Privacy

An author's unpublished manuscript is the most private thing here, and it is treated that way. Readers cannot download it. We do not sell anything to anybody, we do not run advertising, and there are no tracking or analytics scripts on this site.

• Your email address. It is how you sign in and how we reach you.
• Your pen names. A display name, and a short biography if you write one. These are shown to the readers you invite.
• Your manuscripts. The chapters and paragraphs of every draft you upload, kept so your readers can read them.
• Your plan, and — if you pay — an identifier from Stripe and the date your subscription renews. Card numbers never reach InkCircle. Payment happens on Stripe's own pages.
• Sign-in sessions, stored as a hash rather than the token itself, and expiring after 30 days.

If you sign in with Google or Apple, we keep the identifier that provider gives us for you. We never receive your password.

Readers do not have accounts and do not sign in. A reading link identifies one reader to one author. Against that link we keep:

• The name the author labelled you with, and your email address if the author asked us to send you the invitation.
• Your comments, reactions and answers, which are the whole point, and which the author can read and export.
• Your reading progress — which chapter, how far, how long. The author sees this as analytics.
• If you signed a confidentiality agreement: the name you typed, the exact wording you agreed to, the time, and a one-way hash of your IP address — never the address itself. The hash exists so a signature can be shown to have come from one place, and it cannot be turned back into an address.

• Vercel runs the site.
• Neon stores the database.
• Stripe takes payment. They see what is needed to charge a card; we see only that a payment happened and which plan it was for.
• Resend delivers our email — sign-in links, invitations and digests.
• Google and Apple, only if you choose to sign in with them.

That is the complete list. Nobody buys data from us, because we do not sell it. We hand it over to a government or a court only if we are legally required to.

Authors: closing your account on your account page deletes every manuscript, every reading link and every comment. There is no copy kept and it cannot be undone. The dialog offers you a download of all your feedback first, and you can export it at any time before that.

Readers: your comments belong to the author's book. Ask the author to remove them, or write to help@inkcircle.app and we will.

To see what we hold about you, or to correct it, write to the same address.

Two, both necessary and neither used for tracking: one keeps you signed in, and one remembers which pen name you are writing as. There are no advertising or analytics cookies, which is why this site has never asked you to accept any.