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 do not set advertising cookies unless you explicitly accept them in our cookie banner (see Advertising below); if you decline, no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies are set, and you can still read everything.

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, so your content may be processed to generate summaries, tags, and moderation recommendations, all reviewed by a human), and Cloudflare (bot defense). If you consent to advertising, Google (AdSense) serves those ads and may set advertising cookies to do so. We do not sell your data.

Advertising

AltWoke is free to read and carries no ads by default. Where advertising is enabled, it appears only below an article or on index pages, never inside the reading column, and every unit is labeled. These ads are served by Google AdSense, which sets cookies to display and measure them. They load only after you accept in the cookie banner; if you decline, or ignore it, no advertising cookies are set and nothing about what you can read changes. You can withdraw consent at any time by clearing this site’s cookies in your browser. You can also review and control how Google uses advertising data at myadcenter.google.com.

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.