Privacy Policy

Introduction

Welcome to Poeta. We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data. This privacy policy explains how we collect, use, and safeguard your information when you use our platform.

Information We Collect

Account Information

• Email address (for authentication)
• Username and display name
• Profile picture (optional)
• Bio and profile link (optional)

Content You Create

• Poems and writing you post, including drafts and scheduled poems
• Photos you upload, and your avatar
• Books you write in the editor
• Collections, saved poems, follows and blocks
• Reports you send us about other people's content

Technical Data

• Your IP address, recorded when you sign in, change your password or email, and when we count requests to stop abuse of sign-up and sign-in
• Anonymous page and performance measurements, which tell us which pages are slow and roughly how many people visit. They do not identify you and are not used to follow you to other sites
• A bot check on sign-up and sign-in, run by our provider, which sees your IP address and browser

Usage Data

• View counts on poems
• Follow relationships
• Preferences (theme, font, list or single view)

If You Pay Us

• A record that you have a subscription or bought a book, its amount and its status. Your card number, bank details and any tax information go to Stripe and not to us

What Is Public

Poems you publish, your username, display name, avatar, bio, profile link and collections are public. Anyone can read them without an account, and search engines and AI assistants are allowed to read them too. That means copies can exist outside Poeta, and deleting something here cannot reach a copy someone else has already made.

Drafts and scheduled poems are visible only to you until they publish. Your email address, your saved poems and who you block are never shown to anyone else.

How We Use Your Information

• To provide and maintain our service
• To authenticate your account
• To display your content to other users
• To personalize your experience
• To improve our platform
• To communicate with you about service updates
• To keep the site working and to stop abuse, spam and fraud
• To answer reports and enforce our guidelines
• To take payments and keep records of them

How Long We Keep It

Your account and your writing stay until you delete them. Deleting your account removes your profile, poems, books, collections, follows and the images you uploaded, and cancels any subscription.

Two things outlive that, and you should know about both. We keep nightly backups of the database for 30 days, and one backup a month for a year, so deleted information can persist in a backup for up to about twelve months; backups are only ever used to restore the site after a failure. And we keep the record that a payment happened, without your name attached to it, because we have to account for money we received.

Data Storage and Security

Your account and your writing are stored in a managed Postgres database. Photos and avatars are stored with a managed image provider and delivered from a separate domain, so that user images can never reach the cookie that keeps you signed in. Before a photo leaves your browser it is re-encoded, which removes camera and location information from the file; we never receive it. Passwords are stored as salted hashes and are never readable by us. We implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your personal information.

However, no method of transmission over the internet is 100% secure. While we strive to protect your data, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

Who Else Handles Your Data

Poeta runs on services operated by other companies. We use them for these purposes and no others:

• Website hosting, and measuring how quickly pages load
• A managed database, where your account and your writing are stored
• Image storage and delivery, for avatars and photos on poems
• Private file storage, for book files
• Email delivery, for verification, password resets, receipts and notifications
• Bot protection on sign-up and sign-in
• Backups of the database
• Our support inbox
• Stripe for payments. Card details go straight to Stripe; we never see or store your card number.

These providers are all located in the United States, process this data only on our instructions, and have their own privacy policies. We name Stripe because you deal with it directly at checkout. We will tell you the identity of any of the others on request at poeta@maclin.io.

Your Rights

You have the right to:

• See and correct your profile in your settings
• Export your writing, collections, follows and books as a file, from Settings then Account
• Delete your account, from Settings then Account. This removes your profile, your poems, your books and your uploaded images
• Turn off each kind of notification email, from Settings then Notifications
• Block another account, from their profile

For anything these controls do not cover, write to poeta@maclin.io.

Cookies and Local Storage

We use a single session cookie to keep you signed in, which lasts 30 days, and your browser's local storage to remember preferences: light or dark, your font, whether you last used the list or single-poem view, and how you left the book reader. Our bot-check provider may also set a short-lived cookie when you sign up or sign in. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. This data can be cleared at any time through your browser settings.

Children's Privacy

Our service is not intended for users under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new policy on this page and updating the "Last updated" date.

Contact Us

If you have questions about this privacy policy, please contact us at: poeta@maclin.io