on our own server. It counts page views and where links came from. It sets no cookies, follows nobody between sites, builds no profile, and collects no personal data. The numbers are aggregate — how many people read the feed today, not who.

There are no third-party trackers, no advertising, and no data brokers.

Your writing stays yours

We claim no ownership of anything you write here. It's yours. Posting it gives us permission to do one thing: show it to other visitors, in the way you asked for when you posted it.

• Just for you — nobody else sees it.
• A private link — only people you send the link to.
• The feed — public, alongside everyone else's, after a safety check.

It will not be sold, licensed, published elsewhere, packaged into a book, put into an advertisement, or used to train a model. We will never knowingly share it with anyone for any purpose beyond showing it to readers here.

Who else sees anything

Only what is genuinely required to keep the site up. None of them are given your writing to keep.

• Our hosting provider and Cloudflare, which sits in front of the site — they handle the traffic, so they see IP addresses in the ordinary course of serving pages.
• Cloudflare Turnstile, the "are you a person" check shown when you post. It sees your IP address and whether the check passed. It is not shown your writing.
• A language-model provider, used only for the safety check, and only on pieces you send to the public feed. It is sent the piece and returns a verdict; we keep the verdict. Writing you keep private or share by link is never sent anywhere.

Deleting things

Anything you wrote on this device can be deleted from "yours", and deleting it removes it from the feed and breaks its share link. Because we have no way to identify you across devices, we can't recover or delete writing from a device whose storage you have already cleared — we would have no way to tell it was yours.

Children

This site isn't intended for children under 13.

Changes

If this changes in a way that matters, the change will be visible here rather than announced, since we have no way to email you.