Privacy

Pseudonymous, not anonymous

AltWoke is built for pseudonymity: you participate under a display name, and your email address is never shown to anyone — not on your profile, not in responses, not in the newsletter, not in our public API. But pseudonymity is not anonymity, and we will not pretend otherwise. We can see the identity attached to a paid account (through our payment processor). Our email provider can see that you are a member. And lawful legal process can compel us to disclose what we hold. We would rather tell you this plainly than promise a secrecy we cannot deliver.

What we collect

• Your email address, to sign you in (we are passwordless — magic links only) and, if you opt in, to send the newsletter.
• Your display pseudonym and handle, which are public by design.
• Content you submit — essays, responses, applications — and its moderation status.
• Cookieless reading analytics — which essays are read and how far, with no cross-site tracking. If you turn reading history off in settings, these events are recorded without any link to your account.

We do not collect real names, phone numbers, precise location, or device fingerprints. Bot defense is handled by Cloudflare Turnstile, not by fingerprinting. Our analytics are first-party and cookieless; we set no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Who we share it with

We use a small set of subprocessors to run the service: Supabase (database, authentication, file storage), Resend (newsletter delivery), Anthropic (AI assistance to our editors — your content may be processed to generate summaries, tags, and moderation recommendations, all reviewed by a human), and Cloudflare (bot defense). We do not sell your data, and there are no advertisers.

Your choices

• Newsletter and digest emails are off by default; you opt in explicitly and can unsubscribe in one click from any edition.
• You can turn off reading-history retention in your account settings.
• You can request deletion of your account. On deletion we remove your profile and personal data from our database and storage and unsubscribe you from email; published essays may be retained in anonymized or reassigned form where there is an editorial record, as described in our deletion process.

Security

Access to your data is enforced at the database layer, not merely hidden in the interface. Editorial and administrative accounts require two-factor authentication. We never expose one member’s email or unpublished drafts to another.

Contact

Questions about privacy, or a data request, can be sent through our contact page.